This phenomenological account of frame control doesn’t provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question someone would be trying to answer when asking “is this person doing frame control?” aside from noticing which of the features of “frame control” they satisfy.
Some of the “red flags” seem like they could equally well point to someone fanatically committed to totally dominating others, or someone whose perspective responds to evidence but not social pressure, and many of the signs that someone is not a “frame controller” seem like the opposite. From the description of the first red flag:
They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.
These are signs of submission, as is the description of the first sign that someone isn’t “doing frame control”:
They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.
A key component that makes frame control dangerous is when it’s linked to concrete consequences; maybe people really respect them, maybe they control resources, maybe they are the person throwing big events, maybe they gave you a new name, maybe they have the power to exclude you from your social group.
In general I would expect people whose beliefs are more responsive to valid evidence to have an easier time acting to produce the consequences they want. In environments that allocate credit straightforwardly I would also expect them to be more respected, entrusted with more resources, and have their concerns about others listened to more. In perverse environments I would expect the opposite.
The other red flags and opposite signs seem more ground-truth-oriented if I take them literally, as long as we don’t skip the step of investigating whether what the other person is saying is false or true. For instance, reframing “harm” as “beneficial” is helpful if I start out by mistakenly think that my discomfort confronting a criticism is a sign that the criticism is hurting me, but harmful if I’m being trained to treat the grinding-my-gears feeling of endorsing an incoherent narrative as a sign of healthy spiritual challenge.
If you can evaluate directly whether someone has more of a tendency to introduce errors or to correct them, then you can additionally judge whether they are introducing errors in a way calculated to make error-correction harder, to make themselves more central, and to make you more responsive to their commands. If they’re just giving commands and not making claims, then you can skip the first step and just see whether you think their commands are making you better off. In either case, it can help a lot to check whether you are behaving as though the other person is threatening you, whether they are behaving in a way optimized to produce that impression, and whether on reflection you believe that the threats are credible.
If you can’t evaluate that, then you’re in a more confusing situation. It can often be a good idea to switch contexts and see if things seem clear when outside that particular social field. If not, then you’re stuck, and at best you can decide which interactions seem to give you the best chance of achieving autonomy.
Appreciating you pointing out via those first two quotes that some of these dimensions are pointing at someone being submissive rather than sovereign+respectful (not attached to these words).
Feels weird that I missed that when I was reading the draft, actually. Bullet points 2-5 of the “someone isn’t doing frame control” list still seem solid to me. On reflection, I actually think bullet 1 is actually completely misleading, because someone frame controlling can also do a bunch of these things, particularly if they have a victim energy as in Raemon’s comment.
This also feels off:
They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.
I might try to steelman it as:
They can’t laugh at themselves, and don’t seem to give signals that they are interested in learning from you and seeing the world through your eyes.
I stand by the thing I was trying to communicate in point 1, though I might have communicated poorly. I have met many people who are well established, very smart, who are not socially submissive, who still make the little moves that demonstrate vulnerability. I think Eliezer does this, for example.
This phenomenological account of frame control doesn’t provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question someone would be trying to answer when asking “is this person doing frame control?” aside from noticing which of the features of “frame control” they satisfy. Some of the “red flags” seem like they could equally well point to someone fanatically committed to totally dominating others, or someone whose perspective responds to evidence but not social pressure, and many of the signs that someone is not a “frame controller” seem like the opposite.
I feel like I understand aella’s points, but obviously it’s possible that I think of something slightly different. In any case, I’d answer this as follows:
The additional question is whether there’s a hidden (potentially non-conscious) exploitative intent to the person’s communication style, one that has a distortionary effect on susceptible people.
A person fanatically committed to dominating others may not be subtle about it. If you have the sense that a person is just trying to dominate you, you may be intimidated, but you don’t necessarily think “Oh this person is the kindest and most misunderstood person I’ve ever met, I better do everything possible to help them, OMG they are so good.” Or, alternatively, you don’t think “OMG this person seems so smart, perhaps misunderstood in some way, but they’ve got everything figured out and I can learn so much from them.”
As for disagreeable people: They would be disagreeable in almost all contexts. Frame controllers, by contrast, can seem very agreeable in contexts where it makes them look good, but disagreeable in contexts where it helps to erode your confidence, or where they know that your social standing is now small enough that they can allow themselves to be disagreeable towards you.
FWIW, I share others’ impression that some of the OP’s wording is unfortunate in that it lumps together signs of disagreeableness with frame control. In my experience, there’s something extremely genuine about certain highly disagreeable people. They say what they think, even if it doesn’t make them friends. As Anna said in a comment (I’m paraphrasing), disagreeableness can be a costly signal that someone has integrity. If you’re always disagreeable, it means you’re not exerting a lot of effort on subtle social cognition that can be used for “playing the audience.”
It’s often a massive red flag about someone’s character when you see them only be disagreeable towards people they consider “unimportant” or people they’re trying to exert influence over.
FWIW, I share others’ impression that some of the OP’s wording is unfortunate in that it lumps together signs of disagreeableness with frame control.
It seems to me quite ironic that OP lumps together disagreeableness with abusive behavior, given that a disagreeable personality and interaction style is precisely the best antidote to the described abusive behavior. (A cynical, paranoid person might accuse Aella of attempting to engage in what she calls “frame control” herself, and pre-emptively disarming opposition by adding, to an otherwise accurate description of certain abusive behaviors, characteristics that match exactly the people most likely to resist the rest of the sort of thing she describes…)
A non-conscious intent? What on earth does this mean?
This sort of idea seems to me like “let’s psychoanalyze people we don’t like to paint them in a bad light—and in such a way that they’re incapable of defending themselves”. It’s thoroughly toxic, and corrosive to productive or even remotely sane interaction.
If you have the sense that a person is just trying to dominate you, you may be intimidated, but you don’t necessarily think “Oh this person is the kindest and most misunderstood person I’ve ever met, I better do everything possible to help them, OMG they are so good.” Or, alternatively, you don’t think “OMG this person seems so smart, perhaps misunderstood in some way, but they’ve got everything figured out and I can learn so much from them.”
My view is that if you ever find yourself thinking any such thing, immediately stop and remind yourself not to put people on pedestals. Don’t do everything possible to help someone you just met, and don’t conclude that someone’s “got everything figured out” and that you can “learn so much from them”. Just, in general—don’t. This is orthogonal to anyone’s intent or what have you; it’s just a bad idea to approach interpersonal interaction in this way, and it will predictably lead you into bad situations, and generally cause you problems.
There’s a literature on self-deception and hypocrisy in humans that I’m sure you’re aware of. By “non-conscious intent,” which I admit is a confusing/poor phrasing, I wanted to point to that cluster of things. I used the word “intent” because I meant to say that there’s some kind of optimization at work here (but again, “intent” is poor phrasing). Frame control, the way I think of it, looks like agentic behavior with a goal of gaining influence over the person in question. The optimization at work could be something evolution installed or something that people simply learned has desired effects, without necessarily understanding why it has those effects. (E.g., if “playing the victim” gives you lots of sympathy and attention, you may start to do this more often whether or not you’re explicitly aware that the situation isn’t black and white in terms of you being the victim.)
For instance, someone may feel extreme shame whenever they’re criticized, so their first instinct when criticized is to get outraged at the person who dares to bring something up, calling them out and trying to shame them, etc. Against certain susceptible people, that strategy works in that it makes them feel bad for bringing up criticism. But the person being criticized may not be thinking through these implications explicitly, instead, they’re (here) primarily experiencing shame and turn that into reactive rage. (This is more of the vulnerable narcissism phenotype. In other instances, the frame distortion happens more because someone seems immune to criticism because their regard of the other person is so low that they believe the only reason they’re being criticized is because others are jelous and/or too flawed to see their greatness.)
My view is that if you ever find yourself thinking any such thing, immediately stop and remind yourself not to put people on pedestals. Don’t do everything possible to help someone you just met, and don’t conclude that someone’s “got everything figured out” and that you can “learn so much from them”. Just, in general—don’t. This is orthogonal to anyone’s intent or what have you; it’s just a bad idea to approach interpersonal interaction in this way, and it will predictably lead you into bad situations, and generally cause you problems.
I agree this is good advice. But to some degree, and for people who are very agreeable by disposition, it can feel really nice to try to help someone a lot or think very highly of them. Still, you’re right: I think the people susceptible to frame distortion tend to have low self-esteem (or something related, I think “self-esteem” is a complicated concept and maybe not unidimensional) and are too prone to seeing themselves as in the wrong. (Or, in three-party interactions, the people who most easily buy into someone’s frame control, thinking that the abuser is actually the victim, are people who are highly empathetic, but insufficiently cynical.)
A non-conscious intent? What on earth does this mean?
A brain can run computations optimizing for an outcome without running the additional computations needed to represent this optimization target to itself in explicit self-models available to reflective cognition.
Robin Hanson’s developed extensive, detailed sociological models that include this component. I think that the entire Overcoming Bias archives, not just Eliezer’s Sequences, ought to be canonical here, both because of their intellectual merit and because most of the Sequences were originally written on the Overcoming Bias blog in dialogue with Robin and his other co-bloggers there. A Theory of Identity seems particularly relevant here, and develops a directly relevant claim:
Our conscious minds are the public relations department of our larger minds, presenting and managing a story of ourselves to others.
This phenomenological account of frame control doesn’t provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question someone would be trying to answer when asking “is this person doing frame control?” aside from noticing which of the features of “frame control” they satisfy.
But I think the claim the post makes goes further than that. It’s not just that people who do frame control thing #5 are more likely to do frame control thing #13, it’s also that both may be in service of common goals. The post doesn’t make it explicit what those goals are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. (And they can exist even in cases where frame control is applied subconsciously.)
This reply would be more interesting if it engaged with the last two paragraphs of my comment, in which I tried to develop a relevant causal hypothesis.
This phenomenological account of frame control doesn’t provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question someone would be trying to answer when asking “is this person doing frame control?” aside from noticing which of the features of “frame control” they satisfy.
Some of the “red flags” seem like they could equally well point to someone fanatically committed to totally dominating others, or someone whose perspective responds to evidence but not social pressure, and many of the signs that someone is not a “frame controller” seem like the opposite. From the description of the first red flag:
These are signs of submission, as is the description of the first sign that someone isn’t “doing frame control”:
This resembles a pattern I see across many contexts where the idea of listening to someone because they have something to say is replaced with the submissive behavior of believing someone out of loyalty. I don’t mean to say anything about your intent here, just to point out the general pattern, so we have a better chance of doing something else instead.
Second red flag:
In general I would expect people whose beliefs are more responsive to valid evidence to have an easier time acting to produce the consequences they want. In environments that allocate credit straightforwardly I would also expect them to be more respected, entrusted with more resources, and have their concerns about others listened to more. In perverse environments I would expect the opposite.
The other red flags and opposite signs seem more ground-truth-oriented if I take them literally, as long as we don’t skip the step of investigating whether what the other person is saying is false or true. For instance, reframing “harm” as “beneficial” is helpful if I start out by mistakenly think that my discomfort confronting a criticism is a sign that the criticism is hurting me, but harmful if I’m being trained to treat the grinding-my-gears feeling of endorsing an incoherent narrative as a sign of healthy spiritual challenge.
If you can evaluate directly whether someone has more of a tendency to introduce errors or to correct them, then you can additionally judge whether they are introducing errors in a way calculated to make error-correction harder, to make themselves more central, and to make you more responsive to their commands. If they’re just giving commands and not making claims, then you can skip the first step and just see whether you think their commands are making you better off. In either case, it can help a lot to check whether you are behaving as though the other person is threatening you, whether they are behaving in a way optimized to produce that impression, and whether on reflection you believe that the threats are credible.
If you can’t evaluate that, then you’re in a more confusing situation. It can often be a good idea to switch contexts and see if things seem clear when outside that particular social field. If not, then you’re stuck, and at best you can decide which interactions seem to give you the best chance of achieving autonomy.
Appreciating you pointing out via those first two quotes that some of these dimensions are pointing at someone being submissive rather than sovereign+respectful (not attached to these words).
Feels weird that I missed that when I was reading the draft, actually. Bullet points 2-5 of the “someone isn’t doing frame control” list still seem solid to me. On reflection, I actually think bullet 1 is actually completely misleading, because someone frame controlling can also do a bunch of these things, particularly if they have a victim energy as in Raemon’s comment.
This also feels off:
I might try to steelman it as:
I stand by the thing I was trying to communicate in point 1, though I might have communicated poorly. I have met many people who are well established, very smart, who are not socially submissive, who still make the little moves that demonstrate vulnerability. I think Eliezer does this, for example.
I feel like I understand aella’s points, but obviously it’s possible that I think of something slightly different. In any case, I’d answer this as follows:
The additional question is whether there’s a hidden (potentially non-conscious) exploitative intent to the person’s communication style, one that has a distortionary effect on susceptible people.
A person fanatically committed to dominating others may not be subtle about it. If you have the sense that a person is just trying to dominate you, you may be intimidated, but you don’t necessarily think “Oh this person is the kindest and most misunderstood person I’ve ever met, I better do everything possible to help them, OMG they are so good.” Or, alternatively, you don’t think “OMG this person seems so smart, perhaps misunderstood in some way, but they’ve got everything figured out and I can learn so much from them.”
As for disagreeable people: They would be disagreeable in almost all contexts. Frame controllers, by contrast, can seem very agreeable in contexts where it makes them look good, but disagreeable in contexts where it helps to erode your confidence, or where they know that your social standing is now small enough that they can allow themselves to be disagreeable towards you.
FWIW, I share others’ impression that some of the OP’s wording is unfortunate in that it lumps together signs of disagreeableness with frame control. In my experience, there’s something extremely genuine about certain highly disagreeable people. They say what they think, even if it doesn’t make them friends. As Anna said in a comment (I’m paraphrasing), disagreeableness can be a costly signal that someone has integrity. If you’re always disagreeable, it means you’re not exerting a lot of effort on subtle social cognition that can be used for “playing the audience.”
It’s often a massive red flag about someone’s character when you see them only be disagreeable towards people they consider “unimportant” or people they’re trying to exert influence over.
It seems to me quite ironic that OP lumps together disagreeableness with abusive behavior, given that a disagreeable personality and interaction style is precisely the best antidote to the described abusive behavior. (A cynical, paranoid person might accuse Aella of attempting to engage in what she calls “frame control” herself, and pre-emptively disarming opposition by adding, to an otherwise accurate description of certain abusive behaviors, characteristics that match exactly the people most likely to resist the rest of the sort of thing she describes…)
Sorry, what?
A non-conscious intent? What on earth does this mean?
This sort of idea seems to me like “let’s psychoanalyze people we don’t like to paint them in a bad light—and in such a way that they’re incapable of defending themselves”. It’s thoroughly toxic, and corrosive to productive or even remotely sane interaction.
My view is that if you ever find yourself thinking any such thing, immediately stop and remind yourself not to put people on pedestals. Don’t do everything possible to help someone you just met, and don’t conclude that someone’s “got everything figured out” and that you can “learn so much from them”. Just, in general—don’t. This is orthogonal to anyone’s intent or what have you; it’s just a bad idea to approach interpersonal interaction in this way, and it will predictably lead you into bad situations, and generally cause you problems.
There’s a literature on self-deception and hypocrisy in humans that I’m sure you’re aware of. By “non-conscious intent,” which I admit is a confusing/poor phrasing, I wanted to point to that cluster of things.
I used the word “intent” because I meant to say that there’s some kind of optimization at work here (but again, “intent” is poor phrasing). Frame control, the way I think of it, looks like agentic behavior with a goal of gaining influence over the person in question. The optimization at work could be something evolution installed or something that people simply learned has desired effects, without necessarily understanding why it has those effects. (E.g., if “playing the victim” gives you lots of sympathy and attention, you may start to do this more often whether or not you’re explicitly aware that the situation isn’t black and white in terms of you being the victim.)
For instance, someone may feel extreme shame whenever they’re criticized, so their first instinct when criticized is to get outraged at the person who dares to bring something up, calling them out and trying to shame them, etc. Against certain susceptible people, that strategy works in that it makes them feel bad for bringing up criticism. But the person being criticized may not be thinking through these implications explicitly, instead, they’re (here) primarily experiencing shame and turn that into reactive rage. (This is more of the vulnerable narcissism phenotype. In other instances, the frame distortion happens more because someone seems immune to criticism because their regard of the other person is so low that they believe the only reason they’re being criticized is because others are jelous and/or too flawed to see their greatness.)
I agree this is good advice. But to some degree, and for people who are very agreeable by disposition, it can feel really nice to try to help someone a lot or think very highly of them. Still, you’re right: I think the people susceptible to frame distortion tend to have low self-esteem (or something related, I think “self-esteem” is a complicated concept and maybe not unidimensional) and are too prone to seeing themselves as in the wrong. (Or, in three-party interactions, the people who most easily buy into someone’s frame control, thinking that the abuser is actually the victim, are people who are highly empathetic, but insufficiently cynical.)
A brain can run computations optimizing for an outcome without running the additional computations needed to represent this optimization target to itself in explicit self-models available to reflective cognition.
Robin Hanson’s developed extensive, detailed sociological models that include this component. I think that the entire Overcoming Bias archives, not just Eliezer’s Sequences, ought to be canonical here, both because of their intellectual merit and because most of the Sequences were originally written on the Overcoming Bias blog in dialogue with Robin and his other co-bloggers there. A Theory of Identity seems particularly relevant here, and develops a directly relevant claim:
For one, “frame control” may draw a boundary around an empirical cluster in thingspace, in which case the question they would get evidence for is “are they also doing the other things in this cluster”?
But I think the claim the post makes goes further than that. It’s not just that people who do frame control thing #5 are more likely to do frame control thing #13, it’s also that both may be in service of common goals. The post doesn’t make it explicit what those goals are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. (And they can exist even in cases where frame control is applied subconsciously.)
This reply would be more interesting if it engaged with the last two paragraphs of my comment, in which I tried to develop a relevant causal hypothesis.