I think people feel like they shouldn’t post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else’s argument and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.
While I am personally actively trying to become more warm and friendly in my personal demeanor, and think that nicer comments are, ceteris paribus, more effective comments, I worry about seeking to institute niceness as a terminal rather than instrumental value. If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.
But it does seem like niceness as a terminal value is strongly linked to a more balanced gender ratio. Increased niceness will attract more women, and attracting more women will increase the amount of niceness.
It seems that the current population of LW undervalues niceness relative to the general population, but I can’t tell if that’s necessary or contingent. How would we know?
Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.
One thing that may be on some folks’ mind is that expressions of appreciation that don’t also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely “I’m glad you posted that!” I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don’t know. I think I’d be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don’t endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)
I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing “mere” approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
I agree with your second paragraph completely, and I would be averse to comments whose only content was “niceness”. I’m on LW for intellectual discussions, not for feel-goodism and self-esteem boosts.
I think it’s worth distinguishing niceness from respect here. I define niceness to be actions done with the intention of making someone feel good about him/herself. Respect, on the other hand, is an appreciation for another person’s viewpoint and intelligence. Respect is saying “We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner.”
When I began this comment with “I agree with your second paragraph”, I wasn’t saying it to be nice. I wasn’t trying to give fubarobfusco warm fuzzy happiness-feelings. I was saying it because I respect fubarobfusco’s thoughts on this matter, to the point where I wanted to comment and add my own elaborations to the discussion.
There’s not much purpose to engaging in an intellectual discussion with someone who doesn’t respect your ideas. If they’re not even going to listen to what you have to say, or consider that you might be correct, then what’s the point? So I think respect is integral to intellectual discussions, and therefore it’s worthwhile to demonstrate it verbally in comments. But I consider this completely separate from complimenting people for the sake of being nice.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn’t respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
(For what it’s worth, I’m female, albeit a rather distant outlier. I’d emphatically prefer that “niceness” not become a community norm. For me, it takes a lot of mental effort to be nice to people (because I have to focus on my internal model of their feelings, as well as on the discussion at hand), and I get annoyed when people are gratuitously nice to me. This post makes me wonder if I’m unusual among LW females in holding this opinion.)
Your comment has me wondering whether some folks expect niceness and respect to correlate. I’ve noticed some social contexts where fake niceness seems to be expected to cloak lack of respect. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people around here are embittered from experiences with that.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn’t respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
No kidding.
(And I’m having difficulty responding to the rest of this without using unhelpful words such as “normals” or “mundanes”, so I’ll leave it at that.)
The human brain is fallible. That includes assertions made about internal experiences—such assertions may be wrong. If person A has reason X to believe that the result of person B’s introspection is wrong, which is the more respectful course of action?
person A : person B, your account of your internal experiences may be wrong because of X.
person A : meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.
Person A : Person B, my model predicted Y because of evidence X. But your experience sounds like ~Y, so I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your ~Y experiences!
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
A non-gender example:
Atheist: Pentecostal, my model predicted that people would go home from church feeling bored, guilty, or self-righteous, because former church people I know talk about those experiences, and church people who are active in politics seem to be big on guilt and self-righteousness. But your experience sounds like church is a fun party, that you go home from feeling giddy and high. I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your religious experiences!
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
My communicating my differing perception to the other person in Option 1 is my invitation to have them update me.
Going through the song and dance of your third option is not required with some people, making them more efficient partners at finding the truth. I find people who require constant ego stroking in this manner, or who give it, literally tiresome in an intellectual endeavor.
It seems to me that flat contradiction without any communication of being open to being convinced is a strongly suboptimal invitation to update the speaker. This is especially so in cases of strongly asymmetric information (either direction).
‘Song and dance’ appears to me to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for ‘communicating what you mean’ as opposed to ‘indicating something in the general vein and hoping the receiver figures out what you meant’.
Edited to add: option A is much more reasonable than I credited it, so while I’ll stand by my first paragraph above, it’s not particularly relevant to the post above. And yes, option 3 could be streamlined.
without any communication of being open to being convinced
For me, you can take that I’m open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are. Aren’t you?
dysphemism
Thank you! I’ve been looking for that word forever.
‘Song and dance’ appears to me to be a to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for ‘communicating what you mean’
Not really, because ‘communicating what you mean’ was not what I meant. I was referring to kabuki dance of your ritualized formula for disagreement to stroke a person’s ego so that he doesn’t feel a threat to his status by my disagreeing with him.
I don’t think the fellow is really confused about whether I’m open to being convinced of the error of my ways. If I say “I think you’re wrong because of X”, does not the human impulse to reciprocity sanction and invite him to respond in kind?
Does that fellow really need it explained to him that if I disagree with him on when the bus is coming, that he is free and invited to disagree with me right back? I don’t think so.
He: The bus is coming at 3:00. Me: No, it’s coming at 3:10; that’s when I caught it yesterday. He: But yesterday was Friday. Saturday has a different schedule.
That seems like an everyday, ordinary human conversation to me, that no one should get all excited or offended about.
I strongly suspect that tone and body language are a key component in whether the statement “that’s not right” is interpreted as “I disagree, let’s talk about it” or “shut up and think what I think”.
I further suspect that a tendency to interpret ambiguous or missing subtext in a negative or overly critical way correlates strongly with being “thin-skinned”. This is partly based on having both of these characteristics myself. A potential counter-argument here is that it is not “rational” or useful to always assume the worst in personal interactions if you have evidence to follow instead (Have people generally meant the worst things possible when I have been unsure in the past?), but the important thing to remember here is that we are not dealing with people who have had time to be trained in that way. A martial arts master does not go all out against a beginner knowing that they will one day be able to handle it.
It would be unwise to alienate a group of potential rationalists if there is a relatively simple way to avoid it. If it would cripple the discourse or otherwise be quite detrimental to implement any sort of fix, then I would not advocate that course of action. However, I believe that to not be the case.
At this time, I would like to agree with RichardKennaway’s observation that Plasmon’s option A was quite different from the situation posited by Submitter B, and further agree with his hypothesis that even option A is some sort of improvement (largely due to the word “may”).
My conclusion is that a few changes of word choices would be a low-cost, medium-reward first step in the right direction. This would include using words such as “may”, particularly in the context of someone’s perceived domain of expertise or cherished belief. Also, explicitly starting an evidence based conversation while voicing your disagreement.
Example: I disagree with your statement that “Most civilized people are [open to being convinced]”. As (anecdotal) evidence, I submit the large number of Americans who are closemindedly religious.
For me, you can take that I’m open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are.
If one considers sufficiently impersonal topics like bus schedules? Yes, for the most part.
Microcultures with strong elements of authority will have a much harder time with this assumption, even in horizontal interactions. I would not call all of these uncivilized, though I’m not a fan of them.
It’s not complicated to frame a conversation as a search for truth as opposed to a vs. argument. Many people go overboard in this. I agree that this is obnoxious. I maintain that a flat contradiction is in many cases insufficient, especially in those cases where the matter at hand is contentious or personal, or there is any degree of hostility or unease between the conversants.
Option A wasn’t a flat contradiction only. In fact, the original person wrote it up in a more pussy footing way than I would.
Flat contradiction would be “you’re wrong”. I agree that’s not an invitation to further discussion.
My usual comment would be of the form:
“That’s wrong. Blah di blah isn’t blah di blee, it’s hooty hooty.”
It’s “you’re wrong” plus some evidence on which I based my disagreement. Would that be unclear to you personally, that you’re welcome to disagree and cite evidence for your disagreement in turn?
Maybe we could try an example so that we’re talking about something concrete. I just don’t think it’s a mystery. I think that a great many people get very touchy when it comes to being disagreed with. I’m of another species that likes to be disagreed with, because then we have a contradiction to resolve, and that’s fun and potentially productive.
I’m sorry: for reasons I do not understand, I misunderstood what you were referring to with ‘option A’. Your response made perfect sense and mine did not.
That didn’t seem like an accurate characterization of option A to me, so I gave a concrete example:
Flat contradiction would be “you’re wrong”.
and a concrete example of the option A alternative:
“That’s wrong. Blah di blah isn’t blah di blee, it’s hooty hooty.”
It would have been better to be more concrete.
Was that the issue?
I feel that in these more personal discussions abstract terms gets used, and each side is picturing a very different part of the spectrum for their concretes.
I think it was that I kind of short-circuited ‘option 1’ into meaning ‘the first option mentioned’, and from there ‘what the guy said in the first place’. This is not what you were referring to by ‘option 1’, and even though it’s an understandable error, I still should have been able to pick up on it from the context of the parent and grandparent comment to yours.
My communicating my differing perception to the other person in Option 1 is my invitation to have them update me.
Well, except that you would not be actually stating an invitation or request for more information. You would be assuming that the other person will interpret contradiction as an invitation for further discussion rather than as a dismissal, insult, threat, or other sort of speech act.
(Humans use language for a lot of other purposes besides the merely indicative, after all.)
If you say, “I’m having a party on Saturday,” some people in some situations will take this to mean that you are thereby inviting them to come to the party. Others will think that you are merely stating a fact about your own social life. Still others will think that you are excluding them, just as if you had added, ”… and you’re not invited, you disgusting worm!”
Some people hear an invitation. Some hear a statement of fact. Some hear an exclusionary insult.
If you want to make it clear that you are inviting them, you say, “I’m having a party on Saturday, would you like to come?” or ”… and you’re invited!”
This is not bullshit song-and-dance ego-stroking. It is clear communication, and in particular a way to address people’s differing priors about what your communication could mean. It probably depends on recognizing that people have different priors, and that they arrived at those priors legitimately.
(For that matter, if expressing curiosity about other people’s experiences is an effective way to get data from them, then rationalists should practice doing it a lot until it is automatic and cheap System 1 behavior!)
You would be assuming that the other person will interpret contradiction as an invitation for further discussion rather than as a dismissal, insult, threat, or other sort of speech act.
Yes. In this context, and most contexts, that’s my null hypothesis. Isn’t it yours? People are here to discuss, and not dismiss, insult, or threaten.
Do you think I’m here to dismiss, insult, or threaten people? Do you think a large percentage of people here are? Do you think that anyone who says “you’re wrong” is? That strikes me as a bizarre and thoroughly inaccurate prior. Or I certainly believe and hope it is.
Am I wrong? Is it just foolish innocence on my part to think that people are here to discuss, and not stomp on other people to social climb or satisfy sadistic impulses? It wouldn’t be the first time. In other contexts, yeah, there’s a lot of that going on. And it admittedly took me a long time to figure that out. But I don’t see it here. The trouble is, if it were, most of the people who know aren’t going to tell you.
I was referring more to the comment thread, which is filled with detailed writing in support of sending blunt communication while ignoring that such behaviour ends up losing in practice. If you haven’t actually read that article and its comment thread, you really should.
Losing, in what game? Are you sure EY knows the game everyone is playing? I think he is making implicit assumptions about motivations that are incorrect.
I disagree with his strategic analysis. In some contexts I would consider it correct. Yes, I knuckle under and be what “normal people” want me to be, to avoid the costs of being myself, just as all those normal people are busy being what they think other people want them to be.
But where I can, I seek to escape that mutual cage. Internet forums are a place where escape is possible, because the normals no longer have an overwhelming majority, or might not even have a majority at all, and the cost of anyone’s disapproval online is less.
Dale Carnegie teaches you to be the person other people want you to be; I’d rather find the people who like who I want to be, and want to be who I like.
An anecdote from my dissertation adviser. He was having much the same discussion with me, telling me how professors in Asia were allowed less direct intellectual confrontation. Perhaps EY would be proud.
But the discussion went on to the joy of moving to the US, exemplified by another professor he knew, who responded to someone else in a discussion by gleefully retorting “I Disagree! I Disagree! I Disagree!” Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last! Free to be honest, free to be open, free to be who you are.
I want to sit at the table where they’re dealing that game. It seems like there are enough people of my ilk at this party for us to have a few tables. If the cool kids don’t want to sit at the nerd tables, that’s fine, and hardly anything new.
Yes. In this context, and most contexts, that’s my null hypothesis. Isn’t it yours?
Not really, no. People use language for a hell of a lot of other things besides making statements of fact at each other. I expect that in any given speech act, a speaker may be doing a lot of things: stating facts, affirming or challenging a social relation with the listener, causing the listener to have expectations about the speaker’s future actions (promises, threats, plans, etc.), and so on. And that a lot of these things may be going on unconsciously.
If someone tells you that the way you speak gives the impression that you are arrogantly dismissing them, you could respond by merely instructing them (in the very same tone that they were talking about) that you do not intend to arrogantly dismiss them. However, doing that is not likely to be very convincing!
In your prior for Less Wrong discussions, when someone responds to a statement of yours by saying that you’re wrong, and cites evidence for his claim, what are the probabilities you place on the following potential motivations for his reply—he wants to discuss the point, he is threatening you, he is dismissing you, he is insulting you, other?
Sorry, I should have been more specific — I can tell because you’re asking a question that would only make sense in a different context. My probabilities about whether you intend to be threatening are are not at issue here.
At issue in this thread is that some portion of the audience are not sticking around — and are forming negative conclusions about LW — because the words here come across as hostile, unfriendly, cold, and so on. This is a danger to LW’s goals.
This is a matter of instrumental rationality, not only epistemic rationality. We want to accomplish something with words, not merely possess accurate beliefs in our own solipsistic internal monologues. So we have to ask, are our uses of words accomplishing the goals that we care about?
If you emit sentences that are consistently misinterpreted, and you are informed of this, you have a few options of what to do. You could conclude ① that your audience is listening wrong, and needs to correct their assumptions about you before they will be able to understand you; or ② that you are speaking wrong, and you need to correct your assumptions about your audience before they will be able to understand you.
If you care about getting your meaning across, which of these conclusions is more likely to give you the ability to accomplish that goal? Either one is consistent with the evidence; but which conclusion strengthens you, and which weakens you?
You can’t reach into your audience’s minds and force them to interpret your words differently.
You can’t force them to stick around and listen to you correct their assumptions, either.
You can change the way you speak.
Concluding that you are misinterpreted because your audience is listening wrong, or is coming into the conversation with crazy priors, weakens you. Thinking that way would make you incapable of fixing the situation; less able to accomplish goals by speaking. Concluding that you are misinterpreted because you have misspoken, or failed to understand where your audience is coming from, gives you the power to fix the situation and accomplish goals. This strengthens you.
At issue in this thread is that some portion of the audience are not sticking around — and are forming negative conclusions about LW — because the words here come across as hostile, unfriendly, cold, and so on. This is a danger to LW’s goals.
Well, failing at epistemic rationality because we prioritized PR over truth-seeking is an even bigger danger to LW’s goals.
Maybe I missed it; did you give the same speech about how empowering it is to focus on what you can change about yourself to those who are taking offense at the speech of others? You understand you could have, right?
Concluding that you are misinterpreted because your audience is listening wrong, or is coming into the conversation with crazy priors, weakens you.
Not if it’s true.
If it’s true, knowing the truth strengthens me. Just because I think it’s true, doesn’t mean I can’t choose to adjust my speech to them.
And yes, when someone has a false impression, and wants to have an accurate one, you can often change their minds by offering evidence for them to update on.
Concluding that you are misinterpreted because you have misspoken, or failed to understand where your audience is coming from, gives you the power to fix the situation and accomplish goals. This strengthens you.
And assuming that I’ve mispoken does weaken me. It assumes I can “fix” the situation by speaking differently. Ok, compared to what have I misspoken? Compared to preemptively changing my speech patterns so that those with extremely high priors of hostile intent from me are less likely to take offense? Do I have a better alternative?
As a first cut, I’m better off talking to people who don’t assume hostility from my style of speech, who can talk to me ‘as is’ in a productive manner. Seems to be a number of such people. To the extent that they’re similar to me, they will be annoyed and possibly offended by speech acts which seem aimed at managing their potential hurt feelings over my disagreements with their opinions. But even removing these emotional factors from the equation, my attempts to manage their feelings take time and effort from me, and wastes time and effort for them on issues extraneous to the topic at hand. At best, altering our styles will waste our time, and at worst, annoy the hell out of each other. That’s a cost.
I’m to bear that cost, for what?
To talk to others who find my manner hostile? Should I unilaterally cave to every demand that I change my manner when they say they feel hurt or offended? On a game theoretic basis alone, that seems like a bad idea. I am to be malleable to their preferences. Ok, I willing to look at that.
I have been having discussions on adjusting my speech patterns to avoid impressions of hostility in others. Even came up with an idea that someone thought was a good step forward—say “I disagree” instead of “You’re wrong.”
And them? Are they to be malleable to my preferences? Not that I’ve seen.
Where are the discussions of the “offended or hurt” adjusting their priors to better reflect the reality that “meanies” like me really aren’t here to insult, offend, or demean them? Or even where are the discussions that assume the priors are correct, but look for ways to suck it up and develop a thicker skin to better deal the hateful bastards trying to hurt them?
I don’t see those. What I’ve seen are offended rejections of any suggestion they might work on changing their reactions, by them, and often by those defending them.
I was the person who said going from “You’re wrong” to “I disagree” was an important step. I’m glad it registered.
Becoming less thin-skinned takes time and sometimes a good bit of work. You don’t know where any particular person is in that process.
You might be in a Pareto’s Law situation—it’s not that you need to avoid offending the most fragile people, a small amount of effort might lead to not offending 85% of thin-skinned people.
Yes, but I didn’t want to finger you as the culprit.
Becoming less thin-skinned takes time and sometimes a good bit of work.
Indeed.
My concern is that some seem to consider it a crime to suggest that this would be a desirable thing, or to suggest that people adjust their inaccurate priors for hostility downwards when interpreting the actions of others.
The nicies want the meanies to try harder to be understood.OK, fine. But if the meanies suggest that the nicies try harder to understand, that’s just one more thing for the nicies to get offended about.
I would note to all the nicies—if LW feels hostile to you, you’ve led a very sheltered existence. I’m from the HItchens party of debate, that prefers a sharp point be embellished with a barb. That’s part of the fun, in the same way that a decleating hit in football is part of the fun. And that’s not even hostility, that’s just style. And that’s a common style.
By my estimate, LW has a very “Just the Facts Ma’am” culture. Going beyond the facts and putting any relish into a debate is rarely done, and frowned on when it happens. Maybe there were nastier times in the long long ago that led to this culture. LW does seem relatively unique in the equal mix of LIbertarians and Progressives.
FWIW, one of the things that caught my attention about this community, and encouraged me to stick around, was the emphasis on valuing accuracy and precision (which I value) without the “barbs are part of the fun/putting relish into a debate” style you describe here (which I dislike intensely).
There are lots of “nice is more important than true” spaces on the net, and lots of “being unpleasant to people is part of the fun” spaces; and an astonishing number of spaces that are both. A space that manages to even approximate being neither is rare.
Barbs are largely the part of the classical rhetoric that play on biases in the listener. That’s probably true of niceness as well.
And I agree that the Lesswrong tone seems relatively unique, particularly given the broad and general nature of discussion topics, and the variety in political opinions.
One of the good things which contributes to the tone here is people reliably getting credit for saying they’ve changed their mind for some good reason. I can’t think of any other site where that’s in play.
Way back when, I remember discussing exactly that point on the Extropians list. In many ways a similar group to here. But some very smart guys were arguing that it was a huge loss of face to admit you were wrong, and better to deny or evade (I’m sure they put it more convincingly than that).
When someone is wrong, graciously admitting and accepting it scores major points with me.
Thinking about it, maybe I can make a better argument for denial. There are two issues, being wrong, and whether one admits being wrong. If admitting being wrong is what largely determines whether you are perceived as being wrong, then denying the error maintains status.
For people driven by social truth, which is likely the majority, truth is scored on attitude, power, authority, popularity, solidarity, fealty, etc. The validity of the arguments don’t matter much. For people driven by epistemic truth, the arguments are what matters, so denying the plain truth of them is seen as a personality defect, while admitting it a virtue.
The thing is, it’s not that the deniers are aliens. I am. I and my kind. For us, in an argument, it’s the facts that matter, and letting other considerations intrude on that is intruding the rules of the normals into the game. That’s largely what this whole thread is about.
One side says we’ll be more effective playing the normals game. It’s a game my kind strongly prefers not to play. Having to behave as normals is ineffective for us, and the opportunity to play by our rules is extremely valuable to us.
Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning describes his various encounters with unsporting conduct and cheating in chess tournaments and competitive tai chi. He wrote that he’d developed the approach to just work so hard at developing his own skill at the game that he was able to ignore the distractions the opponent was trying to pull and proceed to win anyway. He claimed that the opponents would generally become agitated and careless once they noticed that they couldn’t get any sort of upset out of him.
Discussions aren’t games with rules, but you might still get something out of the idea that social gamesmanship is basically just compensating poor skill with cheating, and you need to work hard enough on your epistemic skills that it won’t stop you even when it does get thrown in your way.
Well, I’d say that social gamesmanship isn’t cheating, it’s playing a different game.
Being very good with your epistemic skills has mileage socially too, and importantly, mileage with people with personal properties you’re more likely concerned about. And refraining from the usual types of social gamesmanship earns you points with those people as well.
Yes, but I didn’t want to finger you as the culprit.
I’m actually very fond of being told I was right. (I only figured that out when a friend mentioned that he’s very fond of other people admitting they were wrong.)
It’s true that there’s currently a belief that it’s very bad to tell people they should be less thin-skinned. People generally want a social environment which suits their preferences, and while it’s not likely that anyone will get a total victory, it’s certainly possible to push the balance towards your preferences.
Thin-skinned people are apt to hear a demand that they be thicker-skinned as “You shouldn’t care about the way I keep hurting you.” The more aggressive among them have started shoving back. Interesting times.
IMO when you write, you should be asking yourself: “What’s the worst way someone could interpret this?”, because surely, someone will interpret it that way. And when you read, you should ask yourself: “What’s the nicest way I could interpret this?”, because that’s probably the way they meant it.
when you write, you should be asking yourself: “What’s the worst way someone could interpret this?”
When dealing with people, habitually searching for only the worst that can happen is a very bad habit, in my experience. It’s a habit I’ve been trying to break. Through availability bias, your world becomes a horrible place. Your priors are distorted toward the bad, and you miss opportunities. Too careful, too risk averse, too distrusting.
And when you read, you should ask yourself: “What’s the nicest way I could interpret this?”, because that’s probably the way they meant it.
I think that’s the right policy, even if it’s not true. It will generally be the more productive assumption—particularly for online forums.
Just work out the cases. Search for everything that can happen. Either a person has basic good will towards you, or they don’t.
If they do, the nice interpretation is likely right, and you understand someone with good will toward you. That makes for a good discussion. Further, if the guy meant it in a nasty way, your response as if he were nice might soften his mood, or not. If it softens, things have at least improved. If not, most observers will likely think him a schmuck, and he is just very unlikely to be a good discussion partner anyway.
If they do have good will, but you assume that it is bad, you’re likely limiting the positive outcomes available with them. If they don’t have good will and you assume they don’t, you have maybe avoided some aggravation and saved yourself some time.
Having worked out the general case, you don’t have to do a de novo analysis each time. Commit to the policy, and blithely move on. Sometimes someone won’t like you. Ok, you knew that was going to happen.
This is what I’ve tried to do in general with my own defensiveness with people. Don’t focus on the worst that a person might do. Try to have an accurate prior on intentions (most people are not con men or mass murderers, and they’re not really out to get me—I’m not that important to them.) Pick a decision based on an analysis of of what their intent and attitudes might be, and the differing outcomes based on your actions.
Most of the analysis applies, except real world encounters carry more serious risks. I live in the Seattle are, which is pretty safe and so real world risks are limited, though I realize not everyone lives in such a safe place, so YMMV.
In general, the best strategy is to act assuming approval and good will, because those situations present the best opportunities.
when you write, you should be asking yourself: “What’s the worst way someone could interpret this?”
When dealing with people, habitually searching for only the worst that can happen is a very bad habit, in my experience.
Ah, but that wasn’t what I meant. I just meant to say that you should be careful when writing, because even when 99%+ of people won’t have any problems with what you write, someone is sure to misinterpret it, if it possibly can be. Communication is hard, and written communication even more so.
I’d say more briefly “someone is sure to misinterpret it”, because it is always possible to do so. There’s going to be a level of misinterpretation no mater how you agonize over what you write.
I agree with you that the underlying good will or lack of it is a crucial factor. I’m still trying to figure out what tends to build good will or damage it.
“Offended or hurt” doesn’t enter into it. This isn’t about hazy feelings; it’s about hard practical effects of actions: do we accomplish what we want to accomplish?
Let’s say you and your interlocutor disagreed about your intention in saying that they were wrong (about whatever). Your interlocutor believes that your intention was for them to shut up and go away, but actually that wasn’t what you meant at all; you meant to invite more discussion.
They are wrong about you.
And you want them to have a correct belief about you.
But … how can you cause your interlocutor to possess a correct belief about your intention? You could lecture them about how wrong they are to have misinterpreted you. But that won’t work if they will take your lecturing as meaning “shut up and go away” … and may very well do so.
That’s all I’m saying. You can’t force people to understand you, or to want to understand you. If you really want to get your ideas across (because you care about those ideas — not because you’re trying to find people who will easily like you) then you use the try harder which probably involves restating them in a way that doesn’t repel people.
Or … well, you could say that you never really cared about that kind of person’s understanding, and really you never wanted a discussion with that kind of person.
But in that case … they weren’t wrong about you, were they?
But in that case … they weren’t wrong about you, were they?
There are plenty of people who would be correct in concluding that I would bear them hostility if I knew what they were like.
They would be incorrect to conclude that the priors I assign to that type of person among LW is very high, and incorrect to assume that my asserting that someone is wrong indicates I have concluded the person is that type of person, so that my comment indicates hostile intent.
Perhaps I’ve given you an incorrect impression.
If you really want to get your ideas across
While I have proselytizing tendencies, that’s not my fundamental goal, particularly in a forum disagreement. Given my limited resources of me, my proselytizing attitude is to sing to those with the ears to hear. People who are assuming that I am hostile are not the low hanging fruit in that regard.
But people who assume I am hostile can be perfectly fine partners in a disagreement. In a disagreement, I am primarily hoping to change my own mind, whether in correcting an error, or clarifying hazy positions of my own. They might even be better, in that they won’t cut me slack when I am sloppy. People who dislike you can be perfectly useful in a discussion. The enemy of my enemy (our ignorance) is my friend.
But I find it strange that you think I should find it hopelessly futile to try to change a person’s assumptions about my intent, but a productive use of my time to try to change their minds about some other fact of reality.
Indeed I agree that it is possible, and probably desirable, to phrase the argument less bluntly than I did.
However, it seems to me that submitter B is arguing against making such arguments at all, not arguing to make them in a more polite fashion.
Furthermore, here of all places, “If you (think you) posses evidence that I do not, show it and update me!” should be a background assumption, not something that needs to be put as a disclaimer on any potentially-controversial statement.
If they said they didn’t understand, or even that they didn’t believe me, that would be workable.
Which I read to mean that she is not opposed to them expressing confusion or saying something like “Huh, you always seemed more like a pure thinker to me.” (as opposed to “No way. You’re totally a thinker.”) It seems precisely how the statement is phrased and how the discussion is conducted that is at issue here.
After the discussion, I think I’ve got a more concise option that achieves this end.
Option 4: I disagree, because blah blah blah.
Concise, and makes it about my differing perceptions and evaluations. Better than my original “you’re wrong, because blah blah.” I doubt that this entirely satisfies the nice camp, but I think it’s a baby step in their direction.
I think you are framing the question in order to presuppose a conclusion. This is an error that is just as endemic on LessWrong as it is everywhere else.
If person A has reason X to believe that the result of person B’s introspection is wrong, which is the more respectful course of action?
person A : person B, your account of your internal experiences may be wrong because of X.
person A : meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.
The first alternative is designed to look nice, respectful, and false, and the second to look nasty, disrespectful, and true. The bottom line is “Niceness is dishonesty”, and the example was invented to support it.
Compare this with an example from the original post:
For a specific example, I was asked whether I was more of a thinker or feeler and I said I was pretty balanced. He retorted that I was more of a thinker.
This does not fall into either of those categories. It looks like this:
person A: no you’re not!
Which is what person A would say if they spoke honestly while thinking “meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.” Person A appears to be running an internal monologue that goes: “I know the truth. You do not know the truth. I have reasons for my beliefs, therefore I am right. Therefore your reasons for your beliefs must be wrong. Therefore you should take correction from me. If you don’t, you’re even more wrong. You can’t handle the truth. I can handle the truth. Therefore I am right. (continue on auto-repeat)”
That, at least, is what I see, when I see those two alternatives.
The real problem here is what person A is actually thinking, and the invisibility of that process to themselves. For it is written:
The way a belief feels from inside, is that you seem to be looking straight at reality.
As long as A is running that monologue, how to express themselves is going to look to them like a conflict between “niceness” and “truth”. And however they express themselves, that monologue is likely to come through to B, because it will leak out all over.
I was not arguing about the specific example given in the OP, where he (the person with whom submitter B was arguing) was apparently unable or unwilling to provide evidence for his assertion that she was mistaken about herself. You, and submitter B, may be entirely correct about the person she was arguing with.
Perhaps I am overestimating the sanity of this place, but I do hope (and expect) that if similar arguments occur on this forum, evidence will (should) be put forward. In this place dedicated, among other things, to awareness of the many failure modes of the human brain, to how you (yes you. And I, too) may be totally wrong about so many things, in this place, the hypothesis “I may be mistaken about myself; I should listen to the other person’s evidence on this matter” is not a hypothesis that should be ignored. (note how submitter B does not consider this hypothesis in her example, and indeed she may have been correct to not consider it, but as stated I’m arguing in general here).
I am the one who has spent millions of minutes in this mind, able to directly experience what’s going on
inside of it. They have spent, at this point, maybe a few hundred minutes observing it from the outside, yet
they act like they’re experts.
The homeopath who has treated thousands of patients, should listen to the high-school chemistry student who has evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work. The physics crackpot who has worked on their theory of everything for decades should listen to the student of physics who points out that it fails to predict the results of an experiment. And the human, who has spent all their life as a human in a human body, should listen to the student of psychology, who may know many things about themselves that they are yet ignorant of.
The homeopath who has treated thousands of patients, should listen to the high-school chemistry student who has evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work. The physics crackpot who has worked on their theory of everything for decades should listen to the student of physics who points out that it fails to predict the results of an experiment.
Wow.
After reading just what was presented in the anecdote, you have strong enough belief that the submitter was wrong about her own mind, and her programmer boyfriend was right, that you’ll compare her to frauds and crackpots whose ideas have vanishingly small probability.
you have strong enough belief that the submitter was wrong about her own mind,
and her programmer boyfriend was right
No, no, certainly not, I made it clear that I was arguing in general and could not comment on the specific example given (come on, I say this twice in the post you quote).
that you’ll compare her to frauds and crackpots whose ideas have vanishingly small probability.
Where do you get that probability mass from?
Let me repeat the argument she made
I am the one who has spent millions of minutes in this mind, able to directly experience what’s going on inside of it.
This sort of argument, “I have observed this phenomenon for far longer than you did, therefore I am vastly more likely to be right about this than you are”, is very vulnerable to confirmation bias (among other biases), where the speaker will more easily remember events that fit her hypothesis than events which didn’t. This argument is a stereotypical crackpot argument, I gave two examples but I can (alas) give many more. It is virtually never a good argument. Someone who is actually sitting on top of mountains of evidence for a certain hypothesis need not resort to this argument, they can just show the evidence!
How often have I seen crackpots use this argument? Dozens of times. How often have I seen non-crackpots use it? I recall only one occasion, two if you include the OP. How often have I seen people who have actually carefully collected lots of evidence use this argument? Never. (Is my memory on this subject susceptible to confirmation bias? Ha! Yes, of course it is.). Is it any wonder then, that my prior for “people who use this argument are crackpots” is somewhat large?
How is this relevant to the example given? We cannot expect everyone to continuously gather relatively unbiased evidence on their own behaviour, can we? Indeed we cannot. Then, we should also not be extremely confident in the models of ourselves which we have constructed. If someone challenges these models, what should we do?
Most likely, the person challenging our models does not actually have good evidence and is just attempting to make some status move. This is the most common and least interesting possibility, ignoring him / breaking up with him / telling him to stop doing it …. may all be good courses of action (yes, I disagree less with the OP than you may think)
If evidence is actually put forward (which it wasn’t in the OP example, but which I hope it would be on less wrong), you can provide evidence of your own “but in the past, when X happened, I did Y, which is compatible with my self-model but not with your model of me”. Ideally, the arguers should update after the exchange of evidence. (“I observed myself for millions of minutes” does not count as evidence exchange, since the other person already knew that)
I was not arguing about the specific example given in the OP
After reading just what was presented in the anecdote, you have strong enough belief that the submitter was wrong about her own mind, and her programmer boyfriend was right, that you’ll compare her to frauds and crackpots whose ideas have vanishingly small probability.
The real problem here is what person A is actually thinking, and the invisibility of that process to themselves.
In brief, Tu quoque.
As an A, I’ll tell you what my deluded perceptions are of my internal dialogue. If I say “you’re wrong, because blah blah”, that’s because I am presuming you can handle the truth, otherwise I wouldn’t bother offering my comment, as indicated by the original poster.
person A : meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.
That’s what you do when you think the person can’t handle the truth—you shrug and move on.
I think I’ve identified two Person A values relevant to this discussion: Expressing honest disagreement is a sign of respect. Crafting that disagreement to manage feelings is a sign of disrespect.
Two different species—those who manipulate things, and those who manipulate people. They don’t get along too well. There’s probably a third that does both, but I don’t think they’re large in number.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn’t respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
That’s a good interpretation, but I wonder if status is a simpler lens. Defining people and their traits is a high-status thing; the guy retorting that she’s a thinker moves power from her to him in a way that suggesting wouldn’t.
Respect also seems subjective; I have basically stopped stating opinions around a friend whose rationality I do not respect because I don’t think discussing contentious subjects with them is a good use of either of our times. If they say that they’re a good judge of character, and I can think of three counterexamples, I’ll only state those counterexamples if I respect them enough to think they can handle it.
I also wonder about how much respect is subject-specific, and how much it’s global. I can easily imagine someone who I trust when it comes to mathematics but don’t trust when it comes to introspection.
If they say that they’re a good judge of character, and I can think of three counterexamples, I’ll only state those counterexamples if I respect them enough to think they can handle it.
This made me think of something irrelevant to your post, but relevant to the topic. I’ve been told that women are socialized not to overtly disagree with or otherwise oppose men. (this usually comes up in the context of careful date non-refusals) I tend to interpret such things as vaguely insulting, along the lines of saying I can’t handle the truth. (or refusal)
Is this interpretation shared by anyone here? What do the women here think of it?
Perhaps I should update to interpret it as “I don’t know if you can handle the truth and I can’t take the chance.” I guess that’s easier to swallow, at least for strangers.
More generally, I think that if you focus on a single interpretation of someone’s motives when you don’t have a lot of information, and the interpretation makes you angry, then you’re probably engaging in an emotional habit. I admit I’m mostly generalizing from one example on this.
I’ve been told that women are socialized not to overtly disagree with or otherwise oppose men.
Avoiding overt disagreements is solid advice for anyone who wants to be well-liked, because they are often a social cost to the disagreer, and primarily benefit the person they’re disagreeing with.
It’s not clear to me that the advice to not overtly disagree with men is as specific as it sounds, since it seems like overt female-female disagreements are also discouraged. To the extent that it is specific, I do suspect it is due to the physical risks involved.
Respect is saying “We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner.”
Those are all things I’d have to discover about you. There are some here I consider worthwhile conversation partners because I recognize their usernames and have formed opinions of them.
I don’t expect respect from people who don’t know me, and I don’t even expect it from those that do know me. I am not due respect from anyone, I have to earn it, by their lights.
I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. Or maybe when they feel like they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. And this may happen while the disagree-er is completely oblivious to this perception, and I think it is a little bit on the disagree-er to add some padding of niceness?
Like you’re not going to be a bit careful if you’re in danger of accidentally stepping on people’s feet in real life, right? That has pretty little to do with respect and more to do with compassion. It’s a mutual understanding that human feet are squishy and hurt to be stepped on. Or you’d add niceness if you accidentally offend someone in a meatspace discussion? So why not here? I feel like it doesn’t take away from the discussion to say “Oh sorry! I really meant [this]” instead of “I said [this] not [that],” which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.
(Also, I feel like I’m the only person here that regularly uses exclamation marks. )
I feel like I’ve come across a lot of discussions where it’s pretty obvious that the parties involved are frustrated, but they don’t acknowledge it because there’s a little bit of that Spocklike rationalists-don’t-get-frustrated attitude still lingering around.
Hmm, I definitely see where you’re coming from, and I don’t (usually) want my comments to hurt anyone. If my comments were consistently upsetting people when I was just trying to have a normal conversation, then I would want to know about this and fix it—both because I actually do care about people’s feelings, and because I don’t want to prevent every single interesting person from conversing with me. It would take a lot of work, and it would go against my default conversational style, but it would be worth it in the long run.
However, it sounds more like there’s a cultural/gender difference on LW. That is, different people prefer different paddings of niceness. Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
So the question here is, should we change LW culture? I personally would prefer we didn’t, because I like the culture we have now. I don’t support rationalist evangelism, and I’m not bothered by the gender imbalance, so I don’t feel a need to lure more women onto LW by changing the culture. Is this unfair to rationalist women who would like to participate in LW discussions, but are put off by the lack of friendliness? Yes, it is. But similarly, if we encouraged more niceness padding, this would be unfair to the people who prefer a more bare-bones style of interaction.
(It could be that it’s easier to adjust in one direction—maybe it’s easier to grow accustomed to niceness padding than to the lack thereof. In that case, it might be worth the overhead.)
Regarding your example...
I feel like it doesn’t take away from the discussion to say “Oh sorry! I really meant [this]” instead of “I said [this] not [that],” which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.
See, I would have classified this as “disrespect” rather than “unfriendliness”. In the first version, the person is admitting that he/she was unclear, and is trying to correct it—a staple of intellectual discussion, which often serves to elucidate things through careful analysis. In the second version, the person is saying “I’m right and you’re wrong”, which means that the discussion has devolved into an argument, instead of two people working together towards greater understanding.
What about these examples?
“Oh sorry! I really meant [this]” (your example)
“Good point; let me clarify. [Clarification.]”
“Oops, let me clarify. [Clarification.]”
“Clarification: [clarification]”
I would tend towards the second or third, personally. The first has “sorry” in it, which seems unnecessarily apologetic to me. People frequently state things unclearly and then have to elucidate them; it’s part of the normal discussion process, and not something to be sorry for. The fourth sounds unnecessarily abrupt to me (though I imagine it’d depend on the context). I’m curious what other people think w.r.t. these examples.
Personally, I find the niceness-padding to be perfectly well-calibrated for dealing with disagreements because people are thoughtful and respectful. I find it to be insufficient when dealing with people talking past each other. It’s really frustrating! This is a community full of interesting, intelligent people whose opinion I want to know … that sometimes aren’t bothering to carefully read what I wrote. And then not bothering to read carefully when I politely tell them that they misread what I wrote and clarify. So then I start thinking that this isn’t a coincidence, so maybe they don’t want to read what I write… ? So then I feel like they don’t like me even though I like them. Nooooo, sadness.
Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
Here is how I see the difference: the people who think there’s too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it. The people who think there is insufficient niceness-padding are getting hurt.
This makes me personally err on the side of niceness. And while I understand that excessive niceness turns into clutter, I think that even the lowest of the four levels that you demonstrated doesn’t happen as often as it should in some discussions.
Also, it’s much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn’t want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
Yep, I agree! But I also want to clarify that, unlike a martial arts dojo, the safeguards aren’t unnecessary when you get good at rationality. They become unnecessary when you trust the person … Which is kind of an orthogonal thing.
Isn’t this how we got Karate America? Making things softer and softer to appeal to more and more people until the martial art is a useless exercise for children?
I think that happened mostly because you need to actually attract customers to stay open and make money, and parents got softer and less inclined to pay money for places where their children get hurt. Especially if the children won’t, with good probability, need to use those skills elsewhere in society.
In the early days of martial arts in America, most schools hardly taught children anyway; it was more or less taken for granted that the training was too harsh for kids. The idea that the martial arts were an appropriate way to teach kids positive values like discipline, restraint, self respect, etc. didn’t have much currency; it was more like boxing, where you might encourage an unruly and violent child to get into it to channel and redirect their energy, but encouraging a normal kid to get into it would be unnecessary and somewhat cruel.
Parents’ values may have changed somewhat, but I’d say the dominant factor is that the original market for martial arts training was fairly niche, and teachers simply expanded into more profitable demographics.
Edit: According to this book which I read recently, children have been pushed into increasingly more intense, competitive, and physically harmful sports activities for decades; while the average child may be fatter and out of shape, child athletes are being pushed more than ever. Parents who’re willing to push their children into activities where they’ll get hurt may not be in decreasing supply at all.
I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”
the people who think there’s too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it.
You’re making the wrong comparison; comparing the impact on one group (“hurt”) with the other group’s emotional reaction to the impact on them “annoyed”. What you want to compare is “hurt” to “have one’s time wasted”, which is a form of harm.
If you start reading something and feel like your time is being wasted, you can just stop reading the rest of it. (For example, the complaint about the crappy evopsych doesn’t bother me because I just don’t read it.) You can also get good at skimming over niceties.
If someone feels hurt they’re going to have to do extra work to get themselves back to their previous state, which is a slightly different form of harm. It’s harder to predict when the next thing you’re going to read has that kind of effect on you.
If you start reading something and feel like you’re going to be hurt, you can just stop reading the rest of it. You can also get good at being tolerant of the direct mode of communication.
If someone’s time is wasted, it’s literally impossible for them to get that time back. Also, whilst it’s easy to skip many potentially offensive topics (don’t read anything tagged gender), it’s much harder to know which random new commentators will have worthwhile contributions.
i.e. I don’t think you’ve identified a significant distinction here.
If you get hurt, you also have to take time (and other resources) to get unhurt so that you feel okay to participate in discussion again. And then your question might still be left unanswered. Pretty counter-productive, if you want to think of it in those terms.
You proposed a distinction between A and B, saying R(A), S(B). Supposedly these facts suffice to show that A and B are relevantly different.
I pointed out S(A) and R(B) were also true, so the properties R and S do not actually allow us to tell that A and B are relevantly different.
Re-iterating that S(B) doesn’t change anything, as even granting that for the sake of argument, S also applies to A, so doesn’t indicate a significant difference.
I agree that when you read top-level articles about touchy subjects, then you’re about as able to predict when you’re going to get hurt than when you’re going to get bored. I do not agree that it is easy to predict when someone you’re having a perfectly reasonable conversation with will suddenly (and often accidentally) say something hurtful—and this will do more harm and damage in terms of lost time and resources than if the person used a little bit of padding to avoid being accidentally hurtful in most cases.
It doesn’t seem like that would be the case, no. I expected your alterations to have been deeper than that, including stuff like softening your disagreement.
Here is why your comment strikes me as unfriendly and not particularly rational:
I wonder
You wonder? If you really wanted to know you would either ask me or you could just read through my comment history and determine that, no, I am pretty direct and people still misunderstand me. Or you could identify specific examples where this did happen and let me know in a helpful way where I messed up my argument. Instead, you just sort of demonstratively express your hypothesis so people who already agree with you can see it and pat you on the back. Pretty mind-killery, in my opinion.
But it’s okay! I understand! These things happen. =]
To be honest, I’m surprised by the hostility of your comments here. I was bringing a hypothesis to your attention so that you could evaluate it. I suppose I could have read all of your comments but I don’t really care that much I guess. “I wonder” was meant to identify this as a passing thought. And in my second comment I updated away from the hypothesis, so I’m not sure why this tone would be present.
I might be misreading it, but your last sentence sounds sort of fake-nice and passive aggressive due to the rest of the comment. I normally wouldn’t make an entire comment just about tone, and I actually like the tone on Lessswrong, but this conversation is sort of about it, and like I said, I was surprised.
See, this is where the whole thing gets confusingly meta, but a lot of what you’re saying contributes to my overall point. You’re right, my comment was written in a pretty hostile tone (and I apologize), but it was also pretty sparse and direct, and … how else do you respond to someone who claims that your writing is too cluttered with niceness? It’s kind of difficult to balance.
This is where I’m not sure what the overall stance on writing things is in the LW community. It seems like there are sequence posts that urge people to pay attention to the effect of their writing and how it will be interpreted by others. So I go in with the assumption that most people have read them and are also paying attention to tone and word choice. Which leads me to assume that if their tone is hostile then it’s intentionally so. When someone says “I wonder,” it’s not clear if they’re asking a question or if they’re just … content to wonder. And because I personally find it awkward to start offering up answers when someone doesn’t want any, it starts feeling like the comment was designed to not have a response.
Add in the large, scary-sounding opposition claiming that they come here to talk about intellectual things and don’t need to care about people’s feelings, and if feels like your stand-alone comment was just going to attract mind-killer-ed people from the other camp even if it wasn’t intended to.
I also apologize that the last part sounded passive-aggressive, but I also feel like that demonstrates the extent to which the community is intolerant of flawed, biased humans that make mistakes. I really wish we had more of a culture that pointed out a bias, and then responded with a *patpat*, “happens!” (like sneezes!) rather than “you are a bad rationalist, go feel bad now.” (Which I’m sure no one ever actually said, but culture gets constructed through things people don’t say as well?)
The ideal might eventually be a two or more track LW. I’m willing to bet that we’re losing some people whose thinking we’d want, but who find the courtesy level too polite or too harsh. I’d also bet that, while it seems that the courtesy level here isn’t friendly enough for a lot of women, there are also men who’d like a friendlier version.
there are also men who’d like a friendlier version.
I cannot agree with this enough.
I also want to be clear that I do not think that this requires putting niceness padding on every statement and interaction. Just enough padding on enough interactions that a new person can believe that they will get a padded response instead of seeing no alternative but that they will receive an unpadded response.
It’s Rattler’s and Eagles all over again, but probably worse. It’s not evaporative cooling, it’s cluster dissociation with actual differences from the start. The general behavior of each group shifts toward their new means—away from each other.
The best answer is hard. We continue to talk about this in a productive manner until our preferences, behavior, perceptions, and trusts shift.
Some behaviors change. Some interpretations change. Some reactions change.
I don’t know that it will make such a big difference. The preferences may start biologically, and are likely reinforced in other parts of our lives regardless. But this could at least improve information and separate real preferences from habitual unexamined behaviors.
I’m willing to bet that we’re losing some people whose thinking we’d want, but who find the courtesy level too polite or too harsh.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone leaving because the discussion was too polite or too nice for their tastes! I may be biased in this, but my intuition is that people who are against encouraging niceness really overestimate how much noise it would actually add, and maybe even how few hedons they’d get from receiving it (but I may well be wrong on this second part).
And I definitely agree that niceness isn’t an attractor to just women. I think a better way of looking at it is that there is a distribution of prioritising niceness in each gender, so the current level might be too low for something like 70% of women and 20% of men (I find myself on the fence about whether I want to bother engaging with the community, for example, and a higher level would probably push me over towards the engagement side).
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone leaving because the discussion was too polite or too nice for their tastes!
To add a single data point: I left one other community largely because it was developing (and enforcing) social norms that had me jumping through too many hoops before I could voice criticism or disagreement; and I had serious issues with a second one for similar reasons, although different things drove me away in the end. I’m happy with LW’s current culture, but there’s a fairly wide range of preferences and I don’t think I’m on the extreme aggressive end of the spectrum.
I actually completely agree that being able to express criticism freely is valuable, I just think there are many non-censorious approaches to niceness we can use.
For example, if the top 20 posters (by recent post karma) decided to all be nicer, I’d expect that that would shift community norms towards niceness looking high-status and consequently the whole community trying to be nicer as a result. Alternatively, adding something like “Please consider [above poster’s name] feelings before hitting ‘Comment’!” above the comment field would probably increase niceness (not that I recommend this specifically, since it would sound overly silly, but maybe a similar injunction to “imagine yourself as having their point of view” appearing 1 time in 5 could be viable). I’m sure there are other options as well that would promote niceness without feeling particularly restrictive or censorious.
(Hopefully I’m interpreting your objections correctly!)
Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.
I would tend towards the last two, I think, and wouldn’t find the forth to be rude (though it might depend on the nature and scale of the clarifications, with this method being most apt for smaller ones). However, I am one of those who likes the style of discussion on lesswrong.
I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. Or maybe when they feel like they are disagreed with in a dismissive way.
I think that showing respect can stop disagreements from seeming like dismissals.
I’ve noticed that women and girls tend to use more emoticons than men and boys, too. It also seems to me that the emoticons used by women are more likely to be noseless—such as :) as opposed to :-) -- than those used by men, but it’s not like I did stats on this so I’m not very confident about this. So, as a compromise between having people misunderstand my tone and looking too effeminate, I do use emoticons when I need to, but I give them noses.
As for exclamation marks, I used to almost always use ellipses to terminate sentences in contexts where a full stop might sound too formal and no punctuation at all might sound too slovenly (namely, in comments on Facebook, and certain times in text messages), but then I noticed that that looked too wimpy, whereas exclamation marks looked more assertive, so I now use either ellipses or exclamation marks depending on (among other things) my instantaneous level of self-confidence. (I can’t remember noticing any gender difference in the use of punctuation.)
I never thought the smileys with noses were inherently manly, but I do think that smileys without noses result in a cuter face, which may explain that correlation if we assume that cuteness ideals are shared by most people.
These confessions of textual insecurities are enlightening and endearing. =] I had no idea guys worried about this stuff until yesterday. We should do this more often!
I either give a smiley a nose or not, depending on what looks better given the default font that the places uses. I think that on LW “:)”, looks pretty squished-together and hard to even make out, so here I use “:-)” instead.
(It has always struck me as a little weird that nobody else seems to do this—if they use smilies at all, it’s either always with a nose or always noseless. But then, my active vocabulary for emoticons tends to be broader than that of most folks in any case.)
Oh yeah, the ^_^ face looks bad in some of the wider fonts.
I sometimes feel that pull to adopt something as a convention because it seems reasonable to me. But then I realize that it’s not really a convention if no one understands or follows it, and it requires a lot of work to explain and popularize. So I’m always left reminding my own brain of its pointlessness despite its … seeming reasonableness. For (a California-specific) example, I always want to signal left in a left-turn lane to let the people behind me to know that I’m going to U-turn. But I’m probably the only person that does that so people behind me just figure I didn’t turn my signal off or whatever. =/
I think people who regularly talk to you probably pick up on your smiley meanings intuitively; people hopefully don’t regularly drive behind me.
I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way.
I acknowledge it, but that doesn’t mean I pander to it. They likely find my callousness mean. I find their sensitivity tiresome. We have different preferences and sensitivities that are mutually inconvenient. Not all people get along well.
I feel like “pander” implies doing something you specifically wouldn’t do of your own accord with the sole aim of getting people to like you. In contrast, being dismissive, acknowledging that someone probably felt bad as a result of something you did and then not doing anything about it—that’s not even insensitive.
“Ow, you stepped on my foot.”
“I acknowledge that your foot probably hurts, but I find that tiresome and inconvenient.”
You’re definitely not expected to get along with everyone, and if you could accurately predict exactly who you’re going to hurt before you have a conversation with them, you could just avoid them ahead of time and everything would be fine. Since we don’t know how to do that, you’re probably going to hurt some people accidentally. What you said sounds like you have no problem hurting people accidentally and don’t care if they feel bad because of it.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don’t know.
I have sent several messages like that; to the best of my knowledge, they have always been taken well. Every message I’ve received like that has made my day; I suggest lowering your estimate of how creepy it actually is.
I do agree with you that such messages are murkier when at least one party could interpret it as romantic, and while that murkiness can be resolved it takes additional effort.
Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
That tends to be the pattern I notice for posts/comments that seem to be well-made; generally, more disagreeing / correcting comments than downvotes, and many more upvotes than comments that only express approval.
Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
That tends to be the pattern I notice for posts/comments that seem to be well-made; generally, more disagreeing / correcting comments than downvotes, and many more upvotes than comments that only express approval.
What I was wondering was a bit different:
Imagine a forum with no upvotes and downvotes. (It might still have a “report as spam/abuse” button, moderation, and the like — I don’t mean that it’s completely unfiltered.) It will have some level of people posting comments of agreement and ones of disagreement.
Now, imagine a forum identical to that one, but with upvotes and downvotes added. Some people who otherwise would comment on others’ words, instead use a vote button. (And some do both.)
In the second forum, there may be fewer total comments — because many people who would post “I agree!” or “Me too!” or “No way!” or “Shut up!” will instead use the voting mechanism. But does the addition of a voting mechanism absorb proportionately more expressions of approval than disapproval?
(It may be that what I’m thinking of here is the old Usenet annoyance at people who posted merely to agree with another poster — “posting ‘me too’ like some brain-dead AOLer”, as Weird Al put it. Voting mechanisms let us tell people not to post “me too” posts, but maybe some “me too” posts are more rewarding for the person they’re responding to.)
I’ve long wanted a ‘me too!’ facility in forum posts—where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It’d be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - ’I’d sign that without reservation”
In seriousness, I was thinking that allowing us to see who has upvoted our comments/posts would probably be helpful and encouraging, although hiding who has downvoted would help protect the voter’s integrity and help avoid downvotes being taken as a personal insult.
The risk would be the development of identifiable cult followings, undeserved reciprocation of upvotes, and similar.
I think it’d be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put “I agree!” or “Fallacious reasoning” or “inappropriate discussion” that only shows up in the poster’s view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn’t clog up the thread.
I’ve never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users “liked” the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.
It may be that what I’m thinking of here is the old Usenet annoyance at people who posted merely to agree with another poster — “posting ‘me too’ like some brain-dead AOLer”, as Weird Al put it.
One of my first reactions to the relevant part of the OP was thinking of this phenomena and feeling some sympathy for the Usenet old hands. I’ve been on forums were “me too” posts are common, and while they can sometimes be nice I also think that they can get annoying/distract from useful comment.
The norm I’ve noticed around here is to upvote for agreeing and general warm fuzzies, but not to downvote for disagreement alone. Downvoting seems to be reserved for thoughts that are not merely incorrect, but broken in some way. (logically fallacious, for example)
For my own posts, I find I appreciate an upvote as if it were explicit encouragement. I’m wondering if this mental reaction is common, and if so, whether it’s limited to the males here. (as a pseudo-”score”, I could see this being the case) Perhaps the karma system produces more warm fuzzies for the average man and little-to-nothing for the average woman. With karma being the primary form of social encouragement, that could make for a very different experience between genders.
Request for anecdotal evidence here.
For my own part, I like the karma system precisely because it provides a way to indicate appreciation without cluttering threads with content-free approval posts. That is probably the usenetter in me speaking. (tangent: I miss the days when usenet was where all the interesting conversations happened. Oh well.)
I may be a somewhat atypical woman, but I appreciate upvotes. I do find it frustrating if I post something I think is substantial and it only gets upvotes. I’m here for conversation, not just approval.
I just don’t understand the downvote/upvote thing, especially if the norm is/should be for broken thoughts.
When I get downvoted (or upvoted), I often don’t get a comment explaining why. So it’s unclear where I’m broken (or what I’m doing right). That’s frustrating and doesn’t help me increase my value to the community.
It’d be nice to have downvoters supply a reason why, in order to improve the original.
A downvote without explanation can basically be translated as “Lurk Moar, Noob”
When I downvote without explanation it’s because I want less of what I’m downvoting AND I don’t want the forums to be cluttered with explanations of what should be obvious.
But does the addition of a voting mechanism absorb proportionately more expressions of approval than disapproval?
I think so, and the evidence I was providing was an estimate of what percentage of ‘negative’ responses (including corrections as negative) were comments vs. downvotes, and what percentage of ‘positive’ responses were comments vs. upvotes.
Note that there are strong alternatives to the absorption model, since the activation energy is lower to vote than comment.
I believe the real issue that B. raised of LW being cold won’t be effectively improved by posting “I agree!” replies, but requires some emotional involvement. A response that offers something to the OP, that gives something back.
Like, why do you agree? What are the implications of you agreeing? Or, what thoughts or emotions does the content of the post bring up for you? The response doesn’t have to be long, but it should be personal and thoughtful.
A little bit more of that may go a long way towards developing community.
Personally I feel quite strongly that ‘niceness’ is way too vague a concept to in any way promote, no matter the social context.
I’d like to talk instead about the value of comments that are specific, positive (+ hopefully warm, without gushing), and cooperative. In short, creating a norm of definite, positive, ‘working together to work out what’s true’ attitudes. I think it is fine to make comments that only express approval, as long as it is approval of a specific behaviour / characteristics and not blanket ‘good job’. These kinds of specific comments help people evaluate themselves and encourage them to continue doing what works.
LessWrong is not a debate club—we’re trying to approach the truth, not merely win the argument. That means that things which keep us working together on that are a net win, providing they do not obscure the truth.
I’ve posted a lot of messy examples all over this thread, but I think I’ve finally gathered my thinking now.
I would like to make a simple case that niceness clarifies communication. This is because not all disagreements are perfectly rational and sometimes contain defensiveness and other stuff that is difficult to filter out. Furthermore, even disagreements that are balanced and rational often fail to engage the original comment, and thus they come off as dismissive—therefore, they unintentionally communicate “I don’t respect you” or “I don’t like you.” Therefore, if it is difficult to predict whether your comment will unintentionally communicate “I don’t like” you to the other person, then adding “but nevertheless I still like you” into what you said in some socially accepted way does increase the likelihood that what you wrote is perceived as what you meant to write.
Sometimes, this can be as small as a smiley. Or an exclamation mark. It doesn’t have to be a crazy stream of niceties and smalltalk and hugs that them mundanes engage in on a daily basis in conversations of no substances because they’re not cool like we are.
Hmm, so I’m thinking about smileys and exclamation points now. I don’t think they just demonstrate friendliness—I think they also connote femininity. I used to use them all the time on IRC, until I realized that the only people who did so were female, or were guys who struck me as more feminine as a result. I didn’t want to be conspicuously feminine on IRC, so I stopped using smileys/exclamation points there.
It never bothered me when other people didn’t use smileys/exclamations. But when I stopped using them on IRC, everything I wrote sounded cold or rude. I felt like I should put the smileys in to assure people I was happy and having a good time (just as I always smile in person so that people will know I’m enjoying myself). But no one else was using them, and they didn’t strike me as unfriendly, so I decided to stop using them.
Until I saw this comment, I had forgotten that I had adjusted myself in this way! In light of this, I may have to take back some of my earlier comments, as it really does seem like culturally enforced gender differences are getting in the way here, and that LW has little tolerance for people who sound feminine (perhaps because of an association between femininity and irrationality, which I’ll admit to being guilty of myself).
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with feminity, or is it just me?
(EDIT: Now I’m thinking that smileys vs. lack thereof might also be a formality thing. I also limit the amount of smileys/exclamations that I put in work emails, because they seem overly friendly/informal for a professional context. LW feels more like a professional environment than a social gathering to me, I think.)
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with femininity, or is it just me?
Apparently! I started talking to someone about this and he just told me this exact thing independently of you. He said men can only use smileys with women because it’s flirting. (??) Which is weird to me because I’ve met men who are WAY more animated than I am in meatspace. Do they also not use exclamation marks? I don’t think I’d be able chat with them online if they didn’t; my brain would explode.
But actually, I think this whole issue comes up because we subconsciously communicate a lot of those “I still like you! I’m not hostile! I’m still having a good time!” messages in meatspace through non-verbal things like smiles and pats and vocal tone, etc. So people that resist adding those into their text think they’re being asked to do something extra that they never do, but I think, they do do it and just don’t realize it because it comes more naturally.
You know, I was just about to make a poll about this! But I’m on an iPad, so that’s a bad idea.
Do you think a lot of LW people are bad at those cues in real life? Do you think they actively resent having to be good at them in real life as well? I figured LW-ers would recognize the utility of these messages out in meatspace, but it might have just not crossed their mind.
I’d rather not speculate about “a lot of LW people,” since I am just one person and I’m not making observations about myself, per se.
But I have at least one friend in real life who struggles with social cues and I think she’d be pretty excited to find an environment where she didn’t have to deal with them. So I’d imagine there are people with different perspectives on it, some of them actively against it, some passively supportive of the current setup, and some unaware that there’s a decision being made, and I have no idea how to distinguish how many of each. I guess a poll would be appropriate.
I sort of assumed that even people who struggle with social cues would understand their instrumental value, at least on an intellectual level. But there’s definitely a typical mind component in that thinking because I know nothing about the social lives of most LW-ers or the average LW-er and how much they interact with humans in meatspace and how they feel about it.
So I thought more about this poll and realized I would need one of those “strongly agree—strongly disagree” matrices to get any good results. Which is an even heftier undertaking.
Because you are trying to be extra-friendly and non-threatening, or because you’re trying to use smileys to directly indicate your attraction/interest?
I’m both emotionally more inclined to be smiling and thus typing smileys when chatting with someone I’m attracted to AND occasionally consciously aware of smileys and that I might want to toss one in to be extra-friendly. I don’t think it’s a known notion that smileys are flirtatious or about attraction so I don’t really use them that way, though maybe I should.
Also, the fact that LW itself isn’t smiley friendly. An interesting project would be to gather data from the real life facebook pages of both males and females on LW and see if a discrepancy shows up there. People would have to volunteer their facebooks for you to look at which might cause a bit of a selection effect. (The less trusting/interpersonal types might be less likely to both volunteer their fb, and to use smileys)
The reason I say this, is because I severely limit my smiley usage on LW.
One user who’s part of the female dataset has already reported cutting out the smileys deliberately. As I say, I don’t put much faith in the results.
I did consider scraping lesswrong.com for data, but a) I wasn’t sure of the etiquette b) I don’t have a list of female users (maybe I can get them from the survey?) c) it’s a lot more coding.
RE: smileys in formal settings. I grew up speaking Russian, which is a language that has a formal-you pronoun, and I spent most of my school life feeling really weird writing “you” to adults in emails, because it felt too friendly and rude and presumptuous. Badly-raised child! I generally don’t use smileys in professional emails unless the other person has used them first or I really want to make a nerdy joke. But sometimes that policy feels weird if your co-workers in meatspace are fun, joking, informal people. Why would you limit yourself with people if you know you don’t have to?
Also, I will add this link to a relevant post you might find interesting, mostly because I didn’t notice this until the author pointed it out but also because I’m proud that I managed to hunt it down. (It is unfortunately not that well-written and touches on a lot of mind-killer topics.)
I am male, don’t associate smileys with femininity, and often use them in most text conversations and also posts online if I would smile in meatspace when saying what I’m typing (which usually is not the case in work emails). It can occasionally put me on edge if I type with someone who does not use them, in a conversation where I would expect them to smile in meatspace.
But I don’t think a comment has to directly serve my terminal values to be worth upvoting.
Agreed, and I may be overbroadening “terminal value” by applying it as “things worth upvoting.” A comment being “nice” makes it more likely that comment will be “helpful,” and I think “helpful” comments are worth upvoting; do I think comments that are nice but not helpful are worth upvoting? Not really, and a policy to upvote for niceness alone won’t capture that value judgment.
But it could be that niceness is the best cause or proxy for desired consequence, and thus is worthwhile.
If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.
Signal to noise.
A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader. For people looking to exchange useful information on the internet, it will act as noise that needs to be filtered to get to the useful stuff.
A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader.
With the important exception that it reinforces the behavior in question, which is actionable and useful information. The trouble is that this is mostly useful for the recipient, and not as useful for bystanders, and it is much more useful if the affirmation identifies the specific behavior it seeks to reinforce.
But if you’re trying to reinforce behavior, wouldn’t that also reinforce the behavior in the observers as well? Is public stroking more reinforcing? For some, in some context.
Here’s the thing. Don’t you feel it’s rather cheeky, or at least manipulative, to be responding to people for the explicit purpose of reinforcing their behavior? “Good boy!”
Maybe the consequentialists like it, or think they do, but it rubs me the wrong way. Somewhere along this thread I thanked someone for bringing me the word “dysphemism”. I wasn’t trying to reinforce his behavior, I was expressing appreciation and gratitude.
I don’t like to “handle” people. I don’t like to be “handled”. I find it disrespectful. Besides the mental energy involved to handle people, that’s probably where my aversion to it comes from.
Apparently, some people want to be handled. They consider it being nice and friendly. Considerate. I guess I can see that, even while noting that this fact doesn’t alter my aversion and distaste for handling.
This is one of the big reasons that niceness annoys me. I think I’ve developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to comments like “good job!” because I don’t want to be manipulated by them. Even when the speaker is just trying to express gratitude, and has no knowledge of behaviorism, “good job!” annoys me. I think it’s an issue of one-place vs. two-place predicates—I have no problem with people saying “I like that” or “I find that interesting”.
If I let my emotional system process both statements without filtering, I think “good job!” actually does reinforce the behavior regardless, while “I like that!” will depend on my relation to the speaker. I know that my emotional system is susceptible to these behaviorist things, and I think that’s part of why I’ve developed a negative reaction to them—to avoid letting them through to a place where they can influence me.
Another reason niceness annoys me is that it satisfies my craving for recognition and approval, but it’s like empty calories. If I can get a quick fix of approval by posting a cat picture on facebook, then it will decrease my motivation to actually accomplish anything I consider worthwhile. This is one of the many reasons I avoid social media and think it encourages complacence. (Also, I get the impression that constant exposure to social media is decreasing people’s internal motivation and increasing their external motivation. But I’m not sure if I believe this becaue it’s true, or because I enjoy being a curmudgeon.)
For me, it’s associated with positive encouragement after someone screws up on a team sport. No, it wasn’t a good job, it was a screw up. It’s epitomized by a very sweet, very positive Christian girl in PE class, while playing volleyball. The contrast of a hypersaccharine “good job!” and the annoyance at the screw up had me grinding my teeth.
The more general issue on “good job” is the inherent condescension. I am your superior, here to judge your performance and pat you on the head to encourage you to improve. No thanks.
That goes a little with your point about the difference between “good job” and “I like that”. I made a similar distinction between “You’re wrong”/”That’s wrong” and “I disagree”. It does seem less annoying or insulting to have people phrase their opinion in terms of themselves, instead of an objective fact about you or reality.
Convey your evaluation as your evaluation, instead of as a objective fact. Seems to feel better for the issues we’re annoyed with.
But do the nicies want to hear “good jobs” that the meanies don’t?
The problem with the comment was that it wasn’t clear what it was a disagreement with—the facts referred to, particular facts referred to, or the implicitly proposed community behavior (as I took it).
In that way, this is one of the worst kinds of comment—ambiguous disagreement. They haven’t made any effort to be clear. You don’t know what they’ve said, so it invites requests for clarification. It otherwise invites counter disagreement, based on an assumption of what was disagreed with. On the bright side, no one followed up.
But if he was just disagreeing with a proposed policy, and made that clear, it would have been an appropriate comment in my estimation.
And “I disagree” on a substantive fact is not really a negative affirmation in the sense I meant. It is a not very informative sharing of a personal attitude. In general, I find “I agree” noise to be filtered. But I wouldn’t call that comment unpleasant at all. It lacked all emotional tone for me.
While I am personally actively trying to become more warm and friendly in my personal demeanor, and think that nicer comments are, ceteris paribus, more effective comments, I worry about seeking to institute niceness as a terminal rather than instrumental value. If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.
But it does seem like niceness as a terminal value is strongly linked to a more balanced gender ratio. Increased niceness will attract more women, and attracting more women will increase the amount of niceness.
It seems that the current population of LW undervalues niceness relative to the general population, but I can’t tell if that’s necessary or contingent. How would we know?
Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.
One thing that may be on some folks’ mind is that expressions of appreciation that don’t also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely “I’m glad you posted that!” I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don’t know. I think I’d be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don’t endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)
I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing “mere” approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
I agree with your second paragraph completely, and I would be averse to comments whose only content was “niceness”. I’m on LW for intellectual discussions, not for feel-goodism and self-esteem boosts.
I think it’s worth distinguishing niceness from respect here. I define niceness to be actions done with the intention of making someone feel good about him/herself. Respect, on the other hand, is an appreciation for another person’s viewpoint and intelligence. Respect is saying “We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner.”
When I began this comment with “I agree with your second paragraph”, I wasn’t saying it to be nice. I wasn’t trying to give fubarobfusco warm fuzzy happiness-feelings. I was saying it because I respect fubarobfusco’s thoughts on this matter, to the point where I wanted to comment and add my own elaborations to the discussion.
There’s not much purpose to engaging in an intellectual discussion with someone who doesn’t respect your ideas. If they’re not even going to listen to what you have to say, or consider that you might be correct, then what’s the point? So I think respect is integral to intellectual discussions, and therefore it’s worthwhile to demonstrate it verbally in comments. But I consider this completely separate from complimenting people for the sake of being nice.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn’t respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
(For what it’s worth, I’m female, albeit a rather distant outlier. I’d emphatically prefer that “niceness” not become a community norm. For me, it takes a lot of mental effort to be nice to people (because I have to focus on my internal model of their feelings, as well as on the discussion at hand), and I get annoyed when people are gratuitously nice to me. This post makes me wonder if I’m unusual among LW females in holding this opinion.)
Your comment has me wondering whether some folks expect niceness and respect to correlate. I’ve noticed some social contexts where fake niceness seems to be expected to cloak lack of respect. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people around here are embittered from experiences with that.
No kidding.
(And I’m having difficulty responding to the rest of this without using unhelpful words such as “normals” or “mundanes”, so I’ll leave it at that.)
The human brain is fallible. That includes assertions made about internal experiences—such assertions may be wrong. If person A has reason X to believe that the result of person B’s introspection is wrong, which is the more respectful course of action?
person A : person B, your account of your internal experiences may be wrong because of X.
person A : meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.
How about a third option:
Person A : Person B, my model predicted Y because of evidence X. But your experience sounds like ~Y, so I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your ~Y experiences!
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
A non-gender example:
Atheist: Pentecostal, my model predicted that people would go home from church feeling bored, guilty, or self-righteous, because former church people I know talk about those experiences, and church people who are active in politics seem to be big on guilt and self-righteousness. But your experience sounds like church is a fun party, that you go home from feeling giddy and high. I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your religious experiences!
My communicating my differing perception to the other person in Option 1 is my invitation to have them update me.
Going through the song and dance of your third option is not required with some people, making them more efficient partners at finding the truth. I find people who require constant ego stroking in this manner, or who give it, literally tiresome in an intellectual endeavor.
It seems to me that flat contradiction without any communication of being open to being convinced is a strongly suboptimal invitation to update the speaker. This is especially so in cases of strongly asymmetric information (either direction).
‘Song and dance’ appears to me to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for ‘communicating what you mean’ as opposed to ‘indicating something in the general vein and hoping the receiver figures out what you meant’.
Edited to add: option A is much more reasonable than I credited it, so while I’ll stand by my first paragraph above, it’s not particularly relevant to the post above. And yes, option 3 could be streamlined.
It works just fine with a lot of people.
For me, you can take that I’m open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are. Aren’t you?
Thank you! I’ve been looking for that word forever.
Not really, because ‘communicating what you mean’ was not what I meant. I was referring to kabuki dance of your ritualized formula for disagreement to stroke a person’s ego so that he doesn’t feel a threat to his status by my disagreeing with him.
I don’t think the fellow is really confused about whether I’m open to being convinced of the error of my ways. If I say “I think you’re wrong because of X”, does not the human impulse to reciprocity sanction and invite him to respond in kind?
Does that fellow really need it explained to him that if I disagree with him on when the bus is coming, that he is free and invited to disagree with me right back? I don’t think so.
He: The bus is coming at 3:00.
Me: No, it’s coming at 3:10; that’s when I caught it yesterday.
He: But yesterday was Friday. Saturday has a different schedule.
That seems like an everyday, ordinary human conversation to me, that no one should get all excited or offended about.
I strongly suspect that tone and body language are a key component in whether the statement “that’s not right” is interpreted as “I disagree, let’s talk about it” or “shut up and think what I think”.
I further suspect that a tendency to interpret ambiguous or missing subtext in a negative or overly critical way correlates strongly with being “thin-skinned”. This is partly based on having both of these characteristics myself. A potential counter-argument here is that it is not “rational” or useful to always assume the worst in personal interactions if you have evidence to follow instead (Have people generally meant the worst things possible when I have been unsure in the past?), but the important thing to remember here is that we are not dealing with people who have had time to be trained in that way. A martial arts master does not go all out against a beginner knowing that they will one day be able to handle it.
It would be unwise to alienate a group of potential rationalists if there is a relatively simple way to avoid it. If it would cripple the discourse or otherwise be quite detrimental to implement any sort of fix, then I would not advocate that course of action. However, I believe that to not be the case.
At this time, I would like to agree with RichardKennaway’s observation that Plasmon’s option A was quite different from the situation posited by Submitter B, and further agree with his hypothesis that even option A is some sort of improvement (largely due to the word “may”).
My conclusion is that a few changes of word choices would be a low-cost, medium-reward first step in the right direction. This would include using words such as “may”, particularly in the context of someone’s perceived domain of expertise or cherished belief. Also, explicitly starting an evidence based conversation while voicing your disagreement.
Example: I disagree with your statement that “Most civilized people are [open to being convinced]”. As (anecdotal) evidence, I submit the large number of Americans who are closemindedly religious.
If one considers sufficiently impersonal topics like bus schedules? Yes, for the most part.
Microcultures with strong elements of authority will have a much harder time with this assumption, even in horizontal interactions. I would not call all of these uncivilized, though I’m not a fan of them.
It’s not complicated to frame a conversation as a search for truth as opposed to a vs. argument. Many people go overboard in this. I agree that this is obnoxious. I maintain that a flat contradiction is in many cases insufficient, especially in those cases where the matter at hand is contentious or personal, or there is any degree of hostility or unease between the conversants.
Option A wasn’t a flat contradiction only. In fact, the original person wrote it up in a more pussy footing way than I would.
Flat contradiction would be “you’re wrong”. I agree that’s not an invitation to further discussion.
My usual comment would be of the form: “That’s wrong. Blah di blah isn’t blah di blee, it’s hooty hooty.”
It’s “you’re wrong” plus some evidence on which I based my disagreement. Would that be unclear to you personally, that you’re welcome to disagree and cite evidence for your disagreement in turn?
Maybe we could try an example so that we’re talking about something concrete. I just don’t think it’s a mystery. I think that a great many people get very touchy when it comes to being disagreed with. I’m of another species that likes to be disagreed with, because then we have a contradiction to resolve, and that’s fun and potentially productive.
I’m sorry: for reasons I do not understand, I misunderstood what you were referring to with ‘option A’. Your response made perfect sense and mine did not.
You thought I meant “flat contradiction”?
That didn’t seem like an accurate characterization of option A to me, so I gave a concrete example:
and a concrete example of the option A alternative:
It would have been better to be more concrete.
Was that the issue?
I feel that in these more personal discussions abstract terms gets used, and each side is picturing a very different part of the spectrum for their concretes.
I think it was that I kind of short-circuited ‘option 1’ into meaning ‘the first option mentioned’, and from there ‘what the guy said in the first place’. This is not what you were referring to by ‘option 1’, and even though it’s an understandable error, I still should have been able to pick up on it from the context of the parent and grandparent comment to yours.
Well, except that you would not be actually stating an invitation or request for more information. You would be assuming that the other person will interpret contradiction as an invitation for further discussion rather than as a dismissal, insult, threat, or other sort of speech act.
(Humans use language for a lot of other purposes besides the merely indicative, after all.)
If you say, “I’m having a party on Saturday,” some people in some situations will take this to mean that you are thereby inviting them to come to the party. Others will think that you are merely stating a fact about your own social life. Still others will think that you are excluding them, just as if you had added, ”… and you’re not invited, you disgusting worm!”
Some people hear an invitation. Some hear a statement of fact. Some hear an exclusionary insult.
If you want to make it clear that you are inviting them, you say, “I’m having a party on Saturday, would you like to come?” or ”… and you’re invited!”
This is not bullshit song-and-dance ego-stroking. It is clear communication, and in particular a way to address people’s differing priors about what your communication could mean. It probably depends on recognizing that people have different priors, and that they arrived at those priors legitimately.
(For that matter, if expressing curiosity about other people’s experiences is an effective way to get data from them, then rationalists should practice doing it a lot until it is automatic and cheap System 1 behavior!)
Yes. In this context, and most contexts, that’s my null hypothesis. Isn’t it yours? People are here to discuss, and not dismiss, insult, or threaten.
Do you think I’m here to dismiss, insult, or threaten people? Do you think a large percentage of people here are? Do you think that anyone who says “you’re wrong” is? That strikes me as a bizarre and thoroughly inaccurate prior. Or I certainly believe and hope it is.
Am I wrong? Is it just foolish innocence on my part to think that people are here to discuss, and not stomp on other people to social climb or satisfy sadistic impulses? It wouldn’t be the first time. In other contexts, yeah, there’s a lot of that going on. And it admittedly took me a long time to figure that out. But I don’t see it here. The trouble is, if it were, most of the people who know aren’t going to tell you.
You’re talking intentions, they’re talking effects. This leads to you defecting by accident.
Talking about intentions is to blurt out something stupidly? I’m not following your point.
I was referring more to the comment thread, which is filled with detailed writing in support of sending blunt communication while ignoring that such behaviour ends up losing in practice. If you haven’t actually read that article and its comment thread, you really should.
I read the article, but not the thread.
Losing, in what game? Are you sure EY knows the game everyone is playing? I think he is making implicit assumptions about motivations that are incorrect.
I disagree with his strategic analysis. In some contexts I would consider it correct. Yes, I knuckle under and be what “normal people” want me to be, to avoid the costs of being myself, just as all those normal people are busy being what they think other people want them to be.
But where I can, I seek to escape that mutual cage. Internet forums are a place where escape is possible, because the normals no longer have an overwhelming majority, or might not even have a majority at all, and the cost of anyone’s disapproval online is less.
Dale Carnegie teaches you to be the person other people want you to be; I’d rather find the people who like who I want to be, and want to be who I like.
An anecdote from my dissertation adviser. He was having much the same discussion with me, telling me how professors in Asia were allowed less direct intellectual confrontation. Perhaps EY would be proud.
But the discussion went on to the joy of moving to the US, exemplified by another professor he knew, who responded to someone else in a discussion by gleefully retorting “I Disagree! I Disagree! I Disagree!” Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last! Free to be honest, free to be open, free to be who you are.
I want to sit at the table where they’re dealing that game. It seems like there are enough people of my ilk at this party for us to have a few tables. If the cool kids don’t want to sit at the nerd tables, that’s fine, and hardly anything new.
Not really, no. People use language for a hell of a lot of other things besides making statements of fact at each other. I expect that in any given speech act, a speaker may be doing a lot of things: stating facts, affirming or challenging a social relation with the listener, causing the listener to have expectations about the speaker’s future actions (promises, threats, plans, etc.), and so on. And that a lot of these things may be going on unconsciously.
If someone tells you that the way you speak gives the impression that you are arrogantly dismissing them, you could respond by merely instructing them (in the very same tone that they were talking about) that you do not intend to arrogantly dismiss them. However, doing that is not likely to be very convincing!
Yes, people use language in many ways.
But I should have been more specific.
In your prior for Less Wrong discussions, when someone responds to a statement of yours by saying that you’re wrong, and cites evidence for his claim, what are the probabilities you place on the following potential motivations for his reply—he wants to discuss the point, he is threatening you, he is dismissing you, he is insulting you, other?
Sorry, I should have been more specific — I can tell because you’re asking a question that would only make sense in a different context. My probabilities about whether you intend to be threatening are are not at issue here.
At issue in this thread is that some portion of the audience are not sticking around — and are forming negative conclusions about LW — because the words here come across as hostile, unfriendly, cold, and so on. This is a danger to LW’s goals.
This is a matter of instrumental rationality, not only epistemic rationality. We want to accomplish something with words, not merely possess accurate beliefs in our own solipsistic internal monologues. So we have to ask, are our uses of words accomplishing the goals that we care about?
If you emit sentences that are consistently misinterpreted, and you are informed of this, you have a few options of what to do. You could conclude ① that your audience is listening wrong, and needs to correct their assumptions about you before they will be able to understand you; or ② that you are speaking wrong, and you need to correct your assumptions about your audience before they will be able to understand you.
If you care about getting your meaning across, which of these conclusions is more likely to give you the ability to accomplish that goal? Either one is consistent with the evidence; but which conclusion strengthens you, and which weakens you?
You can’t reach into your audience’s minds and force them to interpret your words differently.
You can’t force them to stick around and listen to you correct their assumptions, either.
You can change the way you speak.
Concluding that you are misinterpreted because your audience is listening wrong, or is coming into the conversation with crazy priors, weakens you. Thinking that way would make you incapable of fixing the situation; less able to accomplish goals by speaking. Concluding that you are misinterpreted because you have misspoken, or failed to understand where your audience is coming from, gives you the power to fix the situation and accomplish goals. This strengthens you.
Well, failing at epistemic rationality because we prioritized PR over truth-seeking is an even bigger danger to LW’s goals.
Maybe I missed it; did you give the same speech about how empowering it is to focus on what you can change about yourself to those who are taking offense at the speech of others? You understand you could have, right?
Not if it’s true.
If it’s true, knowing the truth strengthens me. Just because I think it’s true, doesn’t mean I can’t choose to adjust my speech to them.
And yes, when someone has a false impression, and wants to have an accurate one, you can often change their minds by offering evidence for them to update on.
And assuming that I’ve mispoken does weaken me. It assumes I can “fix” the situation by speaking differently. Ok, compared to what have I misspoken? Compared to preemptively changing my speech patterns so that those with extremely high priors of hostile intent from me are less likely to take offense? Do I have a better alternative?
As a first cut, I’m better off talking to people who don’t assume hostility from my style of speech, who can talk to me ‘as is’ in a productive manner. Seems to be a number of such people. To the extent that they’re similar to me, they will be annoyed and possibly offended by speech acts which seem aimed at managing their potential hurt feelings over my disagreements with their opinions. But even removing these emotional factors from the equation, my attempts to manage their feelings take time and effort from me, and wastes time and effort for them on issues extraneous to the topic at hand. At best, altering our styles will waste our time, and at worst, annoy the hell out of each other. That’s a cost.
I’m to bear that cost, for what?
To talk to others who find my manner hostile? Should I unilaterally cave to every demand that I change my manner when they say they feel hurt or offended? On a game theoretic basis alone, that seems like a bad idea. I am to be malleable to their preferences. Ok, I willing to look at that.
I have been having discussions on adjusting my speech patterns to avoid impressions of hostility in others. Even came up with an idea that someone thought was a good step forward—say “I disagree” instead of “You’re wrong.”
And them? Are they to be malleable to my preferences? Not that I’ve seen.
Where are the discussions of the “offended or hurt” adjusting their priors to better reflect the reality that “meanies” like me really aren’t here to insult, offend, or demean them? Or even where are the discussions that assume the priors are correct, but look for ways to suck it up and develop a thicker skin to better deal the hateful bastards trying to hurt them?
I don’t see those. What I’ve seen are offended rejections of any suggestion they might work on changing their reactions, by them, and often by those defending them.
Why is change a one way street?
I was the person who said going from “You’re wrong” to “I disagree” was an important step. I’m glad it registered.
Becoming less thin-skinned takes time and sometimes a good bit of work. You don’t know where any particular person is in that process.
You might be in a Pareto’s Law situation—it’s not that you need to avoid offending the most fragile people, a small amount of effort might lead to not offending 85% of thin-skinned people.
Yes, but I didn’t want to finger you as the culprit.
Indeed.
My concern is that some seem to consider it a crime to suggest that this would be a desirable thing, or to suggest that people adjust their inaccurate priors for hostility downwards when interpreting the actions of others.
The nicies want the meanies to try harder to be understood.OK, fine. But if the meanies suggest that the nicies try harder to understand, that’s just one more thing for the nicies to get offended about.
I would note to all the nicies—if LW feels hostile to you, you’ve led a very sheltered existence. I’m from the HItchens party of debate, that prefers a sharp point be embellished with a barb. That’s part of the fun, in the same way that a decleating hit in football is part of the fun. And that’s not even hostility, that’s just style. And that’s a common style.
By my estimate, LW has a very “Just the Facts Ma’am” culture. Going beyond the facts and putting any relish into a debate is rarely done, and frowned on when it happens. Maybe there were nastier times in the long long ago that led to this culture. LW does seem relatively unique in the equal mix of LIbertarians and Progressives.
And you’re right about Pareto’s law too.
FWIW, one of the things that caught my attention about this community, and encouraged me to stick around, was the emphasis on valuing accuracy and precision (which I value) without the “barbs are part of the fun/putting relish into a debate” style you describe here (which I dislike intensely).
There are lots of “nice is more important than true” spaces on the net, and lots of “being unpleasant to people is part of the fun” spaces; and an astonishing number of spaces that are both. A space that manages to even approximate being neither is rare.
I can understand someone disliking the barbs.
Barbs are largely the part of the classical rhetoric that play on biases in the listener. That’s probably true of niceness as well.
And I agree that the Lesswrong tone seems relatively unique, particularly given the broad and general nature of discussion topics, and the variety in political opinions.
One of the good things which contributes to the tone here is people reliably getting credit for saying they’ve changed their mind for some good reason. I can’t think of any other site where that’s in play.
Isn’t it peculiar that most people are otherwise?
Way back when, I remember discussing exactly that point on the Extropians list. In many ways a similar group to here. But some very smart guys were arguing that it was a huge loss of face to admit you were wrong, and better to deny or evade (I’m sure they put it more convincingly than that).
When someone is wrong, graciously admitting and accepting it scores major points with me.
Thinking about it, maybe I can make a better argument for denial. There are two issues, being wrong, and whether one admits being wrong. If admitting being wrong is what largely determines whether you are perceived as being wrong, then denying the error maintains status.
For people driven by social truth, which is likely the majority, truth is scored on attitude, power, authority, popularity, solidarity, fealty, etc. The validity of the arguments don’t matter much. For people driven by epistemic truth, the arguments are what matters, so denying the plain truth of them is seen as a personality defect, while admitting it a virtue.
The thing is, it’s not that the deniers are aliens. I am. I and my kind. For us, in an argument, it’s the facts that matter, and letting other considerations intrude on that is intruding the rules of the normals into the game. That’s largely what this whole thread is about.
One side says we’ll be more effective playing the normals game. It’s a game my kind strongly prefers not to play. Having to behave as normals is ineffective for us, and the opportunity to play by our rules is extremely valuable to us.
Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning describes his various encounters with unsporting conduct and cheating in chess tournaments and competitive tai chi. He wrote that he’d developed the approach to just work so hard at developing his own skill at the game that he was able to ignore the distractions the opponent was trying to pull and proceed to win anyway. He claimed that the opponents would generally become agitated and careless once they noticed that they couldn’t get any sort of upset out of him.
Discussions aren’t games with rules, but you might still get something out of the idea that social gamesmanship is basically just compensating poor skill with cheating, and you need to work hard enough on your epistemic skills that it won’t stop you even when it does get thrown in your way.
Well, I’d say that social gamesmanship isn’t cheating, it’s playing a different game.
Being very good with your epistemic skills has mileage socially too, and importantly, mileage with people with personal properties you’re more likely concerned about. And refraining from the usual types of social gamesmanship earns you points with those people as well.
I’m actually very fond of being told I was right. (I only figured that out when a friend mentioned that he’s very fond of other people admitting they were wrong.)
It’s true that there’s currently a belief that it’s very bad to tell people they should be less thin-skinned. People generally want a social environment which suits their preferences, and while it’s not likely that anyone will get a total victory, it’s certainly possible to push the balance towards your preferences.
Thin-skinned people are apt to hear a demand that they be thicker-skinned as “You shouldn’t care about the way I keep hurting you.” The more aggressive among them have started shoving back. Interesting times.
IMO when you write, you should be asking yourself: “What’s the worst way someone could interpret this?”, because surely, someone will interpret it that way. And when you read, you should ask yourself: “What’s the nicest way I could interpret this?”, because that’s probably the way they meant it.
Postel’s law FTW!
When dealing with people, habitually searching for only the worst that can happen is a very bad habit, in my experience. It’s a habit I’ve been trying to break. Through availability bias, your world becomes a horrible place. Your priors are distorted toward the bad, and you miss opportunities. Too careful, too risk averse, too distrusting.
I think that’s the right policy, even if it’s not true. It will generally be the more productive assumption—particularly for online forums.
Just work out the cases. Search for everything that can happen. Either a person has basic good will towards you, or they don’t.
If they do, the nice interpretation is likely right, and you understand someone with good will toward you. That makes for a good discussion. Further, if the guy meant it in a nasty way, your response as if he were nice might soften his mood, or not. If it softens, things have at least improved. If not, most observers will likely think him a schmuck, and he is just very unlikely to be a good discussion partner anyway.
If they do have good will, but you assume that it is bad, you’re likely limiting the positive outcomes available with them. If they don’t have good will and you assume they don’t, you have maybe avoided some aggravation and saved yourself some time.
Having worked out the general case, you don’t have to do a de novo analysis each time. Commit to the policy, and blithely move on. Sometimes someone won’t like you. Ok, you knew that was going to happen.
This is what I’ve tried to do in general with my own defensiveness with people. Don’t focus on the worst that a person might do. Try to have an accurate prior on intentions (most people are not con men or mass murderers, and they’re not really out to get me—I’m not that important to them.) Pick a decision based on an analysis of of what their intent and attitudes might be, and the differing outcomes based on your actions.
Most of the analysis applies, except real world encounters carry more serious risks. I live in the Seattle are, which is pretty safe and so real world risks are limited, though I realize not everyone lives in such a safe place, so YMMV.
In general, the best strategy is to act assuming approval and good will, because those situations present the best opportunities.
I previously relayed an anecdote from a book on this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/s0/where_recursive_justification_hits_bottom/4wsn
Ah, but that wasn’t what I meant. I just meant to say that you should be careful when writing, because even when 99%+ of people won’t have any problems with what you write, someone is sure to misinterpret it, if it possibly can be. Communication is hard, and written communication even more so.
I’d say more briefly “someone is sure to misinterpret it”, because it is always possible to do so. There’s going to be a level of misinterpretation no mater how you agonize over what you write.
I agree with you that the underlying good will or lack of it is a crucial factor. I’m still trying to figure out what tends to build good will or damage it.
One problem is, what builds good will with one may erode good will in another. Life is full of trade offs.
“Offended or hurt” doesn’t enter into it. This isn’t about hazy feelings; it’s about hard practical effects of actions: do we accomplish what we want to accomplish?
Let’s say you and your interlocutor disagreed about your intention in saying that they were wrong (about whatever). Your interlocutor believes that your intention was for them to shut up and go away, but actually that wasn’t what you meant at all; you meant to invite more discussion.
They are wrong about you.
And you want them to have a correct belief about you.
But … how can you cause your interlocutor to possess a correct belief about your intention? You could lecture them about how wrong they are to have misinterpreted you. But that won’t work if they will take your lecturing as meaning “shut up and go away” … and may very well do so.
That’s all I’m saying. You can’t force people to understand you, or to want to understand you. If you really want to get your ideas across (because you care about those ideas — not because you’re trying to find people who will easily like you) then you use the try harder which probably involves restating them in a way that doesn’t repel people.
Or … well, you could say that you never really cared about that kind of person’s understanding, and really you never wanted a discussion with that kind of person.
But in that case … they weren’t wrong about you, were they?
There are plenty of people who would be correct in concluding that I would bear them hostility if I knew what they were like.
They would be incorrect to conclude that the priors I assign to that type of person among LW is very high, and incorrect to assume that my asserting that someone is wrong indicates I have concluded the person is that type of person, so that my comment indicates hostile intent.
Perhaps I’ve given you an incorrect impression.
While I have proselytizing tendencies, that’s not my fundamental goal, particularly in a forum disagreement. Given my limited resources of me, my proselytizing attitude is to sing to those with the ears to hear. People who are assuming that I am hostile are not the low hanging fruit in that regard.
But people who assume I am hostile can be perfectly fine partners in a disagreement. In a disagreement, I am primarily hoping to change my own mind, whether in correcting an error, or clarifying hazy positions of my own. They might even be better, in that they won’t cut me slack when I am sloppy. People who dislike you can be perfectly useful in a discussion. The enemy of my enemy (our ignorance) is my friend.
But I find it strange that you think I should find it hopelessly futile to try to change a person’s assumptions about my intent, but a productive use of my time to try to change their minds about some other fact of reality.
Indeed I agree that it is possible, and probably desirable, to phrase the argument less bluntly than I did. However, it seems to me that submitter B is arguing against making such arguments at all, not arguing to make them in a more polite fashion.
Furthermore, here of all places, “If you (think you) posses evidence that I do not, show it and update me!” should be a background assumption, not something that needs to be put as a disclaimer on any potentially-controversial statement.
I rather doubt that submitter B would have had a problem with, “Really? Why? I ask because from out here it seems like you’re a thinker.”
Certainly the cited reasons for the actual statement being objectionable do not apply to this modified form.
She writes:
Which I read to mean that she is not opposed to them expressing confusion or saying something like “Huh, you always seemed more like a pure thinker to me.” (as opposed to “No way. You’re totally a thinker.”) It seems precisely how the statement is phrased and how the discussion is conducted that is at issue here.
After the discussion, I think I’ve got a more concise option that achieves this end.
Option 4:
I disagree, because blah blah blah.
Concise, and makes it about my differing perceptions and evaluations. Better than my original “you’re wrong, because blah blah.” I doubt that this entirely satisfies the nice camp, but I think it’s a baby step in their direction.
I think it’s actually a fairly large step, but I’m probably a moderate on niceness.
I think you are framing the question in order to presuppose a conclusion. This is an error that is just as endemic on LessWrong as it is everywhere else.
The first alternative is designed to look nice, respectful, and false, and the second to look nasty, disrespectful, and true. The bottom line is “Niceness is dishonesty”, and the example was invented to support it.
Compare this with an example from the original post:
This does not fall into either of those categories. It looks like this:
person A: no you’re not!
Which is what person A would say if they spoke honestly while thinking “meh, person B can’t handle the truth, I’ll just shut up and say nothing.” Person A appears to be running an internal monologue that goes: “I know the truth. You do not know the truth. I have reasons for my beliefs, therefore I am right. Therefore your reasons for your beliefs must be wrong. Therefore you should take correction from me. If you don’t, you’re even more wrong. You can’t handle the truth. I can handle the truth. Therefore I am right. (continue on auto-repeat)”
That, at least, is what I see, when I see those two alternatives.
The real problem here is what person A is actually thinking, and the invisibility of that process to themselves. For it is written:
As long as A is running that monologue, how to express themselves is going to look to them like a conflict between “niceness” and “truth”. And however they express themselves, that monologue is likely to come through to B, because it will leak out all over.
I was not arguing about the specific example given in the OP, where he (the person with whom submitter B was arguing) was apparently unable or unwilling to provide evidence for his assertion that she was mistaken about herself. You, and submitter B, may be entirely correct about the person she was arguing with.
Perhaps I am overestimating the sanity of this place, but I do hope (and expect) that if similar arguments occur on this forum, evidence will (should) be put forward. In this place dedicated, among other things, to awareness of the many failure modes of the human brain, to how you (yes you. And I, too) may be totally wrong about so many things, in this place, the hypothesis “I may be mistaken about myself; I should listen to the other person’s evidence on this matter” is not a hypothesis that should be ignored. (note how submitter B does not consider this hypothesis in her example, and indeed she may have been correct to not consider it, but as stated I’m arguing in general here).
The homeopath who has treated thousands of patients, should listen to the high-school chemistry student who has evidence that homeopathy doesn’t work. The physics crackpot who has worked on their theory of everything for decades should listen to the student of physics who points out that it fails to predict the results of an experiment. And the human, who has spent all their life as a human in a human body, should listen to the student of psychology, who may know many things about themselves that they are yet ignorant of.
Wow.
After reading just what was presented in the anecdote, you have strong enough belief that the submitter was wrong about her own mind, and her programmer boyfriend was right, that you’ll compare her to frauds and crackpots whose ideas have vanishingly small probability.
Where do you get that probability mass from?
No, no, certainly not, I made it clear that I was arguing in general and could not comment on the specific example given (come on, I say this twice in the post you quote).
Let me repeat the argument she made
This sort of argument, “I have observed this phenomenon for far longer than you did, therefore I am vastly more likely to be right about this than you are”, is very vulnerable to confirmation bias (among other biases), where the speaker will more easily remember events that fit her hypothesis than events which didn’t. This argument is a stereotypical crackpot argument, I gave two examples but I can (alas) give many more. It is virtually never a good argument. Someone who is actually sitting on top of mountains of evidence for a certain hypothesis need not resort to this argument, they can just show the evidence!
How often have I seen crackpots use this argument? Dozens of times. How often have I seen non-crackpots use it? I recall only one occasion, two if you include the OP. How often have I seen people who have actually carefully collected lots of evidence use this argument? Never. (Is my memory on this subject susceptible to confirmation bias? Ha! Yes, of course it is.). Is it any wonder then, that my prior for “people who use this argument are crackpots” is somewhat large?
How is this relevant to the example given? We cannot expect everyone to continuously gather relatively unbiased evidence on their own behaviour, can we? Indeed we cannot. Then, we should also not be extremely confident in the models of ourselves which we have constructed. If someone challenges these models, what should we do?
Most likely, the person challenging our models does not actually have good evidence and is just attempting to make some status move. This is the most common and least interesting possibility, ignoring him / breaking up with him / telling him to stop doing it …. may all be good courses of action (yes, I disagree less with the OP than you may think)
If evidence is actually put forward (which it wasn’t in the OP example, but which I hope it would be on less wrong), you can provide evidence of your own “but in the past, when X happened, I did Y, which is compatible with my self-model but not with your model of me”. Ideally, the arguers should update after the exchange of evidence. (“I observed myself for millions of minutes” does not count as evidence exchange, since the other person already knew that)
...
In brief, Tu quoque.
As an A, I’ll tell you what my deluded perceptions are of my internal dialogue. If I say “you’re wrong, because blah blah”, that’s because I am presuming you can handle the truth, otherwise I wouldn’t bother offering my comment, as indicated by the original poster.
That’s what you do when you think the person can’t handle the truth—you shrug and move on.
I think I’ve identified two Person A values relevant to this discussion:
Expressing honest disagreement is a sign of respect.
Crafting that disagreement to manage feelings is a sign of disrespect.
Two different species—those who manipulate things, and those who manipulate people. They don’t get along too well. There’s probably a third that does both, but I don’t think they’re large in number.
That’s a good interpretation, but I wonder if status is a simpler lens. Defining people and their traits is a high-status thing; the guy retorting that she’s a thinker moves power from her to him in a way that suggesting wouldn’t.
Respect also seems subjective; I have basically stopped stating opinions around a friend whose rationality I do not respect because I don’t think discussing contentious subjects with them is a good use of either of our times. If they say that they’re a good judge of character, and I can think of three counterexamples, I’ll only state those counterexamples if I respect them enough to think they can handle it.
I also wonder about how much respect is subject-specific, and how much it’s global. I can easily imagine someone who I trust when it comes to mathematics but don’t trust when it comes to introspection.
This made me think of something irrelevant to your post, but relevant to the topic. I’ve been told that women are socialized not to overtly disagree with or otherwise oppose men. (this usually comes up in the context of careful date non-refusals) I tend to interpret such things as vaguely insulting, along the lines of saying I can’t handle the truth. (or refusal)
Is this interpretation shared by anyone here? What do the women here think of it?
I agree it’s insulting.
I also believe that when people are rationally frightened of a group, the fear can take generations to fade even when conditions get better.
Perhaps I should update to interpret it as “I don’t know if you can handle the truth and I can’t take the chance.” I guess that’s easier to swallow, at least for strangers.
That sounds like an improvement.
More generally, I think that if you focus on a single interpretation of someone’s motives when you don’t have a lot of information, and the interpretation makes you angry, then you’re probably engaging in an emotional habit. I admit I’m mostly generalizing from one example on this.
Avoiding overt disagreements is solid advice for anyone who wants to be well-liked, because they are often a social cost to the disagreer, and primarily benefit the person they’re disagreeing with.
It’s not clear to me that the advice to not overtly disagree with men is as specific as it sounds, since it seems like overt female-female disagreements are also discouraged. To the extent that it is specific, I do suspect it is due to the physical risks involved.
Those are all things I’d have to discover about you. There are some here I consider worthwhile conversation partners because I recognize their usernames and have formed opinions of them.
I don’t expect respect from people who don’t know me, and I don’t even expect it from those that do know me. I am not due respect from anyone, I have to earn it, by their lights.
I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. Or maybe when they feel like they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. And this may happen while the disagree-er is completely oblivious to this perception, and I think it is a little bit on the disagree-er to add some padding of niceness?
Like you’re not going to be a bit careful if you’re in danger of accidentally stepping on people’s feet in real life, right? That has pretty little to do with respect and more to do with compassion. It’s a mutual understanding that human feet are squishy and hurt to be stepped on. Or you’d add niceness if you accidentally offend someone in a meatspace discussion? So why not here? I feel like it doesn’t take away from the discussion to say “Oh sorry! I really meant [this]” instead of “I said [this] not [that],” which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.
(Also, I feel like I’m the only person here that regularly uses exclamation marks. )
I feel like I’ve come across a lot of discussions where it’s pretty obvious that the parties involved are frustrated, but they don’t acknowledge it because there’s a little bit of that Spocklike rationalists-don’t-get-frustrated attitude still lingering around.
Hmm, I definitely see where you’re coming from, and I don’t (usually) want my comments to hurt anyone. If my comments were consistently upsetting people when I was just trying to have a normal conversation, then I would want to know about this and fix it—both because I actually do care about people’s feelings, and because I don’t want to prevent every single interesting person from conversing with me. It would take a lot of work, and it would go against my default conversational style, but it would be worth it in the long run.
However, it sounds more like there’s a cultural/gender difference on LW. That is, different people prefer different paddings of niceness. Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
So the question here is, should we change LW culture? I personally would prefer we didn’t, because I like the culture we have now. I don’t support rationalist evangelism, and I’m not bothered by the gender imbalance, so I don’t feel a need to lure more women onto LW by changing the culture. Is this unfair to rationalist women who would like to participate in LW discussions, but are put off by the lack of friendliness? Yes, it is. But similarly, if we encouraged more niceness padding, this would be unfair to the people who prefer a more bare-bones style of interaction.
(It could be that it’s easier to adjust in one direction—maybe it’s easier to grow accustomed to niceness padding than to the lack thereof. In that case, it might be worth the overhead.)
Regarding your example...
See, I would have classified this as “disrespect” rather than “unfriendliness”. In the first version, the person is admitting that he/she was unclear, and is trying to correct it—a staple of intellectual discussion, which often serves to elucidate things through careful analysis. In the second version, the person is saying “I’m right and you’re wrong”, which means that the discussion has devolved into an argument, instead of two people working together towards greater understanding.
What about these examples?
I would tend towards the second or third, personally. The first has “sorry” in it, which seems unnecessarily apologetic to me. People frequently state things unclearly and then have to elucidate them; it’s part of the normal discussion process, and not something to be sorry for. The fourth sounds unnecessarily abrupt to me (though I imagine it’d depend on the context). I’m curious what other people think w.r.t. these examples.
Personally, I find the niceness-padding to be perfectly well-calibrated for dealing with disagreements because people are thoughtful and respectful. I find it to be insufficient when dealing with people talking past each other. It’s really frustrating! This is a community full of interesting, intelligent people whose opinion I want to know … that sometimes aren’t bothering to carefully read what I wrote. And then not bothering to read carefully when I politely tell them that they misread what I wrote and clarify. So then I start thinking that this isn’t a coincidence, so maybe they don’t want to read what I write… ? So then I feel like they don’t like me even though I like them. Nooooo, sadness.
Here is how I see the difference: the people who think there’s too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it. The people who think there is insufficient niceness-padding are getting hurt.
This makes me personally err on the side of niceness. And while I understand that excessive niceness turns into clutter, I think that even the lowest of the four levels that you demonstrated doesn’t happen as often as it should in some discussions.
Also, it’s much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn’t want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
Yep, I agree! But I also want to clarify that, unlike a martial arts dojo, the safeguards aren’t unnecessary when you get good at rationality. They become unnecessary when you trust the person … Which is kind of an orthogonal thing.
Isn’t this how we got Karate America? Making things softer and softer to appeal to more and more people until the martial art is a useless exercise for children?
I think that happened mostly because you need to actually attract customers to stay open and make money, and parents got softer and less inclined to pay money for places where their children get hurt. Especially if the children won’t, with good probability, need to use those skills elsewhere in society.
In the early days of martial arts in America, most schools hardly taught children anyway; it was more or less taken for granted that the training was too harsh for kids. The idea that the martial arts were an appropriate way to teach kids positive values like discipline, restraint, self respect, etc. didn’t have much currency; it was more like boxing, where you might encourage an unruly and violent child to get into it to channel and redirect their energy, but encouraging a normal kid to get into it would be unnecessary and somewhat cruel.
Parents’ values may have changed somewhat, but I’d say the dominant factor is that the original market for martial arts training was fairly niche, and teachers simply expanded into more profitable demographics.
Edit: According to this book which I read recently, children have been pushed into increasingly more intense, competitive, and physically harmful sports activities for decades; while the average child may be fatter and out of shape, child athletes are being pushed more than ever. Parents who’re willing to push their children into activities where they’ll get hurt may not be in decreasing supply at all.
I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”
You’re making the wrong comparison; comparing the impact on one group (“hurt”) with the other group’s emotional reaction to the impact on them “annoyed”. What you want to compare is “hurt” to “have one’s time wasted”, which is a form of harm.
If you start reading something and feel like your time is being wasted, you can just stop reading the rest of it. (For example, the complaint about the crappy evopsych doesn’t bother me because I just don’t read it.) You can also get good at skimming over niceties.
If someone feels hurt they’re going to have to do extra work to get themselves back to their previous state, which is a slightly different form of harm. It’s harder to predict when the next thing you’re going to read has that kind of effect on you.
If you start reading something and feel like you’re going to be hurt, you can just stop reading the rest of it. You can also get good at being tolerant of the direct mode of communication.
If someone’s time is wasted, it’s literally impossible for them to get that time back. Also, whilst it’s easy to skip many potentially offensive topics (don’t read anything tagged gender), it’s much harder to know which random new commentators will have worthwhile contributions.
i.e. I don’t think you’ve identified a significant distinction here.
If you get hurt, you also have to take time (and other resources) to get unhurt so that you feel okay to participate in discussion again. And then your question might still be left unanswered. Pretty counter-productive, if you want to think of it in those terms.
I don’t think you’ve answered my argument.
You proposed a distinction between A and B, saying R(A), S(B). Supposedly these facts suffice to show that A and B are relevantly different.
I pointed out S(A) and R(B) were also true, so the properties R and S do not actually allow us to tell that A and B are relevantly different.
Re-iterating that S(B) doesn’t change anything, as even granting that for the sake of argument, S also applies to A, so doesn’t indicate a significant difference.
I agree that when you read top-level articles about touchy subjects, then you’re about as able to predict when you’re going to get hurt than when you’re going to get bored. I do not agree that it is easy to predict when someone you’re having a perfectly reasonable conversation with will suddenly (and often accidentally) say something hurtful—and this will do more harm and damage in terms of lost time and resources than if the person used a little bit of padding to avoid being accidentally hurtful in most cases.
I wonder if your niceness padding has led to people missing your point and to you being frustrated by their failure to understand you.
Right, because words like “sorry” and “thank you” and occasional exclamation marks make my writing completely incomprehensible.
Haha, because words like “sorry” and “thank you” and occasional exclamation marks make my writing completely incomprehensible. =P
It doesn’t seem like that would be the case, no. I expected your alterations to have been deeper than that, including stuff like softening your disagreement.
Here is why your comment strikes me as unfriendly and not particularly rational:
You wonder? If you really wanted to know you would either ask me or you could just read through my comment history and determine that, no, I am pretty direct and people still misunderstand me. Or you could identify specific examples where this did happen and let me know in a helpful way where I messed up my argument. Instead, you just sort of demonstratively express your hypothesis so people who already agree with you can see it and pat you on the back. Pretty mind-killery, in my opinion.
But it’s okay! I understand! These things happen. =]
To be honest, I’m surprised by the hostility of your comments here. I was bringing a hypothesis to your attention so that you could evaluate it. I suppose I could have read all of your comments but I don’t really care that much I guess. “I wonder” was meant to identify this as a passing thought. And in my second comment I updated away from the hypothesis, so I’m not sure why this tone would be present.
I might be misreading it, but your last sentence sounds sort of fake-nice and passive aggressive due to the rest of the comment. I normally wouldn’t make an entire comment just about tone, and I actually like the tone on Lessswrong, but this conversation is sort of about it, and like I said, I was surprised.
See, this is where the whole thing gets confusingly meta, but a lot of what you’re saying contributes to my overall point. You’re right, my comment was written in a pretty hostile tone (and I apologize), but it was also pretty sparse and direct, and … how else do you respond to someone who claims that your writing is too cluttered with niceness? It’s kind of difficult to balance.
This is where I’m not sure what the overall stance on writing things is in the LW community. It seems like there are sequence posts that urge people to pay attention to the effect of their writing and how it will be interpreted by others. So I go in with the assumption that most people have read them and are also paying attention to tone and word choice. Which leads me to assume that if their tone is hostile then it’s intentionally so. When someone says “I wonder,” it’s not clear if they’re asking a question or if they’re just … content to wonder. And because I personally find it awkward to start offering up answers when someone doesn’t want any, it starts feeling like the comment was designed to not have a response.
Add in the large, scary-sounding opposition claiming that they come here to talk about intellectual things and don’t need to care about people’s feelings, and if feels like your stand-alone comment was just going to attract mind-killer-ed people from the other camp even if it wasn’t intended to.
I also apologize that the last part sounded passive-aggressive, but I also feel like that demonstrates the extent to which the community is intolerant of flawed, biased humans that make mistakes. I really wish we had more of a culture that pointed out a bias, and then responded with a
*patpat*, “happens!” (like sneezes!) rather than “you are a bad rationalist, go feel bad now.” (Which I’m sure no one ever actually said, but culture gets constructed through things people don’t say as well?)Yes, any niceness level will involve a trade off between the two preferences. I prefer a leaner and meaner LW.
The ideal might eventually be a two or more track LW. I’m willing to bet that we’re losing some people whose thinking we’d want, but who find the courtesy level too polite or too harsh. I’d also bet that, while it seems that the courtesy level here isn’t friendly enough for a lot of women, there are also men who’d like a friendlier version.
I cannot agree with this enough.
I also want to be clear that I do not think that this requires putting niceness padding on every statement and interaction. Just enough padding on enough interactions that a new person can believe that they will get a padded response instead of seeing no alternative but that they will receive an unpadded response.
It’s Rattler’s and Eagles all over again, but probably worse. It’s not evaporative cooling, it’s cluster dissociation with actual differences from the start. The general behavior of each group shifts toward their new means—away from each other.
The best answer is hard. We continue to talk about this in a productive manner until our preferences, behavior, perceptions, and trusts shift.
Some behaviors change. Some interpretations change. Some reactions change.
I don’t know that it will make such a big difference. The preferences may start biologically, and are likely reinforced in other parts of our lives regardless. But this could at least improve information and separate real preferences from habitual unexamined behaviors.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone leaving because the discussion was too polite or too nice for their tastes! I may be biased in this, but my intuition is that people who are against encouraging niceness really overestimate how much noise it would actually add, and maybe even how few hedons they’d get from receiving it (but I may well be wrong on this second part).
And I definitely agree that niceness isn’t an attractor to just women. I think a better way of looking at it is that there is a distribution of prioritising niceness in each gender, so the current level might be too low for something like 70% of women and 20% of men (I find myself on the fence about whether I want to bother engaging with the community, for example, and a higher level would probably push me over towards the engagement side).
My impression is that there are people who really like the freedom to be insulting.
I agree with the rest of your points.
I think I get better responses even on Less Wrong if I put effort into sounding friendly when I write my comment.
To add a single data point: I left one other community largely because it was developing (and enforcing) social norms that had me jumping through too many hoops before I could voice criticism or disagreement; and I had serious issues with a second one for similar reasons, although different things drove me away in the end. I’m happy with LW’s current culture, but there’s a fairly wide range of preferences and I don’t think I’m on the extreme aggressive end of the spectrum.
I actually completely agree that being able to express criticism freely is valuable, I just think there are many non-censorious approaches to niceness we can use.
For example, if the top 20 posters (by recent post karma) decided to all be nicer, I’d expect that that would shift community norms towards niceness looking high-status and consequently the whole community trying to be nicer as a result. Alternatively, adding something like “Please consider [above poster’s name] feelings before hitting ‘Comment’!” above the comment field would probably increase niceness (not that I recommend this specifically, since it would sound overly silly, but maybe a similar injunction to “imagine yourself as having their point of view” appearing 1 time in 5 could be viable). I’m sure there are other options as well that would promote niceness without feeling particularly restrictive or censorious.
(Hopefully I’m interpreting your objections correctly!)
Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.
I would tend towards the last two, I think, and wouldn’t find the forth to be rude (though it might depend on the nature and scale of the clarifications, with this method being most apt for smaller ones). However, I am one of those who likes the style of discussion on lesswrong.
I think that showing respect can stop disagreements from seeming like dismissals.
I’ve noticed that women and girls tend to use more emoticons than men and boys, too. It also seems to me that the emoticons used by women are more likely to be noseless—such as :) as opposed to :-) -- than those used by men, but it’s not like I did stats on this so I’m not very confident about this. So, as a compromise between having people misunderstand my tone and looking too effeminate, I do use emoticons when I need to, but I give them noses.
As for exclamation marks, I used to almost always use ellipses to terminate sentences in contexts where a full stop might sound too formal and no punctuation at all might sound too slovenly (namely, in comments on Facebook, and certain times in text messages), but then I noticed that that looked too wimpy, whereas exclamation marks looked more assertive, so I now use either ellipses or exclamation marks depending on (among other things) my instantaneous level of self-confidence. (I can’t remember noticing any gender difference in the use of punctuation.)
I never thought the smileys with noses were inherently manly, but I do think that smileys without noses result in a cuter face, which may explain that correlation if we assume that cuteness ideals are shared by most people.
These confessions of textual insecurities are enlightening and endearing. =] I had no idea guys worried about this stuff until yesterday. We should do this more often!
When I use a smiley, it’s noseless, but it’s because I don’t think the hyphen adds information. How geeky!
I use smileys with a nose, but that’s probably just because I’m old, and that’s how I first learned them. :-)
I either give a smiley a nose or not, depending on what looks better given the default font that the places uses. I think that on LW “:)”, looks pretty squished-together and hard to even make out, so here I use “:-)” instead.
(It has always struck me as a little weird that nobody else seems to do this—if they use smilies at all, it’s either always with a nose or always noseless. But then, my active vocabulary for emoticons tends to be broader than that of most folks in any case.)
Oh yeah, the ^_^ face looks bad in some of the wider fonts.
I sometimes feel that pull to adopt something as a convention because it seems reasonable to me. But then I realize that it’s not really a convention if no one understands or follows it, and it requires a lot of work to explain and popularize. So I’m always left reminding my own brain of its pointlessness despite its … seeming reasonableness. For (a California-specific) example, I always want to signal left in a left-turn lane to let the people behind me to know that I’m going to U-turn. But I’m probably the only person that does that so people behind me just figure I didn’t turn my signal off or whatever. =/
I think people who regularly talk to you probably pick up on your smiley meanings intuitively; people hopefully don’t regularly drive behind me.
I acknowledge it, but that doesn’t mean I pander to it. They likely find my callousness mean. I find their sensitivity tiresome. We have different preferences and sensitivities that are mutually inconvenient. Not all people get along well.
I feel like “pander” implies doing something you specifically wouldn’t do of your own accord with the sole aim of getting people to like you. In contrast, being dismissive, acknowledging that someone probably felt bad as a result of something you did and then not doing anything about it—that’s not even insensitive.
“Ow, you stepped on my foot.”
“I acknowledge that your foot probably hurts, but I find that tiresome and inconvenient.”
You’re definitely not expected to get along with everyone, and if you could accurately predict exactly who you’re going to hurt before you have a conversation with them, you could just avoid them ahead of time and everything would be fine. Since we don’t know how to do that, you’re probably going to hurt some people accidentally. What you said sounds like you have no problem hurting people accidentally and don’t care if they feel bad because of it.
I have sent several messages like that; to the best of my knowledge, they have always been taken well. Every message I’ve received like that has made my day; I suggest lowering your estimate of how creepy it actually is.
I do agree with you that such messages are murkier when at least one party could interpret it as romantic, and while that murkiness can be resolved it takes additional effort.
That tends to be the pattern I notice for posts/comments that seem to be well-made; generally, more disagreeing / correcting comments than downvotes, and many more upvotes than comments that only express approval.
What I was wondering was a bit different:
Imagine a forum with no upvotes and downvotes. (It might still have a “report as spam/abuse” button, moderation, and the like — I don’t mean that it’s completely unfiltered.) It will have some level of people posting comments of agreement and ones of disagreement.
Now, imagine a forum identical to that one, but with upvotes and downvotes added. Some people who otherwise would comment on others’ words, instead use a vote button. (And some do both.)
In the second forum, there may be fewer total comments — because many people who would post “I agree!” or “Me too!” or “No way!” or “Shut up!” will instead use the voting mechanism. But does the addition of a voting mechanism absorb proportionately more expressions of approval than disapproval?
(It may be that what I’m thinking of here is the old Usenet annoyance at people who posted merely to agree with another poster — “posting ‘me too’ like some brain-dead AOLer”, as Weird Al put it. Voting mechanisms let us tell people not to post “me too” posts, but maybe some “me too” posts are more rewarding for the person they’re responding to.)
I’ve long wanted a ‘me too!’ facility in forum posts—where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It’d be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - ’I’d sign that without reservation”
Me too.
In seriousness, I was thinking that allowing us to see who has upvoted our comments/posts would probably be helpful and encouraging, although hiding who has downvoted would help protect the voter’s integrity and help avoid downvotes being taken as a personal insult.
The risk would be the development of identifiable cult followings, undeserved reciprocation of upvotes, and similar.
Identifiable cult followings is an upside. We WANT people who get upvoted by the same people over and over to be noticed for this, and to notice it.
I think it’d be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put “I agree!” or “Fallacious reasoning” or “inappropriate discussion” that only shows up in the poster’s view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn’t clog up the thread.
I’ve never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users “liked” the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.
One of my first reactions to the relevant part of the OP was thinking of this phenomena and feeling some sympathy for the Usenet old hands. I’ve been on forums were “me too” posts are common, and while they can sometimes be nice I also think that they can get annoying/distract from useful comment.
Usenet old hand speaking: Me too!
The norm I’ve noticed around here is to upvote for agreeing and general warm fuzzies, but not to downvote for disagreement alone. Downvoting seems to be reserved for thoughts that are not merely incorrect, but broken in some way. (logically fallacious, for example)
For my own posts, I find I appreciate an upvote as if it were explicit encouragement. I’m wondering if this mental reaction is common, and if so, whether it’s limited to the males here. (as a pseudo-”score”, I could see this being the case) Perhaps the karma system produces more warm fuzzies for the average man and little-to-nothing for the average woman. With karma being the primary form of social encouragement, that could make for a very different experience between genders.
Request for anecdotal evidence here.
For my own part, I like the karma system precisely because it provides a way to indicate appreciation without cluttering threads with content-free approval posts. That is probably the usenetter in me speaking. (tangent: I miss the days when usenet was where all the interesting conversations happened. Oh well.)
I may be a somewhat atypical woman, but I appreciate upvotes. I do find it frustrating if I post something I think is substantial and it only gets upvotes. I’m here for conversation, not just approval.
Hrm. I think I agree on the frustration bit, but I’m unsure what to do about it.
Datapoint: I almost didn’t post this because it felt too me-too-ish. If you hadn’t been responding to me, I probably wouldn’t have.
I just don’t understand the downvote/upvote thing, especially if the norm is/should be for broken thoughts.
When I get downvoted (or upvoted), I often don’t get a comment explaining why. So it’s unclear where I’m broken (or what I’m doing right). That’s frustrating and doesn’t help me increase my value to the community.
It’d be nice to have downvoters supply a reason why, in order to improve the original.
A downvote without explanation can basically be translated as “Lurk Moar, Noob”
When I downvote without explanation it’s because I want less of what I’m downvoting AND I don’t want the forums to be cluttered with explanations of what should be obvious.
I sometimes downvote without explanation if the post was highly upvoted and I thought it was merely decent.
I’m a woman, and I feel exactly as you do, so it isn’t limited to males.
I think so, and the evidence I was providing was an estimate of what percentage of ‘negative’ responses (including corrections as negative) were comments vs. downvotes, and what percentage of ‘positive’ responses were comments vs. upvotes.
Note that there are strong alternatives to the absorption model, since the activation energy is lower to vote than comment.
I believe the real issue that B. raised of LW being cold won’t be effectively improved by posting “I agree!” replies, but requires some emotional involvement. A response that offers something to the OP, that gives something back.
Like, why do you agree? What are the implications of you agreeing? Or, what thoughts or emotions does the content of the post bring up for you? The response doesn’t have to be long, but it should be personal and thoughtful.
A little bit more of that may go a long way towards developing community.
Personally I feel quite strongly that ‘niceness’ is way too vague a concept to in any way promote, no matter the social context.
I’d like to talk instead about the value of comments that are specific, positive (+ hopefully warm, without gushing), and cooperative. In short, creating a norm of definite, positive, ‘working together to work out what’s true’ attitudes. I think it is fine to make comments that only express approval, as long as it is approval of a specific behaviour / characteristics and not blanket ‘good job’. These kinds of specific comments help people evaluate themselves and encourage them to continue doing what works.
LessWrong is not a debate club—we’re trying to approach the truth, not merely win the argument. That means that things which keep us working together on that are a net win, providing they do not obscure the truth.
I appreciate the specificity of this breakdown; each of those three is something that I would endorse as directly useful most of the time.
I’ve posted a lot of messy examples all over this thread, but I think I’ve finally gathered my thinking now.
I would like to make a simple case that niceness clarifies communication. This is because not all disagreements are perfectly rational and sometimes contain defensiveness and other stuff that is difficult to filter out. Furthermore, even disagreements that are balanced and rational often fail to engage the original comment, and thus they come off as dismissive—therefore, they unintentionally communicate “I don’t respect you” or “I don’t like you.” Therefore, if it is difficult to predict whether your comment will unintentionally communicate “I don’t like” you to the other person, then adding “but nevertheless I still like you” into what you said in some socially accepted way does increase the likelihood that what you wrote is perceived as what you meant to write.
Sometimes, this can be as small as a smiley. Or an exclamation mark. It doesn’t have to be a crazy stream of niceties and smalltalk and hugs that them mundanes engage in on a daily basis in conversations of no substances because they’re not cool like we are.
Hmm, so I’m thinking about smileys and exclamation points now. I don’t think they just demonstrate friendliness—I think they also connote femininity. I used to use them all the time on IRC, until I realized that the only people who did so were female, or were guys who struck me as more feminine as a result. I didn’t want to be conspicuously feminine on IRC, so I stopped using smileys/exclamation points there.
It never bothered me when other people didn’t use smileys/exclamations. But when I stopped using them on IRC, everything I wrote sounded cold or rude. I felt like I should put the smileys in to assure people I was happy and having a good time (just as I always smile in person so that people will know I’m enjoying myself). But no one else was using them, and they didn’t strike me as unfriendly, so I decided to stop using them.
Until I saw this comment, I had forgotten that I had adjusted myself in this way! In light of this, I may have to take back some of my earlier comments, as it really does seem like culturally enforced gender differences are getting in the way here, and that LW has little tolerance for people who sound feminine (perhaps because of an association between femininity and irrationality, which I’ll admit to being guilty of myself).
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with feminity, or is it just me?
(EDIT: Now I’m thinking that smileys vs. lack thereof might also be a formality thing. I also limit the amount of smileys/exclamations that I put in work emails, because they seem overly friendly/informal for a professional context. LW feels more like a professional environment than a social gathering to me, I think.)
Apparently! I started talking to someone about this and he just told me this exact thing independently of you. He said men can only use smileys with women because it’s flirting. (??) Which is weird to me because I’ve met men who are WAY more animated than I am in meatspace. Do they also not use exclamation marks? I don’t think I’d be able chat with them online if they didn’t; my brain would explode.
But actually, I think this whole issue comes up because we subconsciously communicate a lot of those “I still like you! I’m not hostile! I’m still having a good time!” messages in meatspace through non-verbal things like smiles and pats and vocal tone, etc. So people that resist adding those into their text think they’re being asked to do something extra that they never do, but I think, they do do it and just don’t realize it because it comes more naturally.
I agree with you, but:
I might suspect that for many people on Less Wrong this does not come as naturally as it does to most people :P
You know, I was just about to make a poll about this! But I’m on an iPad, so that’s a bad idea.
Do you think a lot of LW people are bad at those cues in real life? Do you think they actively resent having to be good at them in real life as well? I figured LW-ers would recognize the utility of these messages out in meatspace, but it might have just not crossed their mind.
I’d rather not speculate about “a lot of LW people,” since I am just one person and I’m not making observations about myself, per se.
But I have at least one friend in real life who struggles with social cues and I think she’d be pretty excited to find an environment where she didn’t have to deal with them. So I’d imagine there are people with different perspectives on it, some of them actively against it, some passively supportive of the current setup, and some unaware that there’s a decision being made, and I have no idea how to distinguish how many of each. I guess a poll would be appropriate.
I sort of assumed that even people who struggle with social cues would understand their instrumental value, at least on an intellectual level. But there’s definitely a typical mind component in that thinking because I know nothing about the social lives of most LW-ers or the average LW-er and how much they interact with humans in meatspace and how they feel about it.
So I thought more about this poll and realized I would need one of those “strongly agree—strongly disagree” matrices to get any good results. Which is an even heftier undertaking.
Meta: an excellent example of how a post can look friendly without reducing information content (or even using smileys!)
I’m hugely more likely to use smileys when talking to someone I find attractive online
Because you are trying to be extra-friendly and non-threatening, or because you’re trying to use smileys to directly indicate your attraction/interest?
I’m both emotionally more inclined to be smiling and thus typing smileys when chatting with someone I’m attracted to AND occasionally consciously aware of smileys and that I might want to toss one in to be extra-friendly. I don’t think it’s a known notion that smileys are flirtatious or about attraction so I don’t really use them that way, though maybe I should.
Nono, I don’t think you should! I think this is actually where that “smileys are flirty” impression originated.
...
^_^
Okay, after threatening, I had a go at hacking up a smiley gender detector for lesswrong irc.
Looking at the counts of smileys-per-message by nick, no obvious pattern.
Looking at averages:
male avg 0.015764359871 female avg 0.0194180023583
The dataset I’m using is so male dominated I don’t think the results can be particularly meaningful.
Also, the fact that LW itself isn’t smiley friendly. An interesting project would be to gather data from the real life facebook pages of both males and females on LW and see if a discrepancy shows up there. People would have to volunteer their facebooks for you to look at which might cause a bit of a selection effect. (The less trusting/interpersonal types might be less likely to both volunteer their fb, and to use smileys)
The reason I say this, is because I severely limit my smiley usage on LW.
One user who’s part of the female dataset has already reported cutting out the smileys deliberately. As I say, I don’t put much faith in the results.
I did consider scraping lesswrong.com for data, but a) I wasn’t sure of the etiquette b) I don’t have a list of female users (maybe I can get them from the survey?) c) it’s a lot more coding.
How are you determining gender of users?
The number of female users is so small I just hardcoded known female nicks.
As I say, I don’t think the results are particularly meaningful.
we must create a smiley based gender detector! for science!
RE: smileys in formal settings. I grew up speaking Russian, which is a language that has a formal-you pronoun, and I spent most of my school life feeling really weird writing “you” to adults in emails, because it felt too friendly and rude and presumptuous. Badly-raised child! I generally don’t use smileys in professional emails unless the other person has used them first or I really want to make a nerdy joke. But sometimes that policy feels weird if your co-workers in meatspace are fun, joking, informal people. Why would you limit yourself with people if you know you don’t have to?
Also, I will add this link to a relevant post you might find interesting, mostly because I didn’t notice this until the author pointed it out but also because I’m proud that I managed to hunt it down. (It is unfortunately not that well-written and touches on a lot of mind-killer topics.)
My associations… Well, first I check if the smiley significantly clarifies the tone of the comment. If so, I take that as the explanation.
Beyond that, I associate youth, extroversion, being hip to tech, and emotional openness.
This last has a tendency to be associated as feminine, though not particularly by me.
I am male, don’t associate smileys with femininity, and often use them in most text conversations and also posts online if I would smile in meatspace when saying what I’m typing (which usually is not the case in work emails). It can occasionally put me on edge if I type with someone who does not use them, in a conversation where I would expect them to smile in meatspace.
Rest assured we are in agreement about this. But I don’t think a comment has to directly serve my terminal values to be worth upvoting.
Agreed, and I may be overbroadening “terminal value” by applying it as “things worth upvoting.” A comment being “nice” makes it more likely that comment will be “helpful,” and I think “helpful” comments are worth upvoting; do I think comments that are nice but not helpful are worth upvoting? Not really, and a policy to upvote for niceness alone won’t capture that value judgment.
But it could be that niceness is the best cause or proxy for desired consequence, and thus is worthwhile.
Signal to noise.
A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader. For people looking to exchange useful information on the internet, it will act as noise that needs to be filtered to get to the useful stuff.
With the important exception that it reinforces the behavior in question, which is actionable and useful information. The trouble is that this is mostly useful for the recipient, and not as useful for bystanders, and it is much more useful if the affirmation identifies the specific behavior it seeks to reinforce.
But if you’re trying to reinforce behavior, wouldn’t that also reinforce the behavior in the observers as well? Is public stroking more reinforcing? For some, in some context.
Here’s the thing. Don’t you feel it’s rather cheeky, or at least manipulative, to be responding to people for the explicit purpose of reinforcing their behavior? “Good boy!”
Maybe the consequentialists like it, or think they do, but it rubs me the wrong way. Somewhere along this thread I thanked someone for bringing me the word “dysphemism”. I wasn’t trying to reinforce his behavior, I was expressing appreciation and gratitude.
I don’t like to “handle” people. I don’t like to be “handled”. I find it disrespectful. Besides the mental energy involved to handle people, that’s probably where my aversion to it comes from.
Apparently, some people want to be handled. They consider it being nice and friendly. Considerate. I guess I can see that, even while noting that this fact doesn’t alter my aversion and distaste for handling.
This is one of the big reasons that niceness annoys me. I think I’ve developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to comments like “good job!” because I don’t want to be manipulated by them. Even when the speaker is just trying to express gratitude, and has no knowledge of behaviorism, “good job!” annoys me. I think it’s an issue of one-place vs. two-place predicates—I have no problem with people saying “I like that” or “I find that interesting”.
If I let my emotional system process both statements without filtering, I think “good job!” actually does reinforce the behavior regardless, while “I like that!” will depend on my relation to the speaker. I know that my emotional system is susceptible to these behaviorist things, and I think that’s part of why I’ve developed a negative reaction to them—to avoid letting them through to a place where they can influence me.
Another reason niceness annoys me is that it satisfies my craving for recognition and approval, but it’s like empty calories. If I can get a quick fix of approval by posting a cat picture on facebook, then it will decrease my motivation to actually accomplish anything I consider worthwhile. This is one of the many reasons I avoid social media and think it encourages complacence. (Also, I get the impression that constant exposure to social media is decreasing people’s internal motivation and increasing their external motivation. But I’m not sure if I believe this becaue it’s true, or because I enjoy being a curmudgeon.)
I have a real problem with “good job”.
For me, it’s associated with positive encouragement after someone screws up on a team sport. No, it wasn’t a good job, it was a screw up. It’s epitomized by a very sweet, very positive Christian girl in PE class, while playing volleyball. The contrast of a hypersaccharine “good job!” and the annoyance at the screw up had me grinding my teeth.
The more general issue on “good job” is the inherent condescension. I am your superior, here to judge your performance and pat you on the head to encourage you to improve. No thanks.
That goes a little with your point about the difference between “good job” and “I like that”. I made a similar distinction between “You’re wrong”/”That’s wrong” and “I disagree”. It does seem less annoying or insulting to have people phrase their opinion in terms of themselves, instead of an objective fact about you or reality.
Convey your evaluation as your evaluation, instead of as a objective fact. Seems to feel better for the issues we’re annoyed with.
But do the nicies want to hear “good jobs” that the meanies don’t?
This is important enough to be worth its own discussion, and I would recommend discussing it here.
Negative affirmations (for example) are also noise. But more unpleasant noise.
The problem with the comment was that it wasn’t clear what it was a disagreement with—the facts referred to, particular facts referred to, or the implicitly proposed community behavior (as I took it).
In that way, this is one of the worst kinds of comment—ambiguous disagreement. They haven’t made any effort to be clear. You don’t know what they’ve said, so it invites requests for clarification. It otherwise invites counter disagreement, based on an assumption of what was disagreed with. On the bright side, no one followed up.
But if he was just disagreeing with a proposed policy, and made that clear, it would have been an appropriate comment in my estimation.
And “I disagree” on a substantive fact is not really a negative affirmation in the sense I meant. It is a not very informative sharing of a personal attitude. In general, I find “I agree” noise to be filtered. But I wouldn’t call that comment unpleasant at all. It lacked all emotional tone for me.