I agree with most of this post, but do want to provide a stronger defense of at least a subtype of tone arguments that I think are important (I think those are not the most frequently deployed type of tone arguments, but they are of a type that I think are important to allow people to make).
Tone arguments are practically always in bad faith. They aren’t made by people trying to help an idea be transmitted to and internalized by more others.
To give a very extreme example of the type I am thinking about: Recently I was at an event where I was talking with two of my friends about some big picture stuff in a pretty high context conversation. We were interrupted by another person at the event who walked into the middle of our conversation, said “Fuck You” to me, then stared at me aggressively for about 10 seconds, then insulted me and then said “look, the fact that you can’t even defend yourself with a straight face makes it obvious that what I am saying is right”, then turned to my friends and explained loudly how I was a horrible person, and left a final “fuck you” before walking away.
The whole interaction left me quite terrified. I managed to keep my composure, but I felt pretty close to tears afterwards, had my adrenaline pumping and it took me about half an hour to calm down and be able to properly think clearly again. I think my friends had an even worse experience.
I actually think some of the way the person insulted me were relatively on point and I think reflected some valid criticisms of at least some of my past actions. I nevertheless was completely unable to respond and would have much preferred this interaction to not have taken place. I think it is really important that I can somehow avoid being in that kind of situation.
I usually really don’t care about tone, but I do think there are certain choices of tone that imply threats or that almost directly hook into parts of my brain that make it very hard to think (the statement of “the fact that you can’t even defend yourself with a straight face makes it obvious that I am right” is one of those for me). I think a lot of this is mitigated by text-based conversations, but far from all of it. In particular, if someone threatens some form of serious violence, or insinuates violence, which is often dependent on tone, then I do think it’s reasonable to use tone as real evidence about the other person’s intention, or (more rarely) intervene on tone if someone tries intentionally use tone to invoke a sense of threat.
Obviously the ability for people to threaten each other is much greater in person, and it’s much easier to directly inflict costs on the other person by interrupting or screaming or hitting someone, but I think many forms of violent threat are still available in text-based communication, and often communicated via tone. I think long-lasting, mostly anonymous online communities tend to learn that most forms of threatening-sounding language don’t tend to correspond to actual threats (any long-term user of 4chan will be quite robust to threatening sounding language), but I think for most people using insinuated threats is a quite reliable way to manipulate and control them, making it an actually powerful weapon that I have definitely seen used intentionally.
I think there is a subtype of tone arguments that is something like “you are threatening to hurt me without saying so directly, because saying so directly would be an obvious norm violation”, which I think is actually important. I don’t know whether it’s ever really a good choice to make that argument explicitly (since that argument can easily be abused), or whether it’s usually just better to disengage, but I don’t want to rule out that it’s never a good idea to make it explicitly.
I think the most common form of violence that I see being threatened in online forums is “I will get the audience to hate and attack you by tearing you apart in public”. I think in an environment where the audience is full of careful thinkers this can be a fine generalizable strategy, if the audience has enough discernment to make this a highly truth-asymmetric weapon. But in most online environments there are quite predictable and abusable way to cause the audience to get angry at someone, which mostly makes this a weapon that can be wielded without much relation to accuracy of the participant’s opinions (not fully uncorrelated, but not correlated enough to avoid abuse).
Wielding the audience this way is often done via the choice of a specific type of tone and rhetorical style, and so arguing against that kind of tone in public environments also strikes me as the correct choice under certain circumstances.
I think on LessWrong, we are much closer to the “the audience is full of careful thinkers so your ability to cause your enemy to be torn apart is actually correlated to the truth” side of the spectrum, which I think is why I tend to have a much higher tolerance for certain tones on LessWrong than in other places. But I think it’s still not perfect. LessWrong is still a public forum, and I think there are still rhetorical styles that I expect to at least sometimes (but still with predictable direction) cause parts of the audience to attack the person against whom the rhetoric is wielded, without good justification.
People on LessWrong do however tend to have the patience to listen to good meta-level arguments about threats and against the use of violence in general, but that requires the ability for tone to be a valid subject of discussion at all, which is why I want to make sure that this post doesn’t move tone completely out of the overton window.
This line of thought caused me to think that it might be quite valuable to have some kind of “conversation escrow” that allows people to have conversation in private that still reliably get published. As an example, you could imagine a feature on LessWrong to invite someone to a private comment-thread. The whole thread happens in private, and is scheduled to be published a week after the last comment in the thread was made, unless any of the participants presses a veto button if they feel that the eventual-public nature of the conversation was wielded against them during the conversation. I don’t know how many conversations would end up being published, but it feels like potentially worth a try that avoids many of the error modes I am worried about with more direct public conversation.
[EDIT: see the comment thread with Wei Dai, I don’t endorse the policing/argument terms as stated in this comment]
I agree that tone policing is not always bad. In particular, enforcement of norms that improve collective epistemology or protect people from violence is justified. And, tone can be epistemically misleading or (as you point out) constitute an implicit threat of violence. (Though, note that threats to people’s feelings are not necessarily threats of violence, and also that threats to reputation are not necessarily threats of violence; though, threats to lie about reputation-relevant information are concerning even when not violent). (Note also, different norms are appropriate for different spaces, it’s fine to have e.g. parties where people are supposed to validate each other’s feelings)
Tone arguments are bad because they claim to be “helping you get more people to listen to you” in a way that doesn’t take responsibility for, right then and there, not listening, in a way decision-theoretically correlated with the “other people”. (That isn’t what happened in the example you described)
I agree that people threatening mob violence is generally a bad thing in discourse. (Threats of mob violence aren’t arguments, they’re… threats) Such threats used in the place of arguments are a form of sophistry.
It’s confusing that “tone argument” (in the OP) links to a Wikipedia article on “tone policing”, if they’re not supposed to be the same thing.
What is the actual relationship between tone arguments and tone policing? In the OP you wrote:
A tone argument criticizes an argument not for being incorrect, but for having the wrong tone.
From this it seems that tone arguments is the subset of tone policing that is aimed at arguments (as opposed to other forms of speech). But couldn’t an argument constitute an implicit threat of violence, and therefore tone arguments could be good sometimes?
It seems like to address habryka’s criticism, you’re now redefining (or clarifying) “tone argument” to be a subset of the subset of tone policing that is aimed at arguments, namely where the aim of the policing is specifically claimed to be “helping you get more people to listen to you”. If that’s the case, it seems good to be explicit about the redefinition/clarification to avoid confusing people even further.
On reflection, I don’t think the online discourse makes the same distinction I made in the parent comment, and I also don’t think there is a clean distinction, so I retract the words for this distinction, although I think the distinction I pointed to is useful.
Tone arguments, in the broad sense, criticize arguments for their tone, not their content (as I wrote in the post).
More narrowly, tone arguments claim something like “more people would listen to you if you were more polite”. This is a subset of “broad” tone arguments.
The Geek Feminism article on tone arguments (which, I was reluctant to link to for obvious political reasons) says:
A tone argument is an argument used in discussions, sometimes by concern trolls and sometimes as a derailment tactic, where it is suggested that feminists would be more successful if only they expressed themselves in a more pleasant tone. This is also sometimes described as catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, a particular variant of the tone argument. The tone argument also manifests itself where arguments produced in an angry tone are dismissed irrespective of the legitimacy of the argument; this is also known as tone policing.
Which is making something like the policing vs. argument distinction I made in the parent comment. But, the distinction isn’t made clear in this paragraph (and, certainly, tone arguments don’t only apply to feminism).
Saying “fuck you” and waiting ten seconds? There’s a good chance they were trying to bait you into a reportable offense. That said, you should’ve used more courage in the moment, and your “friends” should’ve backed you up. If you find yourself in that situation again, try saying “no you” and improvise from there.
If you find yourself in that situation again, try saying “no you” and improvise from there.
Why take the risk of this escalating into a seriously negative sum outcome? I can imagine the risk being worth it for someone who needs to constantly show others that they can “handle themselves” and won’t easily back down from perceived threats and slights. But presumably habryka is not in that kind of social circumstances, so I don’t understand your reasoning here.
Why take the risk of this escalating into a seriously negative sum outcome?
Because if someone does that to you (walking up to you and insulting you to your face, apropos of nothing), then the value to them of the situation’s outcome no longer matters to you—or shouldn’t, anyway; this person does not deserve that, not by a long shot.
And so the “negative sum” consideration is irrelevant. There’s no “sum” to consider, only the value to you. And to you, the situation is already strongly negative.
Now, it is possible that you could make it more negative, for yourself. Possible… but not likely. And even if you do, if you simultaneously succeed at making it much more negative for your opponent, you have nonetheless improved your own outcome (for what I hope are obvious game-theoretic reasons).
Aren’t you, after all, simply asking “why retaliate against attacks, even when doing so is not required to stop that particular attack”? All I can say to that is “read Schelling”…
It would have very likely made it a lot more negative to myself. I expect that would have escalated the situation and would have prolonged the whole thing for at least twice as long.
Generally I am in favor of punishing things like this, but it seems much better for that punishment to not happen via conflict escalation, but via other more systematic ways of punishment.
Because if someone does that to you (walking up to you and insulting you to your face, apropos of nothing), then the value to them of the situation’s outcome no longer matters to you—or shouldn’t, anyway; this person does not deserve that, not by a long shot.
I disagree with the morality that is implied by this statement. (It’s a really small part of my moral parliament.)
And to you, the situation is already strongly negative.
There may be some value difference here between you and I, in that you may consider being insulted to have a strongly negative terminal value?
Now, it is possible that you could make it more negative, for yourself. Possible… but not likely.
If the situation escalated, I might get injured or arrested or be less likely to be invited to future parties, or that person might develop a vendetta against me and cause more substantial harm to me in the future, all of which seem potentially a lot more negative.
And even if you do, if you simultaneously succeed at making it much more negative for your opponent, you have nonetheless improved your own outcome (for what I hope are obvious game-theoretic reasons).
I already addressed this when I wrote “I can imagine the risk being worth it for someone who needs to constantly show others that they can “handle themselves” and won’t easily back down from perceived threats and slights. But presumably habryka is not in that kind of social circumstances, so I don’t understand your reasoning here.”
Aren’t you, after all, simply asking “why retaliate against attacks, even when doing so is not required to stop that particular attack”? All I can say to that is “read Schelling”…
No, I was saying that cost-benefit doesn’t seem to favor retaliating against that particular attack, in the particular way that cousin_it suggested. (Clearly it’s true that some attacks should not be retaliated against, right?)
>> Why take the risk of this escalating into a seriously negative sum outcome?
Because if someone does that to you (walking up to you and insulting you to your face, apropos of nothing), then the value to them of the situation’s outcome no longer matters to you—or shouldn’t, anyway; this person does not deserve that, not by a long shot.
I think I’m with Wei_Dai on this one—insulting me to my face, apropos of nothing, doesn’t change my valuation of them very much. I don’t know the reasons for such, but I presume it’s based on fear or pain and I deeply sympathize with those reasons for unpleasant, unreasoning actions. Part of my reaction is that it’s VERY DIFFICULT to insult me in any way that I won’t just laugh at the absurdity, unless you actually know me and are targeting my personal insecurities.
Only if it’s _NOT_ random and apropos of nothing am I likely to feel that there are strategic advantages to taking a risk now to prevent future occurrences (per your Schelling reference).
Fun tends to be highly personal, for example some people find free soloing fun, and others find it terrifying. Some people enjoy strategy games and others much prefer action games. So it seems surprising that you’d give an unconditional “should have” criticism/advice based on what you think is fun. I mean, you wouldn’t say to someone, “you should not have used safety equipment during that climb.” At most you’d say, “you should try not using safety equipment next time and see if that’s more fun for you.”
It’s not just about thrill-seeking though. A bit of courage can improve quality of life by making you less scared of events that happen, like the event habryka described.
Free soloing is fun for some and not others in large part for reasons like “skill in climbing”, which cannot be expected to hold the same optimal value for different people. Courage, on the other hand, is pretty universally useful, and can help in ways that are not immediately obvious.
It’s not always obvious how things could be better through the exercise of courage for two reasons. First, the application of courage almost inevitably results in an increase of fear (how could it not, since you’re choosing to not flinch away from the fear). If you’re not exceedingly careful, it can be easy to conflate “things got scarier” with “things got objectively worse”. In situations like this, it can often escalate things into explicit threats of violence which are definitely more scary and it can be easy to read “he threatened to fight me” as a turn for the worse. It’s not at all obvious until you follow through that these threats are very very often empty — so often, in fact, that displaying willingness to let things escalate physically can be the safer thing to (at least in my experience it has been).
Secondly, it’s not always clear what one should do with courage. All the courage in the world wouldn’t get me to free solo climb for the same reason it wouldn’t get me to play Russian roulette; it’s just not worth the risk for me. In situations like this, cousin_it suggests responding with “no, you”, but I actually think that’s a mistake. I’d actually advocate doing exactly what habryka did. Say nothing. Don’t back down, of course, but you don’t have to respond and what do you get out of responding other than encouraging that kind of bad behavior? The jerk doesn’t deserve a response.
Of course, it’d be nice to do it with less fear. It’d be nice if instead of seeing fear he sees someone looking at him as if he’s irrelevant and just waiting for him to leave (which is a pretty big punishment, actually, since it makes the aggressor feel foolish for thinking their aggression would have any effect), but that’s an issue of “fear” not “courage”, and you kinda have to accept and run with whatever fear you have since you can’t really address it on the fly.
I wouldn’t say “you should have more courage” both because I don’t see any obvious failure of courage and because you can’t “should” people into courage or out of fear, but I do think courage is an underappreciated virtue to be cultivated, and that the application of courage in cases like these makes life as a whole much more pleasant and less (invisibly and visibly) controlled by fear. This means both holding fast in the moment despite the presence of fear, as well as taking the time to work through your fears in the down time such that you’re more prepared for the next time.
This line of thought caused me to think that it might be quite valuable to have some kind of “conversation escrow” that allows people to have [a] conversation in private that still reliably gets published. As an example, you could imagine a feature on LessWrong to invite someone to a private comment-thread. The whole thread happens in private, and is scheduled to be published a week after the last comment in the thread was made, unless any of the participants presses a veto button...
I’m not sure I understand either the problem or the proposed solution. If there’s a veto button, it’s not reliable publishing, is it? How is this any better or different than having a private exchange via e-mail, Slack, Discord, etc, and then asking the other person, “Do you mind if I publish an excerpt?”
More generally, I’m not sure what kind of problem this tool would solve. Can you name some kinds of conversations that this tool would be used for?
I don’t know how much the tool would help, but it seems like an importantly different expectation where “this will be published, unless someone actively thinks it’d be bad to do so” vs “this is by default private, unless someone actively asks to publish.”
Yeah, this is mostly it. Making things “by default public unless someone objects” feels very different than normal private google docs where asking whether you can make it public feels like a strong ask and quite weird.
I’m not sure there’s a difference. Either you’re asking up front (“Hey, do you mind if I set this timer to auto-publish in a week?”) or you’re asking later (“Hey, we just discussed something that I think would be of interest, do you mind if I publish it?”).
In fact, I think asking after the fact might be easier, because you can point to specific things that were discussed and say, “I’m going to excerpt <x>, <y>, and <z>. Is that okay?”
Agreed. Also, remember that conversations are not always about facts. Oftentimes they are about the relative status of the participants. Something like Nonviolent Communication might seem like tone policing, but through a status lens, it could be seen as a practice where you stop struggling for higher status with your conversation partner and instead treat them compassionately as an equal.
It has been my experience that NVC is used exclusively as a means of making status plays. Perhaps it may be used otherwise, but if so, I have not seen it.
I tend to (or at least try to remember to) draw on NVC a lot in conversation about emotionally fraught topics, but it’s hard for me to recall the specifics of my wording afterwards, and they often include a lot of private context. But here’s an old example which I picked because it happened in a public thread and because I remember being explicitly guided by NVC principles while writing my response.
As context, I had shared a link to an SSC post talking about EA on my Facebook page, and some people were vocally critical of its implicit premises (e.g. utilitarianism). The conversation got a somewhat heated tone and veered into, among other things, the effectiveness of non-EA/non-utilitarian-motivated volunteer work. I ended making some rather critical comments in return, which led to the following exchange:
The other person: Kaj, I also find you to be rather condescending (and probably, privileged) when talking about volunteer work. Perhaps you just don’t realize how large a part volunteers play in doing the work that supposedly belongs to the state, but isn’t being taken care of. And your suggestion that by volunteering you mainly get to feel better about yourself, and then “maybe help some people in the process”, is already heading towards offensive. I have personally seen/been involved in/know of situations where a volunteer literally saved someone’s life, as in, if they weren’t there and didn’t have the training they had, the person would most likely have died. So, what was your personal, verified lives saved per dollar efficiency ratio, again, that allows you to make such dismissive comments?
Me: I’m sorry. I was indeed condescending, and that was wrong of me. I was just getting frustrated because I felt that Scott’s post had a great message about what people could accomplish if they just worked together, which was getting completely lost squabbling over a part of it that was beside the actual point. When I saw you say call lives saved per dollar an absolutely terrible metric, I felt hurt because I felt that the hard and thoughtful work the EA scene has put into evaluating different interventions was being dismissed without being given a fair evaluation. I felt a need to defend them—any myself, since I’m a part of that community—at that point.
I do respect anyone doing volunteer work, especially the kind of volunteer work you’re referring to. When I was writing my comment, I was still thinking of activism primarily in the context of Scott’s original post (and the post of his preceding it), which had been talking about campaigns to (re)post things on Twitter, Tumblr, etc. These are obviously very different campaigns from the kind of work that actually saves lives.
Even then, you are absolutely correct about the fact that my remarks have often unfairly devalued the value of volunteer work. So to set matters straight: anyone who voluntarily works to make other’s lives better has my utmost respect. Society and the people in it would be a lot worse off without such work, and I respect anyone who actually does important life-saving work much more than I respect, say, someone who hangs around in the EA community and talks about pretty things without actually doing much themselves. (I will also admit that I’ve kinda fallen to the latter category every now and then.)
I also admit that the people in the field have a lot of experience which I do not have, and that academic analyses about the value of some intervention have lots of limitations that may cause them to miss out important things. I do still think that systematic, peer-reviewed studies are the way to go if one wishes to find the most effective ways of making a difference, but I do acknowledge that the current level of evidence is not yet strong and that there are also lots of individual gut feelings and value judgement involved in interpreting the data.
I don’t want there to be any us versus them thing going on, with EAs on the one side and traditional volunteers on the other. I would rather have us all be on the same side, where we may disagree on what is the best way to act, but support each other regardless and agree that we have a shared goal in making the world a better place.
(The conversation didn’t proceed anywhere from that, but the other person did “like” my comment.)
Maybe you’re right, I haven’t seen it used much in practice. Feel free to replace “Something like Nonviolent Communication” with “Advice for getting along with people” in that sentence.
I agree with most of this post, but do want to provide a stronger defense of at least a subtype of tone arguments that I think are important (I think those are not the most frequently deployed type of tone arguments, but they are of a type that I think are important to allow people to make).
To give a very extreme example of the type I am thinking about: Recently I was at an event where I was talking with two of my friends about some big picture stuff in a pretty high context conversation. We were interrupted by another person at the event who walked into the middle of our conversation, said “Fuck You” to me, then stared at me aggressively for about 10 seconds, then insulted me and then said “look, the fact that you can’t even defend yourself with a straight face makes it obvious that what I am saying is right”, then turned to my friends and explained loudly how I was a horrible person, and left a final “fuck you” before walking away.
The whole interaction left me quite terrified. I managed to keep my composure, but I felt pretty close to tears afterwards, had my adrenaline pumping and it took me about half an hour to calm down and be able to properly think clearly again. I think my friends had an even worse experience.
I actually think some of the way the person insulted me were relatively on point and I think reflected some valid criticisms of at least some of my past actions. I nevertheless was completely unable to respond and would have much preferred this interaction to not have taken place. I think it is really important that I can somehow avoid being in that kind of situation.
I usually really don’t care about tone, but I do think there are certain choices of tone that imply threats or that almost directly hook into parts of my brain that make it very hard to think (the statement of “the fact that you can’t even defend yourself with a straight face makes it obvious that I am right” is one of those for me). I think a lot of this is mitigated by text-based conversations, but far from all of it. In particular, if someone threatens some form of serious violence, or insinuates violence, which is often dependent on tone, then I do think it’s reasonable to use tone as real evidence about the other person’s intention, or (more rarely) intervene on tone if someone tries intentionally use tone to invoke a sense of threat.
Obviously the ability for people to threaten each other is much greater in person, and it’s much easier to directly inflict costs on the other person by interrupting or screaming or hitting someone, but I think many forms of violent threat are still available in text-based communication, and often communicated via tone. I think long-lasting, mostly anonymous online communities tend to learn that most forms of threatening-sounding language don’t tend to correspond to actual threats (any long-term user of 4chan will be quite robust to threatening sounding language), but I think for most people using insinuated threats is a quite reliable way to manipulate and control them, making it an actually powerful weapon that I have definitely seen used intentionally.
I think there is a subtype of tone arguments that is something like “you are threatening to hurt me without saying so directly, because saying so directly would be an obvious norm violation”, which I think is actually important. I don’t know whether it’s ever really a good choice to make that argument explicitly (since that argument can easily be abused), or whether it’s usually just better to disengage, but I don’t want to rule out that it’s never a good idea to make it explicitly.
I think the most common form of violence that I see being threatened in online forums is “I will get the audience to hate and attack you by tearing you apart in public”. I think in an environment where the audience is full of careful thinkers this can be a fine generalizable strategy, if the audience has enough discernment to make this a highly truth-asymmetric weapon. But in most online environments there are quite predictable and abusable way to cause the audience to get angry at someone, which mostly makes this a weapon that can be wielded without much relation to accuracy of the participant’s opinions (not fully uncorrelated, but not correlated enough to avoid abuse).
Wielding the audience this way is often done via the choice of a specific type of tone and rhetorical style, and so arguing against that kind of tone in public environments also strikes me as the correct choice under certain circumstances.
I think on LessWrong, we are much closer to the “the audience is full of careful thinkers so your ability to cause your enemy to be torn apart is actually correlated to the truth” side of the spectrum, which I think is why I tend to have a much higher tolerance for certain tones on LessWrong than in other places. But I think it’s still not perfect. LessWrong is still a public forum, and I think there are still rhetorical styles that I expect to at least sometimes (but still with predictable direction) cause parts of the audience to attack the person against whom the rhetoric is wielded, without good justification.
People on LessWrong do however tend to have the patience to listen to good meta-level arguments about threats and against the use of violence in general, but that requires the ability for tone to be a valid subject of discussion at all, which is why I want to make sure that this post doesn’t move tone completely out of the overton window.
This line of thought caused me to think that it might be quite valuable to have some kind of “conversation escrow” that allows people to have conversation in private that still reliably get published. As an example, you could imagine a feature on LessWrong to invite someone to a private comment-thread. The whole thread happens in private, and is scheduled to be published a week after the last comment in the thread was made, unless any of the participants presses a veto button if they feel that the eventual-public nature of the conversation was wielded against them during the conversation. I don’t know how many conversations would end up being published, but it feels like potentially worth a try that avoids many of the error modes I am worried about with more direct public conversation.
[EDIT: see the comment thread with Wei Dai, I don’t endorse the policing/argument terms as stated in this comment]
I agree that tone policing is not always bad. In particular, enforcement of norms that improve collective epistemology or protect people from violence is justified. And, tone can be epistemically misleading or (as you point out) constitute an implicit threat of violence. (Though, note that threats to people’s feelings are not necessarily threats of violence, and also that threats to reputation are not necessarily threats of violence; though, threats to lie about reputation-relevant information are concerning even when not violent). (Note also, different norms are appropriate for different spaces, it’s fine to have e.g. parties where people are supposed to validate each other’s feelings)
Tone arguments are bad because they claim to be “helping you get more people to listen to you” in a way that doesn’t take responsibility for, right then and there, not listening, in a way decision-theoretically correlated with the “other people”. (That isn’t what happened in the example you described)
I agree that people threatening mob violence is generally a bad thing in discourse. (Threats of mob violence aren’t arguments, they’re… threats) Such threats used in the place of arguments are a form of sophistry.
It’s confusing that “tone argument” (in the OP) links to a Wikipedia article on “tone policing”, if they’re not supposed to be the same thing.
What is the actual relationship between tone arguments and tone policing? In the OP you wrote:
From this it seems that tone arguments is the subset of tone policing that is aimed at arguments (as opposed to other forms of speech). But couldn’t an argument constitute an implicit threat of violence, and therefore tone arguments could be good sometimes?
It seems like to address habryka’s criticism, you’re now redefining (or clarifying) “tone argument” to be a subset of the subset of tone policing that is aimed at arguments, namely where the aim of the policing is specifically claimed to be “helping you get more people to listen to you”. If that’s the case, it seems good to be explicit about the redefinition/clarification to avoid confusing people even further.
On reflection, I don’t think the online discourse makes the same distinction I made in the parent comment, and I also don’t think there is a clean distinction, so I retract the words for this distinction, although I think the distinction I pointed to is useful.
Tone arguments, in the broad sense, criticize arguments for their tone, not their content (as I wrote in the post).
More narrowly, tone arguments claim something like “more people would listen to you if you were more polite”. This is a subset of “broad” tone arguments.
The Geek Feminism article on tone arguments (which, I was reluctant to link to for obvious political reasons) says:
Which is making something like the policing vs. argument distinction I made in the parent comment. But, the distinction isn’t made clear in this paragraph (and, certainly, tone arguments don’t only apply to feminism).
Saying “fuck you” and waiting ten seconds? There’s a good chance they were trying to bait you into a reportable offense. That said, you should’ve used more courage in the moment, and your “friends” should’ve backed you up. If you find yourself in that situation again, try saying “no you” and improvise from there.
Why take the risk of this escalating into a seriously negative sum outcome? I can imagine the risk being worth it for someone who needs to constantly show others that they can “handle themselves” and won’t easily back down from perceived threats and slights. But presumably habryka is not in that kind of social circumstances, so I don’t understand your reasoning here.
Because if someone does that to you (walking up to you and insulting you to your face, apropos of nothing), then the value to them of the situation’s outcome no longer matters to you—or shouldn’t, anyway; this person does not deserve that, not by a long shot.
And so the “negative sum” consideration is irrelevant. There’s no “sum” to consider, only the value to you. And to you, the situation is already strongly negative.
Now, it is possible that you could make it more negative, for yourself. Possible… but not likely. And even if you do, if you simultaneously succeed at making it much more negative for your opponent, you have nonetheless improved your own outcome (for what I hope are obvious game-theoretic reasons).
Aren’t you, after all, simply asking “why retaliate against attacks, even when doing so is not required to stop that particular attack”? All I can say to that is “read Schelling”…
It would have very likely made it a lot more negative to myself. I expect that would have escalated the situation and would have prolonged the whole thing for at least twice as long.
Generally I am in favor of punishing things like this, but it seems much better for that punishment to not happen via conflict escalation, but via other more systematic ways of punishment.
I disagree with the morality that is implied by this statement. (It’s a really small part of my moral parliament.)
There may be some value difference here between you and I, in that you may consider being insulted to have a strongly negative terminal value?
If the situation escalated, I might get injured or arrested or be less likely to be invited to future parties, or that person might develop a vendetta against me and cause more substantial harm to me in the future, all of which seem potentially a lot more negative.
I already addressed this when I wrote “I can imagine the risk being worth it for someone who needs to constantly show others that they can “handle themselves” and won’t easily back down from perceived threats and slights. But presumably habryka is not in that kind of social circumstances, so I don’t understand your reasoning here.”
No, I was saying that cost-benefit doesn’t seem to favor retaliating against that particular attack, in the particular way that cousin_it suggested. (Clearly it’s true that some attacks should not be retaliated against, right?)
>> Why take the risk of this escalating into a seriously negative sum outcome?
I think I’m with Wei_Dai on this one—insulting me to my face, apropos of nothing, doesn’t change my valuation of them very much. I don’t know the reasons for such, but I presume it’s based on fear or pain and I deeply sympathize with those reasons for unpleasant, unreasoning actions. Part of my reaction is that it’s VERY DIFFICULT to insult me in any way that I won’t just laugh at the absurdity, unless you actually know me and are targeting my personal insecurities.
Only if it’s _NOT_ random and apropos of nothing am I likely to feel that there are strategic advantages to taking a risk now to prevent future occurrences (per your Schelling reference).
I think living with courage and dignity is more fun in any social circumstances.
Fun tends to be highly personal, for example some people find free soloing fun, and others find it terrifying. Some people enjoy strategy games and others much prefer action games. So it seems surprising that you’d give an unconditional “should have” criticism/advice based on what you think is fun. I mean, you wouldn’t say to someone, “you should not have used safety equipment during that climb.” At most you’d say, “you should try not using safety equipment next time and see if that’s more fun for you.”
It’s not just about thrill-seeking though. A bit of courage can improve quality of life by making you less scared of events that happen, like the event habryka described.
Free soloing is fun for some and not others in large part for reasons like “skill in climbing”, which cannot be expected to hold the same optimal value for different people. Courage, on the other hand, is pretty universally useful, and can help in ways that are not immediately obvious.
It’s not always obvious how things could be better through the exercise of courage for two reasons. First, the application of courage almost inevitably results in an increase of fear (how could it not, since you’re choosing to not flinch away from the fear). If you’re not exceedingly careful, it can be easy to conflate “things got scarier” with “things got objectively worse”. In situations like this, it can often escalate things into explicit threats of violence which are definitely more scary and it can be easy to read “he threatened to fight me” as a turn for the worse. It’s not at all obvious until you follow through that these threats are very very often empty — so often, in fact, that displaying willingness to let things escalate physically can be the safer thing to (at least in my experience it has been).
Secondly, it’s not always clear what one should do with courage. All the courage in the world wouldn’t get me to free solo climb for the same reason it wouldn’t get me to play Russian roulette; it’s just not worth the risk for me. In situations like this, cousin_it suggests responding with “no, you”, but I actually think that’s a mistake. I’d actually advocate doing exactly what habryka did. Say nothing. Don’t back down, of course, but you don’t have to respond and what do you get out of responding other than encouraging that kind of bad behavior? The jerk doesn’t deserve a response.
Of course, it’d be nice to do it with less fear. It’d be nice if instead of seeing fear he sees someone looking at him as if he’s irrelevant and just waiting for him to leave (which is a pretty big punishment, actually, since it makes the aggressor feel foolish for thinking their aggression would have any effect), but that’s an issue of “fear” not “courage”, and you kinda have to accept and run with whatever fear you have since you can’t really address it on the fly.
I wouldn’t say “you should have more courage” both because I don’t see any obvious failure of courage and because you can’t “should” people into courage or out of fear, but I do think courage is an underappreciated virtue to be cultivated, and that the application of courage in cases like these makes life as a whole much more pleasant and less (invisibly and visibly) controlled by fear. This means both holding fast in the moment despite the presence of fear, as well as taking the time to work through your fears in the down time such that you’re more prepared for the next time.
I’m not sure I understand either the problem or the proposed solution. If there’s a veto button, it’s not reliable publishing, is it? How is this any better or different than having a private exchange via e-mail, Slack, Discord, etc, and then asking the other person, “Do you mind if I publish an excerpt?”
More generally, I’m not sure what kind of problem this tool would solve. Can you name some kinds of conversations that this tool would be used for?
I don’t know how much the tool would help, but it seems like an importantly different expectation where “this will be published, unless someone actively thinks it’d be bad to do so” vs “this is by default private, unless someone actively asks to publish.”
Yeah, this is mostly it. Making things “by default public unless someone objects” feels very different than normal private google docs where asking whether you can make it public feels like a strong ask and quite weird.
I’m not sure there’s a difference. Either you’re asking up front (“Hey, do you mind if I set this timer to auto-publish in a week?”) or you’re asking later (“Hey, we just discussed something that I think would be of interest, do you mind if I publish it?”).
In fact, I think asking after the fact might be easier, because you can point to specific things that were discussed and say, “I’m going to excerpt <x>, <y>, and <z>. Is that okay?”
Agreed. Also, remember that conversations are not always about facts. Oftentimes they are about the relative status of the participants. Something like Nonviolent Communication might seem like tone policing, but through a status lens, it could be seen as a practice where you stop struggling for higher status with your conversation partner and instead treat them compassionately as an equal.
It has been my experience that NVC is used exclusively as a means of making status plays. Perhaps it may be used otherwise, but if so, I have not seen it.
I think NVC has the thing where, if it’s used well, it’s subtle enough that you don’t necessarily recognize it as NVC.
Do you have any examples of this?
I tend to (or at least try to remember to) draw on NVC a lot in conversation about emotionally fraught topics, but it’s hard for me to recall the specifics of my wording afterwards, and they often include a lot of private context. But here’s an old example which I picked because it happened in a public thread and because I remember being explicitly guided by NVC principles while writing my response.
As context, I had shared a link to an SSC post talking about EA on my Facebook page, and some people were vocally critical of its implicit premises (e.g. utilitarianism). The conversation got a somewhat heated tone and veered into, among other things, the effectiveness of non-EA/non-utilitarian-motivated volunteer work. I ended making some rather critical comments in return, which led to the following exchange:
(The conversation didn’t proceed anywhere from that, but the other person did “like” my comment.)
Maybe you’re right, I haven’t seen it used much in practice. Feel free to replace “Something like Nonviolent Communication” with “Advice for getting along with people” in that sentence.