Upfront note: I’ve enjoyed the circling I’ve done.
One reason to be cautious of circling: dropping group punishment norms for certain types of manipulation is extremely harmful. From my experience of circling (which is limited to a CFAR workshop), it provides plausible cover for very powerful status grabs under the aegis of “(just) expressing feelings and experiences”; I think the strongest usual defense against this is actually group disapproval. If someone is able to express such a status grab without receiving overt disapproval, they have essentially succeeded unless everyone in the group truly is superhuman at later correcting for this. If mounting the obvious self-defense against the status grab is taken off the table, then you may just lose painfully unless you can out-do them.
Normalizing circling (or NVC) too much could lead to externalities, where this happens outside of an actual circling context. This could lead to people losing face who normally wouldn’t, along with arms races that turn an X community into a circling-skill community.
If people are allowed to fish sell you (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aFyWFwGWBsP5DZbHF/circling#E9dqjhm8Ca3HkFRMZ), and walking away loses you social status, and other people look on expectantly for your answer as you are fish sold instead of saying “Stop, they don’t want to buy your fish”, then depending on the type of fish and what escape routes to other social circles you have available, you may be in a hellishly difficult situation.
Note that I think this is bad regardless of your personal skill at resisting social pressure. The social incentive landscape changing leads to worse outcomes for everyone, even if you can individually get better outcomes for yourself by better learning to resist social pressure. That better outcome may be moving to a different community instead of being continually downgraded in status, which is a worse outcome than the community never having that bad incentive landscape to begin with.
The “fish sell” link isn’t working—it just takes me to the top of the circling post.
Also, when I search for “fish sell” on Lesser Wrong, I get a result under “comments” of CronoDAS saying:
The “fish sell” link isn’t working—it just takes me to the top of the Circling post.
And that link, itself, just takes me to the top of the circling post. And weirdly, I don’t see that comment here anywhere. Is this a error on the website, rather than the way the link was formatted? Like, is it not possible to link to comments yet? I’ll poke around a little, but I’m not all that hopeful, since that’s a guess in the dark.
What’s ridiculous about this is that the solution was actually shared “just below” this comment, BUT it doesn’t show up because you would have needed to know the solution first to see it. -_-
Anyway, you have to go to the top of the comments and click (show more). Then the link will work.
You seem to be thinking that both NVC and Circling involve not maintaining boundaries against behaviors that we would otherwise notice, categorize as bad and take social action against. I am familiar with NVC and if anything the opposite seems to be the case, in NVC you enforce your boundaries more strongly and effectively than without it. I am not familiar with Circling, but I see nothing in the post above to suggest it would be any different.
I think it’s a memetic adaptation type thing. I would claim that attempting to open up the group usage of NVC will also (in a large enough group) open up the usage of “language-that-appears-NVCish-even-if-against-the-stated-philosophy”. I think that this type of language provides cover for power plays (re: the broken link to the fish selling scenario), and that using the language in a way that maintains boundaries requires the group to adapt and be skillful enough at detecting these violations. It is not enough if you do so as an individual if your group does not lend support; it may be enough if as an individual you are highly skilled at defending yourself in a way that does not lose face (and practicing NVC might raise that skill level), but it’s harder than in the alternative scenario.
I’m definitely not trying to object to NVC in general, but I’m worried about it as a large social group style. I think the failures of it as a large group style would mostly appear as relatively silent status transfers to the less virtuous.
Also, these arguments are not super specific to NVC and Circling, so should probably be abstracted. I think any large scale group communication change has similar bad potential, and it’s an object level question whether that actually happens. With NVC, I’ve seen some such dynamics in churches that remind me of it, hence why I raise the worry. I think I would feel queasy and like I was being attacked if someone started using NVC language at me in a public setting in front of others; I definitely feel like I’ve been “fish-sold” before.
It’s entirely possible that there exist large groups with a high enough skill level or different values so that this is not a problem at all, and my experience is just too limited.
Upfront note: I’ve enjoyed the circling I’ve done.
One reason to be cautious of circling: dropping group punishment norms for certain types of manipulation is extremely harmful. From my experience of circling (which is limited to a CFAR workshop), it provides plausible cover for very powerful status grabs under the aegis of “(just) expressing feelings and experiences”; I think the strongest usual defense against this is actually group disapproval. If someone is able to express such a status grab without receiving overt disapproval, they have essentially succeeded unless everyone in the group truly is superhuman at later correcting for this. If mounting the obvious self-defense against the status grab is taken off the table, then you may just lose painfully unless you can out-do them.
Normalizing circling (or NVC) too much could lead to externalities, where this happens outside of an actual circling context. This could lead to people losing face who normally wouldn’t, along with arms races that turn an X community into a circling-skill community.
If people are allowed to fish sell you (https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aFyWFwGWBsP5DZbHF/circling#E9dqjhm8Ca3HkFRMZ), and walking away loses you social status, and other people look on expectantly for your answer as you are fish sold instead of saying “Stop, they don’t want to buy your fish”, then depending on the type of fish and what escape routes to other social circles you have available, you may be in a hellishly difficult situation.
Note that I think this is bad regardless of your personal skill at resisting social pressure. The social incentive landscape changing leads to worse outcomes for everyone, even if you can individually get better outcomes for yourself by better learning to resist social pressure. That better outcome may be moving to a different community instead of being continually downgraded in status, which is a worse outcome than the community never having that bad incentive landscape to begin with.
The “fish sell” url isn’t working—it just takes me to the top of the Circling post.
you have to go to the top of the comments and click (show more).
Yeah, this definitely seems like a bug; permalinks to comments shouldn’t require this. Unfortunately, I don’t see any obvious way to report a bug.
The “fish sell” link isn’t working—it just takes me to the top of the circling post.
Also, when I search for “fish sell” on Lesser Wrong, I get a result under “comments” of CronoDAS saying:
And that link, itself, just takes me to the top of the circling post. And weirdly, I don’t see that comment here anywhere. Is this a error on the website, rather than the way the link was formatted? Like, is it not possible to link to comments yet? I’ll poke around a little, but I’m not all that hopeful, since that’s a guess in the dark.
What’s ridiculous about this is that the solution was actually shared “just below” this comment, BUT it doesn’t show up because you would have needed to know the solution first to see it. -_-
Anyway, you have to go to the top of the comments and click (show more). Then the link will work.
Outsch, sorry again. I will get around to increasing the comment limit soon.
Fix the links, not the limit.
You seem to be thinking that both NVC and Circling involve not maintaining boundaries against behaviors that we would otherwise notice, categorize as bad and take social action against. I am familiar with NVC and if anything the opposite seems to be the case, in NVC you enforce your boundaries more strongly and effectively than without it. I am not familiar with Circling, but I see nothing in the post above to suggest it would be any different.
I think it’s a memetic adaptation type thing. I would claim that attempting to open up the group usage of NVC will also (in a large enough group) open up the usage of “language-that-appears-NVCish-even-if-against-the-stated-philosophy”. I think that this type of language provides cover for power plays (re: the broken link to the fish selling scenario), and that using the language in a way that maintains boundaries requires the group to adapt and be skillful enough at detecting these violations. It is not enough if you do so as an individual if your group does not lend support; it may be enough if as an individual you are highly skilled at defending yourself in a way that does not lose face (and practicing NVC might raise that skill level), but it’s harder than in the alternative scenario.
I’m definitely not trying to object to NVC in general, but I’m worried about it as a large social group style. I think the failures of it as a large group style would mostly appear as relatively silent status transfers to the less virtuous.
Also, these arguments are not super specific to NVC and Circling, so should probably be abstracted. I think any large scale group communication change has similar bad potential, and it’s an object level question whether that actually happens. With NVC, I’ve seen some such dynamics in churches that remind me of it, hence why I raise the worry. I think I would feel queasy and like I was being attacked if someone started using NVC language at me in a public setting in front of others; I definitely feel like I’ve been “fish-sold” before.
It’s entirely possible that there exist large groups with a high enough skill level or different values so that this is not a problem at all, and my experience is just too limited.