Based on recent experience in the community around the subject, I think Circling is both toxic and a feedback-loop trap.
To paraphrase two friends who had similar strong negative reactions:
This is one of those “this thing is intensely intimate, but it is going to be pushed on me as if it isn’t” things, where people will look down on me for not doing it because it is Therapeutic.
I am fairly sure this would be bad for me, in the same way meditation is bad for me, and I have a terror that because of the social aspect people I want to be friends with will come to decide it is essential to being friends.
This is something I would not do with anyone I did not trust absolutely. No matter what it ostensibly holds about how it should not “force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable”, I am quite sure that, as practiced by humans, it will, and participants will be blinded to this obvious truth by the benefits and feeling of purity they have gained from it. Like NVC, I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
EDIT:
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you what you want, that you’ll become bored or start judging me.
[^This is a Circling move I just made: revealing what I’m feeling and what I’m imagining will happen.]
If this were an actual circle, I could ask you and check if it’s true—are you feeling bored?[I invite you to check.]
My instinctive reaction to this entire chunk is “ENEMY, HOSTILE, GET GONE, YOU ARE NO FRIEND OF MINE.” And I endorse that reaction. Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.
So, I think a pretty strong analogy can be made to sex. Circling, like sex, is a vulnerable activity, and like sex, it’s possible or even easy to do in a way that is nonconsensual and harmful. Like sex, it can cause harm so bad that people develop defenses of the form “anyone trying to engage with me even slightly in this way needs to back the fuck off,” which I’m fine with and want to respect. (Also like sex, it can be amazing and I think there’s something important about it.)
What bugs me about this comment is the lack of a clear distinction between “Circling is bad for me and people like me as we stand” and “Circling is bad, period, in general.” Like, I’m entirely happy with
I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
because you’re just clearly stating a boundary, but not at all happy with
Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.
because it’s phrased as a strong empirical claim about me and people I like. There’s a huge difference between “people should not try to hit on me” and “sex in general is bad and anyone who attempts to have it is bad.”
Also, I want to ask you more about your reaction to the quoted chunk, but… I… can’t?
There used to be a reply from PDV here, leading to a long subthread with some strong anti-circling sentiment (from me too). Now LW2.0 doesn’t show it anymore, but it’s still visible on GW. Is this how the new mod tools work?
I’m pretty sure this is because of the way LW2.0 only displays a limited number of comments at a time—the lowest-karma comments, along with their replies, simply disappear without any indication that they need to be manually loaded in order to be seen.
Yeah, the comment and subthread are still here, you just have to press “load more” at the top. I too thought that the comment had been deleted at first, until I remembered that wait, this thread has a lot of comments, maybe all of them are just not showing.
Since your comment, Oli+Ray have done some backend improvements, and now the number of auto-lodaded comments is 200, so this problem should be gone right now.
One remark: The larger that number is, (1) the less people will be used to seeing threads with some comments not displayed, hence (2) the more likely they are to forget that they are seeing only a partial picture; and also (3) the less it matters if the notice saying some comments haven’t been loaded yet is ugly; so it may be worth making it more prominent.
I guess we could just increase it to 300? That would cover practically all posts, and I think it should be fine on most devices, but it might cause some serious load times on slow connections and slow devices.
My guess it’s better to do that than to have this annoying loading experience, but I should really get around to refactoring our comment system.
If sex almost always happened in groups of 4-12, it would be unwise for most people to ever have sex, since it is highly unlikely that they would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have sex with.
If sex was praised as a way to be a better person and done in deliberate ritualized circumstances, it would be boundary-violating basically every single time.
If it was both, then anyone who suggested you have sex would be so obviously wrong they could not be said to be anything but evil.
If sex was praised as a way to be a better person and done in deliberate ritualized circumstances, it would be boundary-violating basically every single time.
…describes a pretty wide swath of BDSM. Pretty much all the BDSM communities I’ve ever encountered put heroic amounts of care into identifying and respecting boundaries. You’re going to have a strange uphill battle trying to get general agreement that BDSM is still “boundary-violating basically every single time” or that anyone suggesting group BSDM scenes “could not be said to be anything but evil.”
I get the impression that there’s something here that matters a lot to you. I can’t yet tell what it is though. It sounds like you feel really unsafe when reading Unreal’s self-reveal, and that you need others to recognize some kind of danger you see in it. If that’s right, then I don’t yet see what the danger you see is, but I’d like to. My preference would be for you to talk about your perspective (“I feel”, “I think”, “When I encounter X, I experience Y”, etc.) instead of making factually-structured statements about “most people”, because I find it easier to understand where you’re coming from if you talk from your perspective.
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.
The last paragraph of your comment is exactly the sort of thing that makes people (like me, and—I surmise—like PDV) have such a strongly negative view of NVC.
The way you say that sounds like you’re expecting people to realize why exactly that paragraph is bad, not just that it is bad. And while there was enough about Val’s paragraph for the “some people are going to react very badly to this” pattern-match to trigger for me (I recognized the is), I’m still unclear and curious about the why of it, since I would have reacted very appreciatively to someone doing that kind of thing to me.
Is it for the reason that Qiaochu gives above, or something else?
Because it insinuates that my feelings are divorced from reality. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to defuse.
A: Buy my fish
B: No
A: It sounds like you feel like you ought to experience some kind of aversion toward my fish. If so, I would really like to understand it better. Can you please describe it to me using subjective language like “I feel like I ought to experience some kind of aversion toward your fish because...”
B: Because it stinks
A: No, no. Say “I feel that I don’t like it”
B: …
A: Say “I feel like I ought to experience an aversion to it”
B: …
A: We’re making progress! Now we can really get to the root of your feeling like you ought to experience some kind of aversion toward buying my fish. Communication is so important. Blah blah
B: Whatever man, good luck selling your fish (walks away)
As PDV correctly points out, bad things happen if B is penalized for walking away. Better not to have such situations.
Because it insinuates that my feelings are divorced from reality.
I want to point out that another less loaded phrase we have for this is “distinguishing the map from the territory.”
I hope we can all agree that B should not be penalized for walking away, and that A in your example is either pretty bad at NVC or abusing it. I think I know Val enough to be reasonably confident that his intent was not to insinuate that anyone’s feelings are divorced from reality, but just to acknowledge that PDV has strong feelings about this topic (the word “evil” is not particularly neutral) and that he doesn’t understand them yet. B in your dialogue doesn’t have a strong feeling about the fish (I imagine), he just doesn’t want them.
Let’s look at the dialogue from B’s perspective. My reading of it is that he does have a strong feeling, or opinion, about the fish. They smell bad, they probably aren’t fresh, they may be more likely to make him sick if he eats them. Now, what’s A done here?
1 He’s changed the subject. They were discussing A’s fish; now they’re discussing B’s feelings.
2 He’s made a status grab. If A says “let’s talk about your feelings” and B complies, that puts A in the position of therapist or teacher or something of the sort.
3 He’s implied B is wrong about the fish. Conversational implicatures: If B says “your fish are bad” and A says “so, tell me about your feelings about my fish”, A is presupposing that B’s feelings aren’t simply a consequence of the badness of the fish.
4 He’s implied B is being unreasonable. Conversational implicatures again.
5 He’s done these things implicitly which means that if B objects and tries to get back onto the subject of the fish, or to defend himself from the charge of unreasonableness, he is liable to look like he’s being petty.
It is not surprising if B doesn’t like this.
Now, to be clear, you’re not wrong about map and territory. Sometimes B will react negatively to A’s fish, and the reason really will lie in B’s quirks rather than any deficiency in the fish. This is one reason why it may well be a good idea for B to take an NVC-ish approach and begin by talking about his reaction to the fish rather than about the Fish-In-Themselves. (Well … probably not, actually, in this example. But in the situations it’s a metaphor for.) And if B charges in accusing A of selling rotten fish, then A is likely to get offended and defensive; that’s another reason why B may choose to do the NVC thing.
But it’s a different matter if A tries to oblige B to do that, especially if B has already made an object-level criticism of the Fish-In-Themselves. And, in a world where fishmongers do sometimes sell bad fish, it’s probably not a good idea to have norms that say B should never begin by criticizing the fish.
Returning from the metaphor to the reality of this thread for a moment: of course Valentine didn’t say anything like “PDV, you are obliged to respond by talking about your feelings”. Quite the reverse: he said “My preference would be...”. That’s surely better than trying to impose a literal obligation; but it’s easy enough (and not obviously wrong) to read Valentine’s words as trying to impose a social obligation. “Valentine’s made this reasonable request, and asked politely, and explained why; the least you can do is to comply”.
One more remark: sometimes B will react negatively, the reason will lie in B’s quirks, and B will be unable or unwilling to see this. In that case, perhaps A’s best course of action really is to expose B’s peculiarities somehow. But I think usually not: better to show that the fish are OK, and let others draw their own conclusions about why B thinks otherwise.
I think it’s a bit creepy to focus attention on Bob’s map while talking to Bob. Instead, talk about the territory (“my fish has beautiful scales”) and let Bob deal with his map. If you don’t trust him to do that right, why should he trust you?
For example, when PDV says “I think circling is evil”, it’s a bit creepy to reply with “I get the impression that you feel strongly about this” etc. A better reply is something like “nobody would ever use circling to manipulate you”.
I’m confused about this. Isn’t this the sort of thing we do when trying to point out each other’s biases or flaws in reasoning and so forth?
I’m willing to get on board the “circling / NVC should not be done at someone without their consent” train in general, though. In the circles I’ve been in everyone has explicitly opted into the circle and explicitly has permission to leave at any time if they feel they need to to protect themselves from whatever.
A better reply is something like “nobody would ever use circling to manipulate you”.
I’m willing to get on board the “circling / NVC should not be done at someone without their consent” train in general, though. In the circles I’ve been in everyone has explicitly opted into the circle and explicitly has permission to leave at any time if they feel they need to to protect themselves from whatever.
I am worried that here this train actually means things like, “Don’t express your feelings or ask about mine” and “If you express preferences about how I communicate and the topic is emotionally laden, then you’re making a status grab and should be ashamed.”
Me too, but I think I’m still willing to err on the side of caution anyway. Once again, the analogy to sex: there’s something useful about there being safe spaces where people aren’t allowed to flirt with / hit on each other, or even express sexual / romantic preferences, so nobody has to deal with the resulting social pressure / awkwardness / power dynamics, even if I think in general flirtation and romance is good and even if I think there’s something awful about clamping down on expressing sexual / romantic preferences in general.
there’s something useful about there being safe spaces where people aren’t allowed to flirt with / hit on each other
That is true, but something that’s a safe space for one kind of a person often hurts another kind of person. For something like “do not flirt with each other or otherwise express sexuality”, there is a clear case for why having that norm is the better tradeoff in many situations… but for something like “do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you”, it is much less obvious to me that this is the norm that helps more people than it hurts. (to be clear, the same is true for the reverse case; I’m genuinely expressing uncertainty rather than implying that one of them would be clearly better/worse)
I feel like “don’t circle at people without their consent” is meaningfully different from “do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you.” Very few people have ever circled, but nearly everyone can express feelings and preferences.
That rule might exclude people who only have one script for expressing feelings and preferences, however, which is a particular concern in a community where so many people rely on scripts to communicate.
I agree that they are different; I was thinking in the context of Val’s worry that trying to enforce a rule of “no circling / NVC on LW without express consent” will in practice become interpreted as
“Don’t express your feelings or ask about mine” and “If you express preferences about how I communicate and the topic is emotionally laden, then you’re making a status grab and should be ashamed.”
I don’t understand which part you don’t understand. Part of the disagreement we’re hashing out here, as I understand it, is about how bad it is to do circling / NVC to someone without them having consented to it in advance (e.g. Val writing the last paragraph in that one comment above). My opinion on this issue is complicated but I’m willing to respect a Schelling fence erected around “let’s just not do it to people without their consent in general.”
There are certain standard cultural norms of how people talk in US society. Any deviation from those standard cultural norms requires consent by the other party.
Given that default cultural norms are driven by memetic evolution into a state that’s quite horrible, I don’t think that’s a good position.
Cultural norms that make people more connected with their felt sense lead to communications that are more likely to have good psychological effects.
Look, once again, the analogy to sex: there are certain standard cultural norms for how people flirt, have sex, etc. in US society. There are many reasons to disagree with these cultural norms. I am still not going to (substantially) deviate from them at someone without their consent, because I don’t get to decide for them what their boundaries are.
There are lots of defenses / counters to this happening in a circle, FWIW. At least with folks who know what they’re doing / experienced Circlers, “A” would not be able to get away with this without pushback.
I’m also in the position of, strangely, finding it mechanically difficult to figure out how to ask for the “why” here in a way I expect will be received as sincere.
Can I just give you permission to talk about me, and then spell out what the problem is from your perspective?
Isn’t that implicit in all disagreements? You’re implicitly (or actually explicitly, in many cases) claiming social/moral/epistemic superiority over people who think NVC and related concepts are good and useful.
When you say “actually explicitly” I take that to mean that it’s “worse” when the claim is explicit, but that ain’t necessarily so. If I call you an idiot, you can defend yourself by pointing out how you’re not an idiot, and everyone around will understand that you’re responding to my criticism. But if I say things that just presume you’re an idiot, you typically can’t do that without coming across as weirdly defensive and/or dickish and/or oversensitive, so I get to sneak in the idea that you’re stupid without giving you a fair chance to respond.
I prefer this particular thread to be discontinued (starting with Valentine’s “I would like to understand why” comment). Sensing serious demon thread potential. Do not want to feed it. As always, if you decide to discard this message, that is fine and your prerogative.
Explicit claims are more honest, and thus better, than implicit claims. Claiming status explicitly opens you up to someone else contesting it; claiming status implicitly makes it harder to be criticized.
This probably maps cleanly to Ask/Guess Culture. I’m certainly an Ask partisan. (On that front. I am not strongly opinionated on Ask vs. Tell vs. other novel variations).
I am a dom, and while I dislike nearly everyone in the BDSM scene, it’s not for reasons at all related to this. I am unaware of any writing on BDSM from anyone I’ve heard of saying that BDSM is “praised as a way to be a better person”; when it’s held up as better, it’s on hedonistic grounds, not moral ones. Which is a critical piece of the problem; the difference between “you really should try this, you’re missing out” and “you really should try this, you’re weaker and worse because you don’t” is enormous in terms of what social pressure it exerts.
Also, I don’t appreciate the social posturing/attack in your latter paragraph.
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.
Thank you for writing that! I don’t know anything about circling, but the bit you highlighted feels creepy to me as well, and I have similar doubts about meditation. And I’ve noticed a few people in the community speaking in that manner too. Huh.
I feel really uneasy with a policy of upvoting comments based on the fact that they offer a dissenting opinion. That rewards contrarianism instead of good epistemics whenever there’s a difference.
I think a better policy is, upvote only posts that support good epistemics and good discussion norms; and if you don’t see a dissenting opinion appearing, try to form one yourself under the constraints of good epistemics and good discussion norms.
It’s complicated. We need to keep the dissenter around before we can teach them good epistemics. Maybe being lenient on one is okay at times while we work on the other. I hold myself to standards, but it remains to be seen whether other people hold themselves to those same arbitrary standards that I want to hold.
Most people are unknown to me and do not share my values. They are trustworthy to the extent of my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.
I was systematically subtly pulled down by ostensible friends in middle school and early high school, but I don’t consider that I was ever betrayed in any stronger sense, or by anyone I trusted to any high degree.
they are trustworthy to the extent of my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.
If that’s the case then it’s your duty to be better at modelling them than they are at surprising you. If they surprise you more often than you model them as not manipulating you then you will be living in a horrible world built on your own unfortunate premises about how it works.
For the record “my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.” recently took a hell of an upgrade by taking on board NVC, circling and manymanymore (see those 3 links). And I don’t believe that many people are out to manipulate. It’s rare that anyone surprises me, and I feel very safe and comfortable constantly because I am a good model of the other people around me and their actions. I’d encourage you in the direction of scholarship. It’s very empowering to have the understanding of everyone else to feel more safe and in control.
And I don’t believe that many people are out to manipulate.
I think that would be a crux. Virtually everyone is out to manipulate almost everyone else, at all times. Much of the manipulation is subconscious, and observing that it is present is harshly socially punished. (cf. ialdabaoth/frustrateddemiurge/the living incarnation of David Monroe, PBUH).
If that’s the case then it’s your duty to be better at modelling them than they are at surprising you.
Doing that in full generality is literally impossible; it’s anti-inductive. It’s entirely a matter of what tolerances are acceptable. Treating most people as not giving a shit about me or anyone else, until clearly demonstrated otherwise, has predicted the world accurately up to this point.
Based on recent experience in the community around the subject, I think Circling is both toxic and a feedback-loop trap.
To paraphrase two friends who had similar strong negative reactions:
This is something I would not do with anyone I did not trust absolutely. No matter what it ostensibly holds about how it should not “force you to open up or try to get you to be vulnerable”, I am quite sure that, as practiced by humans, it will, and participants will be blinded to this obvious truth by the benefits and feeling of purity they have gained from it. Like NVC, I consider anyone engaging in this while in interaction with me a hostile actor.
EDIT:
I notice I feel trepidation and fear as I prepare to discuss this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you what you want, that you’ll become bored or start judging me.
[^This is a Circling move I just made: revealing what I’m feeling and what I’m imagining will happen.]
If this were an actual circle, I could ask you and check if it’s true—are you feeling bored? [I invite you to check.]
My instinctive reaction to this entire chunk is “ENEMY, HOSTILE, GET GONE, YOU ARE NO FRIEND OF MINE.” And I endorse that reaction. Anyone who uses this kind of frame is someone who is unsafe to know.
So, I think a pretty strong analogy can be made to sex. Circling, like sex, is a vulnerable activity, and like sex, it’s possible or even easy to do in a way that is nonconsensual and harmful. Like sex, it can cause harm so bad that people develop defenses of the form “anyone trying to engage with me even slightly in this way needs to back the fuck off,” which I’m fine with and want to respect. (Also like sex, it can be amazing and I think there’s something important about it.)
What bugs me about this comment is the lack of a clear distinction between “Circling is bad for me and people like me as we stand” and “Circling is bad, period, in general.” Like, I’m entirely happy with
because you’re just clearly stating a boundary, but not at all happy with
because it’s phrased as a strong empirical claim about me and people I like. There’s a huge difference between “people should not try to hit on me” and “sex in general is bad and anyone who attempts to have it is bad.”
Also, I want to ask you more about your reaction to the quoted chunk, but… I… can’t?
There used to be a reply from PDV here, leading to a long subthread with some strong anti-circling sentiment (from me too). Now LW2.0 doesn’t show it anymore, but it’s still visible on GW. Is this how the new mod tools work?
I’m pretty sure this is because of the way LW2.0 only displays a limited number of comments at a time—the lowest-karma comments, along with their replies, simply disappear without any indication that they need to be manually loaded in order to be seen.
Yeah, the comment and subthread are still here, you just have to press “load more” at the top. I too thought that the comment had been deleted at first, until I remembered that wait, this thread has a lot of comments, maybe all of them are just not showing.
Since your comment, Oli+Ray have done some backend improvements, and now the number of auto-lodaded comments is 200, so this problem should be gone right now.
That’s excellent.
One remark: The larger that number is, (1) the less people will be used to seeing threads with some comments not displayed, hence (2) the more likely they are to forget that they are seeing only a partial picture; and also (3) the less it matters if the notice saying some comments haven’t been loaded yet is ugly; so it may be worth making it more prominent.
Guys, we are over 200 comments right now. ….
I guess we could just increase it to 300? That would cover practically all posts, and I think it should be fine on most devices, but it might cause some serious load times on slow connections and slow devices.
My guess it’s better to do that than to have this annoying loading experience, but I should really get around to refactoring our comment system.
Yeah, it seems like we’re making the experience worse in some actual cases, in exchange for making it better in other hypothetical cases.
If whenever we hit a limit we increase it, why even have the limit!?
If sex almost always happened in groups of 4-12, it would be unwise for most people to ever have sex, since it is highly unlikely that they would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have sex with.
If sex was praised as a way to be a better person and done in deliberate ritualized circumstances, it would be boundary-violating basically every single time.
If it was both, then anyone who suggested you have sex would be so obviously wrong they could not be said to be anything but evil.
Hmm. This:
…describes a pretty wide swath of BDSM. Pretty much all the BDSM communities I’ve ever encountered put heroic amounts of care into identifying and respecting boundaries. You’re going to have a strange uphill battle trying to get general agreement that BDSM is still “boundary-violating basically every single time” or that anyone suggesting group BSDM scenes “could not be said to be anything but evil.”
I get the impression that there’s something here that matters a lot to you. I can’t yet tell what it is though. It sounds like you feel really unsafe when reading Unreal’s self-reveal, and that you need others to recognize some kind of danger you see in it. If that’s right, then I don’t yet see what the danger you see is, but I’d like to. My preference would be for you to talk about your perspective (“I feel”, “I think”, “When I encounter X, I experience Y”, etc.) instead of making factually-structured statements about “most people”, because I find it easier to understand where you’re coming from if you talk from your perspective.
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.
The last paragraph of your comment is exactly the sort of thing that makes people (like me, and—I surmise—like PDV) have such a strongly negative view of NVC.
The way you say that sounds like you’re expecting people to realize why exactly that paragraph is bad, not just that it is bad. And while there was enough about Val’s paragraph for the “some people are going to react very badly to this” pattern-match to trigger for me (I recognized the is), I’m still unclear and curious about the why of it, since I would have reacted very appreciatively to someone doing that kind of thing to me.
Is it for the reason that Qiaochu gives above, or something else?
Because it insinuates that my feelings are divorced from reality. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to defuse.
As PDV correctly points out, bad things happen if B is penalized for walking away. Better not to have such situations.
I want to point out that another less loaded phrase we have for this is “distinguishing the map from the territory.”
I hope we can all agree that B should not be penalized for walking away, and that A in your example is either pretty bad at NVC or abusing it. I think I know Val enough to be reasonably confident that his intent was not to insinuate that anyone’s feelings are divorced from reality, but just to acknowledge that PDV has strong feelings about this topic (the word “evil” is not particularly neutral) and that he doesn’t understand them yet. B in your dialogue doesn’t have a strong feeling about the fish (I imagine), he just doesn’t want them.
Let’s look at the dialogue from B’s perspective. My reading of it is that he does have a strong feeling, or opinion, about the fish. They smell bad, they probably aren’t fresh, they may be more likely to make him sick if he eats them. Now, what’s A done here?
1 He’s changed the subject. They were discussing A’s fish; now they’re discussing B’s feelings.
2 He’s made a status grab. If A says “let’s talk about your feelings” and B complies, that puts A in the position of therapist or teacher or something of the sort.
3 He’s implied B is wrong about the fish. Conversational implicatures: If B says “your fish are bad” and A says “so, tell me about your feelings about my fish”, A is presupposing that B’s feelings aren’t simply a consequence of the badness of the fish.
4 He’s implied B is being unreasonable. Conversational implicatures again.
5 He’s done these things implicitly which means that if B objects and tries to get back onto the subject of the fish, or to defend himself from the charge of unreasonableness, he is liable to look like he’s being petty.
It is not surprising if B doesn’t like this.
Now, to be clear, you’re not wrong about map and territory. Sometimes B will react negatively to A’s fish, and the reason really will lie in B’s quirks rather than any deficiency in the fish. This is one reason why it may well be a good idea for B to take an NVC-ish approach and begin by talking about his reaction to the fish rather than about the Fish-In-Themselves. (Well … probably not, actually, in this example. But in the situations it’s a metaphor for.) And if B charges in accusing A of selling rotten fish, then A is likely to get offended and defensive; that’s another reason why B may choose to do the NVC thing.
But it’s a different matter if A tries to oblige B to do that, especially if B has already made an object-level criticism of the Fish-In-Themselves. And, in a world where fishmongers do sometimes sell bad fish, it’s probably not a good idea to have norms that say B should never begin by criticizing the fish.
Returning from the metaphor to the reality of this thread for a moment: of course Valentine didn’t say anything like “PDV, you are obliged to respond by talking about your feelings”. Quite the reverse: he said “My preference would be...”. That’s surely better than trying to impose a literal obligation; but it’s easy enough (and not obviously wrong) to read Valentine’s words as trying to impose a social obligation. “Valentine’s made this reasonable request, and asked politely, and explained why; the least you can do is to comply”.
One more remark: sometimes B will react negatively, the reason will lie in B’s quirks, and B will be unable or unwilling to see this. In that case, perhaps A’s best course of action really is to expose B’s peculiarities somehow. But I think usually not: better to show that the fish are OK, and let others draw their own conclusions about why B thinks otherwise.
This is an accurate description of my mental state in this situation.
I think it’s a bit creepy to focus attention on Bob’s map while talking to Bob. Instead, talk about the territory (“my fish has beautiful scales”) and let Bob deal with his map. If you don’t trust him to do that right, why should he trust you?
For example, when PDV says “I think circling is evil”, it’s a bit creepy to reply with “I get the impression that you feel strongly about this” etc. A better reply is something like “nobody would ever use circling to manipulate you”.
I’m confused about this. Isn’t this the sort of thing we do when trying to point out each other’s biases or flaws in reasoning and so forth?
I’m willing to get on board the “circling / NVC should not be done at someone without their consent” train in general, though. In the circles I’ve been in everyone has explicitly opted into the circle and explicitly has permission to leave at any time if they feel they need to to protect themselves from whatever.
Well, I certainly can’t guarantee that.
I am worried that here this train actually means things like, “Don’t express your feelings or ask about mine” and “If you express preferences about how I communicate and the topic is emotionally laden, then you’re making a status grab and should be ashamed.”
Me too, but I think I’m still willing to err on the side of caution anyway. Once again, the analogy to sex: there’s something useful about there being safe spaces where people aren’t allowed to flirt with / hit on each other, or even express sexual / romantic preferences, so nobody has to deal with the resulting social pressure / awkwardness / power dynamics, even if I think in general flirtation and romance is good and even if I think there’s something awful about clamping down on expressing sexual / romantic preferences in general.
there’s something useful about there being safe spaces where people aren’t allowed to flirt with / hit on each other
That is true, but something that’s a safe space for one kind of a person often hurts another kind of person. For something like “do not flirt with each other or otherwise express sexuality”, there is a clear case for why having that norm is the better tradeoff in many situations… but for something like “do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you”, it is much less obvious to me that this is the norm that helps more people than it hurts. (to be clear, the same is true for the reverse case; I’m genuinely expressing uncertainty rather than implying that one of them would be clearly better/worse)
I feel like “don’t circle at people without their consent” is meaningfully different from “do not express your feelings or let other people know what would make communication easier for you.” Very few people have ever circled, but nearly everyone can express feelings and preferences.
That rule might exclude people who only have one script for expressing feelings and preferences, however, which is a particular concern in a community where so many people rely on scripts to communicate.
I agree that they are different; I was thinking in the context of Val’s worry that trying to enforce a rule of “no circling / NVC on LW without express consent” will in practice become interpreted as
Circling isn’t just about expressing feelings or preference but it’s about being explicit about relating.
It’s not just saying “I’m sad” but saying “When you said X that made me sad”. Circling is also less about scripts than NVC.
What exactly do you mean with that?
I don’t understand which part you don’t understand. Part of the disagreement we’re hashing out here, as I understand it, is about how bad it is to do circling / NVC to someone without them having consented to it in advance (e.g. Val writing the last paragraph in that one comment above). My opinion on this issue is complicated but I’m willing to respect a Schelling fence erected around “let’s just not do it to people without their consent in general.”
For me that position sounds like:
There are certain standard cultural norms of how people talk in US society. Any deviation from those standard cultural norms requires consent by the other party.
Given that default cultural norms are driven by memetic evolution into a state that’s quite horrible, I don’t think that’s a good position.
Cultural norms that make people more connected with their felt sense lead to communications that are more likely to have good psychological effects.
Look, once again, the analogy to sex: there are certain standard cultural norms for how people flirt, have sex, etc. in US society. There are many reasons to disagree with these cultural norms. I am still not going to (substantially) deviate from them at someone without their consent, because I don’t get to decide for them what their boundaries are.
Yeah, “overcoming biases” often veers into “overcoming sales resistance”. I prefer trades that both sides want, even when one of them is biased.
There are lots of defenses / counters to this happening in a circle, FWIW. At least with folks who know what they’re doing / experienced Circlers, “A” would not be able to get away with this without pushback.
This is certainly the approach I endorse, but the voting patterns on this site indicate that my preference is, shall we say, far from universal.
Please see my reply to Qiaochu_Yuan.
Then why did you make your comment??? :-/
I would in fact like to understand why.
I’m also in the position of, strangely, finding it mechanically difficult to figure out how to ask for the “why” here in a way I expect will be received as sincere.
Can I just give you permission to talk about me, and then spell out what the problem is from your perspective?
It’s a implicit claim of social/moral/epistemic superiority.
Isn’t that implicit in all disagreements? You’re implicitly (or actually explicitly, in many cases) claiming social/moral/epistemic superiority over people who think NVC and related concepts are good and useful.
When you say “actually explicitly” I take that to mean that it’s “worse” when the claim is explicit, but that ain’t necessarily so. If I call you an idiot, you can defend yourself by pointing out how you’re not an idiot, and everyone around will understand that you’re responding to my criticism. But if I say things that just presume you’re an idiot, you typically can’t do that without coming across as weirdly defensive and/or dickish and/or oversensitive, so I get to sneak in the idea that you’re stupid without giving you a fair chance to respond.
I prefer this particular thread to be discontinued (starting with Valentine’s “I would like to understand why” comment). Sensing serious demon thread potential. Do not want to feed it. As always, if you decide to discard this message, that is fine and your prerogative.
Explicit claims are more honest, and thus better, than implicit claims. Claiming status explicitly opens you up to someone else contesting it; claiming status implicitly makes it harder to be criticized.
This probably maps cleanly to Ask/Guess Culture. I’m certainly an Ask partisan. (On that front. I am not strongly opinionated on Ask vs. Tell vs. other novel variations).
(Correct. We definitely seem to be on the same page here.)
I am a dom, and while I dislike nearly everyone in the BDSM scene, it’s not for reasons at all related to this. I am unaware of any writing on BDSM from anyone I’ve heard of saying that BDSM is “praised as a way to be a better person”; when it’s held up as better, it’s on hedonistic grounds, not moral ones. Which is a critical piece of the problem; the difference between “you really should try this, you’re missing out” and “you really should try this, you’re weaker and worse because you don’t” is enormous in terms of what social pressure it exerts.
Also, I don’t appreciate the social posturing/attack in your latter paragraph.
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.
Link or tldr on what NVC is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
Nonviolent communication.
Thank you for writing that! I don’t know anything about circling, but the bit you highlighted feels creepy to me as well, and I have similar doubts about meditation. And I’ve noticed a few people in the community speaking in that manner too. Huh.
Upvoted for dissenting opinion.
I am interested in hearing more of the objection.
As relevant questions - Do you hold a fundamental premise that humans are not to be trusted?
Have you been repeatedly betrayed by people you thought you could trust until you decided you were not good at judging who you could trust?
Meta:
I feel really uneasy with a policy of upvoting comments based on the fact that they offer a dissenting opinion. That rewards contrarianism instead of good epistemics whenever there’s a difference.
I think a better policy is, upvote only posts that support good epistemics and good discussion norms; and if you don’t see a dissenting opinion appearing, try to form one yourself under the constraints of good epistemics and good discussion norms.
FWIW.
It’s complicated. We need to keep the dissenter around before we can teach them good epistemics. Maybe being lenient on one is okay at times while we work on the other. I hold myself to standards, but it remains to be seen whether other people hold themselves to those same arbitrary standards that I want to hold.
Not by default and no, respectively.
Most people are unknown to me and do not share my values. They are trustworthy to the extent of my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.
I was systematically subtly pulled down by ostensible friends in middle school and early high school, but I don’t consider that I was ever betrayed in any stronger sense, or by anyone I trusted to any high degree.
If that’s the case then it’s your duty to be better at modelling them than they are at surprising you. If they surprise you more often than you model them as not manipulating you then you will be living in a horrible world built on your own unfortunate premises about how it works.
For the record “my ability to model them and my confidence that they are not manipulating me.” recently took a hell of an upgrade by taking on board NVC, circling and many many more (see those 3 links). And I don’t believe that many people are out to manipulate. It’s rare that anyone surprises me, and I feel very safe and comfortable constantly because I am a good model of the other people around me and their actions. I’d encourage you in the direction of scholarship. It’s very empowering to have the understanding of everyone else to feel more safe and in control.
I think that would be a crux. Virtually everyone is out to manipulate almost everyone else, at all times. Much of the manipulation is subconscious, and observing that it is present is harshly socially punished. (cf. ialdabaoth/frustrateddemiurge/the living incarnation of David Monroe, PBUH).
Doing that in full generality is literally impossible; it’s anti-inductive. It’s entirely a matter of what tolerances are acceptable. Treating most people as not giving a shit about me or anyone else, until clearly demonstrated otherwise, has predicted the world accurately up to this point.
I strongly endorse the sentiments expressed in this comment.