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?)
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?)