Val, I think your last paragraph constitutes a violation of PDV’s boundaries.
Here’s my impression of what it’s like to be PDV reacting to the bolded excerpt, which maybe will help you understand where they’re coming from. Imagine not trusting your System 1 in a deep sense. Your life has been such that trusting your System 1 has reliably led to you being hurt and taken advantage of by others, and so you’ve simply stopped doing it for the sake of your own safety. Your mental defenses are all concentrated in System 2, and so the way people engage with you respectfully is to engage with your System 2, so your mental defenses can filter appropriately.
This means anyone trying to engage with your System 1 is received as attempting to bypass your mental defenses. Just talking about their feelings can constitute such an attempt, but it’s even worse if they then ask about your feelings, because the combination of the two produces social pressure, on your System 1, to answer, which you don’t know how to respond to from your System 1. You can’t distinguish this from an attempt to manipulate and hurt you, and you don’t feel like you have the social skills necessary to reject the ask gracefully, without risking being judged. So instead your System 2 defenses kick into gear and you reject the whole interaction.
(There’s an additional issue if there are other people around; there’s a way in which someone trying to engage with your System 1 in the presence of a group can be weaving a narrative for the group in which you not responding in the way the narrative wants is bad and will be judged, and you don’t feel like you have the social skills necessary to navigate this.)
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.
For example, cousin_it’s example with the fish. The fish salesman is trying to get me to open up more about my reluctance to buy fish, by framing it as a weakness that he might help me to overcome. He wants to hear more about my objections to his fish so that he can answer all of them, and leave me with no “excuse” not to buy. If I get drawn into open, vulnerable conversation with him and I don’t know how to defend myself verbally, I’ll wind up buying his stinky fish.
Likewise, Val’s invitation to Said and PDV to explain how circling upsets them looks like the exact same kind of sales move — “share with me your objections to the thing so that I can potentially give you a personalized reassurance.” It’s the oldest trick in the book: let the prospect tell you how to sell to them.
This is scary if you can’t see what’s going on. The existence of people with any skill that you don’t have, which can be used for aggression, is a threat, even if aggression is not its main purpose.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
FWIW, the most useful tactic to use with people who seem to be using social manipulation on you is *declaring boundaries.*
Many, if not most, people who are doing a lot of heavy S1 social magic, have basically friendly intent. If you just blurt out “I don’t want to do X under any circumstances”, friendly people will respect that, and anyone who doesn’t abide by your boundary is now recognizably a person not to trust.
Fearing people who have strong personalities is a weak substitute for actually clarifying your limits. I have found that some people whom I felt were “manipulating” me were actually totally respectful of my boundaries the minute I said, in words, “I will not do X.” As a defense against the well-meaning but overbearing majority, being explicitly assertive is pretty effective.
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.
Yes, this. Extremely this.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
I don’t think learning the social pressure manipulation skill is sufficient. The counterskill, resisting social pressure, is much harder to learn and much harder to execute.
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.
It’s the oldest trick in the book: let the prospect tell you how to sell to them.
NVC/Circling deals with this by getting the “seller” in this example to take on the responsibility for not abusing the selling process. Ideally the seller would be saying something like, “I understand that you don’t like stinky fish, and I wouldn’t want to sell you a fish that was stinky if you don’t like stinky fish. So if this fish is stinky it’s not for sale to you, but also if this fish is not stinky to you, you should consider it’s other traits. Especially on account of the fact that I don’t think it’s stinky”
it’s no “salespersons” job to sell you something that you don’t want. But it is their job to help you find the fish or other things that you do want. Even if it’s, “I don’t want to talk to the salesman”. It’s the salesman’s job to help you to that conclusion.
This may be true if everyone does NVC exactly as Marshall Rosenberg describes it, but there’s no guarantee that everyone will do that in the real world.
This is the core of the matter. All methods, all rules, all systems are for nothing if they are not executed with right intention. And who knows another’s intention, or even their own?
If the intention is not sound, connected to the heart, it’s not nvc.
That is good as modus ponens, but bad as modus tollens.
Given that NVC gives you tools for connecting to your heart, it’s useful for evaluating whether or not something is NVC by looking at whether those tools are used.
All methods, all rules, all systems, and all tools. The question to ask is not, is this NVC?, but is this being done not merely with right tools, but with right intention? And even right intentions are not enough, hence the saying about the road to hell. As soon as someone talks about their intentions, they may already have substituted form for substance. No-one is a credible witness for their own probity.
My attitude to someone talking at me with NVC techniques would be similar to Said Achmiz and PDV’s. I would have the same reaction if I recognised Landmark concepts, or even concepts from another such training (that no-one here is likely to have heard of) that I’ve done myself and consider valuable. Or CFAR, or the Sequences (see the thread on Shit Rationalists Say).
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
I can’t read anybodies mind and know their intentions but “connection to the heart” is something that’s perceivable with sufficient practice/body awareness.
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
Yes, I do, with the minor correction that I said “right intention”, not “right attention”. But right attention is a prerequisite for everything else. “Virtue has many tools, but they are all grasped with the handle of attention.”
Yes, I read “the heart” as a metaphor. Literally, the heart is a blood pump, which works faster or slower, stronger or weaker, according to instructions from elsewhere in the body. “Connected to the heart” is (as I read it) a metaphorical description of a state. What is meant by a literal “connection to the heart”?
As background to this, I have done about 15 years of tai chi and 10 years of taiko (Japanese drumming), and I am quite familiar with the sorts of (as I read them) metaphors and visualisations one must enact in order to obtain the desired results from the body. I follow Crowley’s warning against “attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”
Disagree: NVC does give one additional tools that they can use to turn their kindness into practice. I say this because originally discovering NVC was something of a mind-blowing event to me, and allowed me to resolve an interpersonal conflict that had been bothering me for a long time, but which would only have blown up if I had tried to address it without the tools from NVC.
Details: a friend of mine was acting in a way which I felt was wrong, both towards themselves and towards others. When I had been trying to bring this up, they had replied that they had no choice but to act as they did—a statement which I felt was blatantly false. I wanted to discuss this with them, but the only sensible sentence that kept coming to my mind was something like “it pisses me off that you’re not taking responsibility for your actions”, and there was no way that starting the conversation like that would have gone well. So I said nothing but still felt occasionally angry about it.
Then I read the NVC book, and realized that I could turn that sentence into a much more constructive and kind one: what I ended up using was something like “when you say that you have to act the way that you do, I get frustrated, because I feel that thinking about it like that prevents you from seeing how you could actually act differently”. This led to a very constructive and useful conversation where we resolved the thing that had been bugging me.
Previously I had felt like if I was upset with someone, my alternatives were to either lash out at them, or keep it in but keep feeling angry. And because I did want to be kind, this often led to a lot of bottled-up annoyance towards other people. NVC taught to me to look for how my needs create my emotions, and how to express that in a way that doesn’t come off as aggressive.
Highlighting that this example had details that pointed me towards the fact that I view saying that sentence as good, right and useful, but telling someone else to talk like that, or that such talk is the only valid talk seems supremely hostile and wrong. It’s the difference between “this is a tool in my box that is sometimes the right tool” and making regulations requiring the tool’s use.
Yes, this. NVC should be treated with a similar sort of parameters to Crocker’s Rules, which you can declare for yourself at any time, you can invite people to a conversation where it’s known that everyone will be using them, but you cannot hold it against anyone if you invite them to declare Crocker’s Rules and they refuse.
Sure. I’d think that in general, anyone claiming that others were only allowed to talk in some particular way would already bear a pretty heavy burden of proof they needed to meet, regardless of whether it was an NVC pattern or any other pattern.
I am not PDV and thus can’t speak to his view of your comment, but to me this sort of “psychoanalyze another commenter” thing is quite off-putting. Were your comment about me, I would find it most insulting.
There are valuable insights in what you say. I won’t, for now, say more about the substance of your comment, lest my response be taken as endorsement of this style of discourse; but the dynamics you describe are very much worth discussing.
But not in a personal way. Not directed at a specific commenter. Doing it that way is, quite frankly, disrespectful.
I would encourage you to make a post about this, or perhaps to start a comment thread in an Open Thread—without the personal targeting.
You know, I wondered that, and debated for a bit whether to add it. I still think I chose correctly though (with a caveat; see the end).
I was grappling with two factors here:
PDV had drawn their boundaries in a way that was about how others speak about themselves and express preferences. While I generally want to respect people’s wishes all else being equal, I don’t want to encourage boundary-drawing that prevents people from being able to express where they’re coming from. Succombing to this creates a social discourse incentive that’s waaaaay too easy to Goodhart. So, basically, I’m standing by communal norms that allow people to express what’s going on for them, and I oppose communal norms that allow people to suppress what others have to say about themselves. (This translates into problem ownership: I welcome PDV’s preferences (to the extent I can understand them — which was part of what I was asking about!) but I don’t take responsibility for managing their feelings for them.)
I could see two obvious pathways for this discussion to go down. One was where PDV keeps making statements that strike me as claims about objective or universally agreed upon moral facts, and this turns into a demon thread. The other was one where we make a sincere effort to understand what PDV is talking about. The latter seemed much, much better, and more like the kind of community I would like to encourage here.
I should also note that PDV expressed serious disdain for the “Here are my feelings” version of Circling-style interactions. The NVC move I tried was more “Okay, I imagine X is going on for you. Can you tell me more? I’d prefer style Y for reason Z.” If that’s considered “violating”… then this is bullying via boundaries. Again, I will try to be respectful of others’ wishes where I can, but I will not take responsibility for managing others’ feelings for them.
(Also, I find something seriously weird about “Hey, I’m calling BS on you” being considered totally okay but “Hey, I don’t understand you and I’d like to, can we try?” being considered violating. Are we sure that’s a culture we want?)
Caveat: I could have given the meta context I have here. I debated doing that too, but decided against it because I was worried about that increasing the chances of a demon thread.
I notice-1 that this carries an implicit claim that claims about reality, rather than one’s own feelings and experiences, are not valid. I don’t think Val actually thinks this, but it’s a super scary thing, both because its implications are awful and a lot of people (not Val!) seem to actually believe this or argue for this. That one should say “I observe that I have a belief that the sky is blue.”
Thus, I have a very hostile emotional reaction to responding to “X is bad” with “I think that what’s going on is that Y is going on inside your brain making you have the emotional reaction that X is bad, can you say more about this but only talk in this fashion?” especially to someone explicitly rejecting this frame, and in fact in this conversation in order to argue against the frame.
What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,”
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)
I can’t emphasize enough how important the thing you’re mentioning here is, and I believe it points to the crux of the issue more directly than most other things that have been said so far.
We can often weakman postmodernism as making basically the same claim, but this doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people are running an algorithm in their head with the textual description “there is no outside reality, only things that happen in my mind.” This algorithm seems to produce different behaviors in people than if they were running the algorithm “outside reality exists and is important.” I think the first algorithm tends to produce behaviors that are a lot more dangerous than the latter, even though it’s always possible to make philosophical arguments that make one algorithm seem much more likely to be “true” than the other. It’s crucial to realize that not everyone is running the perfectly steelmanned version of such algorithms to do with updating our beliefs based on observations of the processes of how we update on our beliefs, and such things are very tricky to get right.
Even though it’s valid to make observations of the form “I observe that I am running a process that produces the belief X in me”, it is definitely very risky to create a social norm that says such statements are superior to statements like “X is true” because such norms create the tendency to assign less validity to statements like “X is true”. In other words, such a norm can itself become a process that produces the belief “X is not true” when we don’t necessarily want to move our beliefs on X just because we begin to understand how the processes work. It’s very easy to go from “X is true” to “I observe I believe X is true” to “I observe there are social and emotional influences on my beliefs” to “There are social and emotional influences on my belief in X” to finally “X is not true” and I can’t help but feel a mistake is being made somewhere in that process.
I consider you to be bullying me. NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
I trust both your intentions to be good here. But I’m going to step in and express some of my own preferences for this comment section.
@PDV I would like it if you took a break from commenting on my post for some reasonable time period, like, 24-48 hours.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
I obviously cannot do anything here but express my preferences, and I do not expect you guys to comply. I am just a person and stuff. But here I am, expressing them.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
Preference received. I appreciate you expressing it.
I’m happy to fulfill it, as long as I see that the cultural vision that I’m standing for is well-represented in the discussion. (Which isn’t a request or a threat. Just a description of the parameters that shape where I’m okay stepping back from this.)
I don’t know what cultural vision you’re wanting to be represented. I am hoping it doesn’t rely on the particular conversation with PDV, but if it does, I’d like to understand that. Feel free to elaborate. (To clarify I’m only requesting you to stop trying to talk to PDV, not commenting here in general.)
That’s very hard to answer here without implicitly continuing the conversation with PDV. Something something game theory something something. Happy to answer you in more detail privately.
I appreciate Unreal setting boundaries on their post. (Whether done via formal moderation policies or simple expressions of preference, this seems like a good thing for people to feel empowered to do)
I quite disagree—this is just the sort of thing that I am worried will become more common (and more enforceable) with the upcoming moderation changes.
I think my disgreement may come from fundamentally different notions of what posting to the front page of LW is—in my view, it’s starting a public conversation. That conversation might well move in a direction you don’t want, but that’s the way it is—and I don’t think the conversation starter should have any special rights, explicit or implicit, to control that conversation.
I want to be very clear that I don’t think Unreal is being all that rude or unreasonable with their request—and that’s in fact precisely why I’m worried! If the request were obviously cruel or foolish that would be one thing, but something like this might well become accepted—and I think if requests like this are accepted there may well be a chilling effect on the overall discourse here, and it will occur in a way that is quite hard to see in the moment.
FYI, I’m writing out a lengthier post about this sort of issue. The short answer is that not giving creators control over their spaces creates different chilling effects.
NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
**Can you be more specific?
I can guess that there is going to be a problem here.
If you want to answer “no” then you take social penalty. In NVC the “no” would look like “An explanation of why I can’t answer”. Either that or you say yes, and give specifics. You will probably perceive that you are being cornered.
Feeling cornered here would be a symptom of not knowing how to say no. Here are some versions of saying no.
“I don’t know how to say no without taking social damage”.
“It’s not my job to tell you the specifics”.
“I don’t have time to tell you, and other comments are more important”
“no.”
The trouble with most of them is they are epistemically poor. If you expect to change something, the phrase “I don’t like this but I won’t explain why” isn’t very helpful.
Val, I think your last paragraph constitutes a violation of PDV’s boundaries.
Here’s my impression of what it’s like to be PDV reacting to the bolded excerpt, which maybe will help you understand where they’re coming from. Imagine not trusting your System 1 in a deep sense. Your life has been such that trusting your System 1 has reliably led to you being hurt and taken advantage of by others, and so you’ve simply stopped doing it for the sake of your own safety. Your mental defenses are all concentrated in System 2, and so the way people engage with you respectfully is to engage with your System 2, so your mental defenses can filter appropriately.
This means anyone trying to engage with your System 1 is received as attempting to bypass your mental defenses. Just talking about their feelings can constitute such an attempt, but it’s even worse if they then ask about your feelings, because the combination of the two produces social pressure, on your System 1, to answer, which you don’t know how to respond to from your System 1. You can’t distinguish this from an attempt to manipulate and hurt you, and you don’t feel like you have the social skills necessary to reject the ask gracefully, without risking being judged. So instead your System 2 defenses kick into gear and you reject the whole interaction.
(There’s an additional issue if there are other people around; there’s a way in which someone trying to engage with your System 1 in the presence of a group can be weaving a narrative for the group in which you not responding in the way the narrative wants is bad and will be judged, and you don’t feel like you have the social skills necessary to navigate this.)
I resonate with this.
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.
For example, cousin_it’s example with the fish. The fish salesman is trying to get me to open up more about my reluctance to buy fish, by framing it as a weakness that he might help me to overcome. He wants to hear more about my objections to his fish so that he can answer all of them, and leave me with no “excuse” not to buy. If I get drawn into open, vulnerable conversation with him and I don’t know how to defend myself verbally, I’ll wind up buying his stinky fish.
Likewise, Val’s invitation to Said and PDV to explain how circling upsets them looks like the exact same kind of sales move — “share with me your objections to the thing so that I can potentially give you a personalized reassurance.” It’s the oldest trick in the book: let the prospect tell you how to sell to them.
This is scary if you can’t see what’s going on. The existence of people with any skill that you don’t have, which can be used for aggression, is a threat, even if aggression is not its main purpose.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
FWIW, the most useful tactic to use with people who seem to be using social manipulation on you is *declaring boundaries.*
Many, if not most, people who are doing a lot of heavy S1 social magic, have basically friendly intent. If you just blurt out “I don’t want to do X under any circumstances”, friendly people will respect that, and anyone who doesn’t abide by your boundary is now recognizably a person not to trust.
Fearing people who have strong personalities is a weak substitute for actually clarifying your limits. I have found that some people whom I felt were “manipulating” me were actually totally respectful of my boundaries the minute I said, in words, “I will not do X.” As a defense against the well-meaning but overbearing majority, being explicitly assertive is pretty effective.
Cool; I appreciate you sharing. I’m happy with this.
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.
Yes, this. Extremely this.
I happen to believe that “learn the skill already“ is far safer than “denounce it wherever it occurs”, especially when the skill is something as universal as *exerting social pressure*.
I don’t think learning the social pressure manipulation skill is sufficient. The counterskill, resisting social pressure, is much harder to learn and much harder to execute.
Resisting social pressure is the relevant skill, yes, and I’m not sure it is harder to execute than creating social pressure.
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.
NVC/Circling deals with this by getting the “seller” in this example to take on the responsibility for not abusing the selling process. Ideally the seller would be saying something like, “I understand that you don’t like stinky fish, and I wouldn’t want to sell you a fish that was stinky if you don’t like stinky fish. So if this fish is stinky it’s not for sale to you, but also if this fish is not stinky to you, you should consider it’s other traits. Especially on account of the fact that I don’t think it’s stinky”
it’s no “salespersons” job to sell you something that you don’t want. But it is their job to help you find the fish or other things that you do want. Even if it’s, “I don’t want to talk to the salesman”. It’s the salesman’s job to help you to that conclusion.
This may be true if everyone does NVC exactly as Marshall Rosenberg describes it, but there’s no guarantee that everyone will do that in the real world.
Definitely. Part of nvc is the intention behind the process. If the intention is not sound, connected to the heart, it’s not nvc.
This is the core of the matter. All methods, all rules, all systems are for nothing if they are not executed with right intention. And who knows another’s intention, or even their own?
That is good as modus ponens, but bad as modus tollens.
Given that NVC gives you tools for connecting to your heart, it’s useful for evaluating whether or not something is NVC by looking at whether those tools are used.
All methods, all rules, all systems, and all tools. The question to ask is not, is this NVC?, but is this being done not merely with right tools, but with right intention? And even right intentions are not enough, hence the saying about the road to hell. As soon as someone talks about their intentions, they may already have substituted form for substance. No-one is a credible witness for their own probity.
My attitude to someone talking at me with NVC techniques would be similar to Said Achmiz and PDV’s. I would have the same reaction if I recognised Landmark concepts, or even concepts from another such training (that no-one here is likely to have heard of) that I’ve done myself and consider valuable. Or CFAR, or the Sequences (see the thread on Shit Rationalists Say).
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
I can’t read anybodies mind and know their intentions but “connection to the heart” is something that’s perceivable with sufficient practice/body awareness.
Yes, I do, with the minor correction that I said “right intention”, not “right attention”. But right attention is a prerequisite for everything else. “Virtue has many tools, but they are all grasped with the handle of attention.”
Yes, I read “the heart” as a metaphor. Literally, the heart is a blood pump, which works faster or slower, stronger or weaker, according to instructions from elsewhere in the body. “Connected to the heart” is (as I read it) a metaphorical description of a state. What is meant by a literal “connection to the heart”?
As background to this, I have done about 15 years of tai chi and 10 years of taiko (Japanese drumming), and I am quite familiar with the sorts of (as I read them) metaphors and visualisations one must enact in order to obtain the desired results from the body. I follow Crowley’s warning against “attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”
If the intention is sound, the value it adds is minimal. Anyone can be kind as long as they are trying to be kind.
Disagree: NVC does give one additional tools that they can use to turn their kindness into practice. I say this because originally discovering NVC was something of a mind-blowing event to me, and allowed me to resolve an interpersonal conflict that had been bothering me for a long time, but which would only have blown up if I had tried to address it without the tools from NVC.
Details: a friend of mine was acting in a way which I felt was wrong, both towards themselves and towards others. When I had been trying to bring this up, they had replied that they had no choice but to act as they did—a statement which I felt was blatantly false. I wanted to discuss this with them, but the only sensible sentence that kept coming to my mind was something like “it pisses me off that you’re not taking responsibility for your actions”, and there was no way that starting the conversation like that would have gone well. So I said nothing but still felt occasionally angry about it.
Then I read the NVC book, and realized that I could turn that sentence into a much more constructive and kind one: what I ended up using was something like “when you say that you have to act the way that you do, I get frustrated, because I feel that thinking about it like that prevents you from seeing how you could actually act differently”. This led to a very constructive and useful conversation where we resolved the thing that had been bugging me.
Previously I had felt like if I was upset with someone, my alternatives were to either lash out at them, or keep it in but keep feeling angry. And because I did want to be kind, this often led to a lot of bottled-up annoyance towards other people. NVC taught to me to look for how my needs create my emotions, and how to express that in a way that doesn’t come off as aggressive.
Highlighting that this example had details that pointed me towards the fact that I view saying that sentence as good, right and useful, but telling someone else to talk like that, or that such talk is the only valid talk seems supremely hostile and wrong. It’s the difference between “this is a tool in my box that is sometimes the right tool” and making regulations requiring the tool’s use.
Yes, this. NVC should be treated with a similar sort of parameters to Crocker’s Rules, which you can declare for yourself at any time, you can invite people to a conversation where it’s known that everyone will be using them, but you cannot hold it against anyone if you invite them to declare Crocker’s Rules and they refuse.
Sure. I’d think that in general, anyone claiming that others were only allowed to talk in some particular way would already bear a pretty heavy burden of proof they needed to meet, regardless of whether it was an NVC pattern or any other pattern.
If only it were so easy. The road to hell etc.
A fictional snatch of dialogue:
“I’m only trying to help!”
“That is the problem. You are only trying to help. You are not actually helping.”
I am not PDV and thus can’t speak to his view of your comment, but to me this sort of “psychoanalyze another commenter” thing is quite off-putting. Were your comment about me, I would find it most insulting.
There are valuable insights in what you say. I won’t, for now, say more about the substance of your comment, lest my response be taken as endorsement of this style of discourse; but the dynamics you describe are very much worth discussing.
But not in a personal way. Not directed at a specific commenter. Doing it that way is, quite frankly, disrespectful.
I would encourage you to make a post about this, or perhaps to start a comment thread in an Open Thread—without the personal targeting.
That’s fair.
You are correct that Val’s last paragraph is a problem in the same way the quoted section was.
EDIT: Your description of me is wrong in most details, but I don’t think reaching the correct top-level conclusion was a coincidence.
You know, I wondered that, and debated for a bit whether to add it. I still think I chose correctly though (with a caveat; see the end).
I was grappling with two factors here:
PDV had drawn their boundaries in a way that was about how others speak about themselves and express preferences. While I generally want to respect people’s wishes all else being equal, I don’t want to encourage boundary-drawing that prevents people from being able to express where they’re coming from. Succombing to this creates a social discourse incentive that’s waaaaay too easy to Goodhart. So, basically, I’m standing by communal norms that allow people to express what’s going on for them, and I oppose communal norms that allow people to suppress what others have to say about themselves. (This translates into problem ownership: I welcome PDV’s preferences (to the extent I can understand them — which was part of what I was asking about!) but I don’t take responsibility for managing their feelings for them.)
I could see two obvious pathways for this discussion to go down. One was where PDV keeps making statements that strike me as claims about objective or universally agreed upon moral facts, and this turns into a demon thread. The other was one where we make a sincere effort to understand what PDV is talking about. The latter seemed much, much better, and more like the kind of community I would like to encourage here.
I should also note that PDV expressed serious disdain for the “Here are my feelings” version of Circling-style interactions. The NVC move I tried was more “Okay, I imagine X is going on for you. Can you tell me more? I’d prefer style Y for reason Z.” If that’s considered “violating”… then this is bullying via boundaries. Again, I will try to be respectful of others’ wishes where I can, but I will not take responsibility for managing others’ feelings for them.
(Also, I find something seriously weird about “Hey, I’m calling BS on you” being considered totally okay but “Hey, I don’t understand you and I’d like to, can we try?” being considered violating. Are we sure that’s a culture we want?)
Caveat: I could have given the meta context I have here. I debated doing that too, but decided against it because I was worried about that increasing the chances of a demon thread.
I notice-1 that this carries an implicit claim that claims about reality, rather than one’s own feelings and experiences, are not valid. I don’t think Val actually thinks this, but it’s a super scary thing, both because its implications are awful and a lot of people (not Val!) seem to actually believe this or argue for this. That one should say “I observe that I have a belief that the sky is blue.”
Thus, I have a very hostile emotional reaction to responding to “X is bad” with “I think that what’s going on is that Y is going on inside your brain making you have the emotional reaction that X is bad, can you say more about this but only talk in this fashion?” especially to someone explicitly rejecting this frame, and in fact in this conversation in order to argue against the frame.
What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)
I can’t emphasize enough how important the thing you’re mentioning here is, and I believe it points to the crux of the issue more directly than most other things that have been said so far.
We can often weakman postmodernism as making basically the same claim, but this doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people are running an algorithm in their head with the textual description “there is no outside reality, only things that happen in my mind.” This algorithm seems to produce different behaviors in people than if they were running the algorithm “outside reality exists and is important.” I think the first algorithm tends to produce behaviors that are a lot more dangerous than the latter, even though it’s always possible to make philosophical arguments that make one algorithm seem much more likely to be “true” than the other. It’s crucial to realize that not everyone is running the perfectly steelmanned version of such algorithms to do with updating our beliefs based on observations of the processes of how we update on our beliefs, and such things are very tricky to get right.
Even though it’s valid to make observations of the form “I observe that I am running a process that produces the belief X in me”, it is definitely very risky to create a social norm that says such statements are superior to statements like “X is true” because such norms create the tendency to assign less validity to statements like “X is true”. In other words, such a norm can itself become a process that produces the belief “X is not true” when we don’t necessarily want to move our beliefs on X just because we begin to understand how the processes work. It’s very easy to go from “X is true” to “I observe I believe X is true” to “I observe there are social and emotional influences on my beliefs” to “There are social and emotional influences on my belief in X” to finally “X is not true” and I can’t help but feel a mistake is being made somewhere in that process.
I consider you to be bullying me. NVC and most related practice are morally-disguised bullying, a framework in which anyone who does not conform to the norm (and never mind the personal cost) is constantly socially attacked.
I trust both your intentions to be good here. But I’m going to step in and express some of my own preferences for this comment section.
@PDV I would like it if you took a break from commenting on my post for some reasonable time period, like, 24-48 hours.
@Valentine I prefer that you stop trying to have this conversation with PDV.
I obviously cannot do anything here but express my preferences, and I do not expect you guys to comply. I am just a person and stuff. But here I am, expressing them.
I did not see this comment until this moment (the comment display when there are more than 100 of them is really screwy). I will break off for the next day.
Preference received. I appreciate you expressing it.
I’m happy to fulfill it, as long as I see that the cultural vision that I’m standing for is well-represented in the discussion. (Which isn’t a request or a threat. Just a description of the parameters that shape where I’m okay stepping back from this.)
I don’t know what cultural vision you’re wanting to be represented. I am hoping it doesn’t rely on the particular conversation with PDV, but if it does, I’d like to understand that. Feel free to elaborate. (To clarify I’m only requesting you to stop trying to talk to PDV, not commenting here in general.)
That’s very hard to answer here without implicitly continuing the conversation with PDV. Something something game theory something something. Happy to answer you in more detail privately.
I appreciate Unreal setting boundaries on their post. (Whether done via formal moderation policies or simple expressions of preference, this seems like a good thing for people to feel empowered to do)
I quite disagree—this is just the sort of thing that I am worried will become more common (and more enforceable) with the upcoming moderation changes.
I think my disgreement may come from fundamentally different notions of what posting to the front page of LW is—in my view, it’s starting a public conversation. That conversation might well move in a direction you don’t want, but that’s the way it is—and I don’t think the conversation starter should have any special rights, explicit or implicit, to control that conversation.
I want to be very clear that I don’t think Unreal is being all that rude or unreasonable with their request—and that’s in fact precisely why I’m worried! If the request were obviously cruel or foolish that would be one thing, but something like this might well become accepted—and I think if requests like this are accepted there may well be a chilling effect on the overall discourse here, and it will occur in a way that is quite hard to see in the moment.
FYI, I’m writing out a lengthier post about this sort of issue. The short answer is that not giving creators control over their spaces creates different chilling effects.
I’m pretty sure that the standard Eliezer requires to post here is hostile to good epistemics.
**Can you be more specific?
I can guess that there is going to be a problem here.
If you want to answer “no” then you take social penalty. In NVC the “no” would look like “An explanation of why I can’t answer”. Either that or you say yes, and give specifics. You will probably perceive that you are being cornered.
Feeling cornered here would be a symptom of not knowing how to say no. Here are some versions of saying no.
“I don’t know how to say no without taking social damage”.
“It’s not my job to tell you the specifics”.
“I don’t have time to tell you, and other comments are more important”
“no.”
The trouble with most of them is they are epistemically poor. If you expect to change something, the phrase “I don’t like this but I won’t explain why” isn’t very helpful.
I think I’ve explained this in other subthreads.