I don’t object to pointing out flaws in arguments, and I endorse being careful about how you do it in order to “collateral damage”.
That isn’t what you seemed to be championing originally (e.g., “If I say something stupid, I expect other people to give me a hard time about it. My brain forms a connection between the stupid comment and the negative utility, and I develop techniques to avoid making a fool of myself the same way in the future. ”). But perhaps I misunderstood you.
Insults don’t have much effect on my confidence in arguments, but they have a lot of effect on my willingness to have the conversation in the first place.
I’m willing to avoid the word “polite” if it has negative connotations for you. Do you prefer “non-invasive,” then?
In retrospect my first comment was misleading, I edited too much.
I have heard politeness used as a blanket statement which covers telling lies to make people feel good, never objecting to something someone considers part of their identity, along with being careful about how you communicate criticism and avoiding swearing. There are a lot of additions and variations between cultures, but these are the mental tags I have built up. So yes, I think politeness has too broad of a meaning to describe how people should interact if they actually want to accomplish something. I have rarely used non-invasive or collatoral damage in this context before, so I am open to more widely used alternatives.
If I’ve understood you, you endorse “being careful about how you criticize someone” as important, but reject “being careful about how you communicate criticism”. Can you say more about what distinction you’re trying to convey there?
Re: politeness...
For my own part, I think of politeness as a natural consequence of signal processing considerations. Speech and body language are noisy, and when a communication channel is noisy it’s helpful to establish standard protocols for redundancy and error-correction, and standard signals for initial handshaking and for key operations.
For most mammals, this includes being careful about when and how to challenge others, which is what most of your examples are about, because status challenges are expensive enough that unintentional ones waste crucial resources.
And, yes, I agree that “politeness” is a blanket term for that and similar things.
If we had better channels, we could engage in continual precise negotiations about status, and we wouldn’t need mechanisms as clumsy as explicit status challenges… and we wouldn’t need social rules for keeping those challenges under control. But most of us don’t have good enough channels for that, and all of us have emotional responses that evolved in bodies and environments that didn’t.
And, yes, if I lack sufficient finesse to avoid issuing unintentional status challenges, I will get slapped down for it until I either learn or leave the tribe (possibly horizontally).
I do not think everything which is considered polite is bad (such as careful criticism and minimal insults), I was just trying to show that it covers a wide range of behaviors, some of which suppress rational debate.
I agree with the rest of your points, but even if society currently works that way, I still wish people’s happiness was not affected by winning (or avoiding losing) arguments. Perhaps my resistance to social norms is hopeless, but intelligent criticism improves my perception of reality, and I appreciate others doing it in the fastest way possible.
I don’t object to pointing out flaws in arguments, and I endorse being careful about how you do it in order to “collateral damage”.
That isn’t what you seemed to be championing originally (e.g., “If I say something stupid, I expect other people to give me a hard time about it. My brain forms a connection between the stupid comment and the negative utility, and I develop techniques to avoid making a fool of myself the same way in the future. ”). But perhaps I misunderstood you.
Insults don’t have much effect on my confidence in arguments, but they have a lot of effect on my willingness to have the conversation in the first place.
I’m willing to avoid the word “polite” if it has negative connotations for you. Do you prefer “non-invasive,” then?
In retrospect my first comment was misleading, I edited too much.
I have heard politeness used as a blanket statement which covers telling lies to make people feel good, never objecting to something someone considers part of their identity, along with being careful about how you communicate criticism and avoiding swearing. There are a lot of additions and variations between cultures, but these are the mental tags I have built up. So yes, I think politeness has too broad of a meaning to describe how people should interact if they actually want to accomplish something. I have rarely used non-invasive or collatoral damage in this context before, so I am open to more widely used alternatives.
Re: criticism...
If I’ve understood you, you endorse “being careful about how you criticize someone” as important, but reject “being careful about how you communicate criticism”. Can you say more about what distinction you’re trying to convey there?
Re: politeness...
For my own part, I think of politeness as a natural consequence of signal processing considerations. Speech and body language are noisy, and when a communication channel is noisy it’s helpful to establish standard protocols for redundancy and error-correction, and standard signals for initial handshaking and for key operations.
For most mammals, this includes being careful about when and how to challenge others, which is what most of your examples are about, because status challenges are expensive enough that unintentional ones waste crucial resources.
And, yes, I agree that “politeness” is a blanket term for that and similar things.
If we had better channels, we could engage in continual precise negotiations about status, and we wouldn’t need mechanisms as clumsy as explicit status challenges… and we wouldn’t need social rules for keeping those challenges under control. But most of us don’t have good enough channels for that, and all of us have emotional responses that evolved in bodies and environments that didn’t.
And, yes, if I lack sufficient finesse to avoid issuing unintentional status challenges, I will get slapped down for it until I either learn or leave the tribe (possibly horizontally).
I do not think everything which is considered polite is bad (such as careful criticism and minimal insults), I was just trying to show that it covers a wide range of behaviors, some of which suppress rational debate. I agree with the rest of your points, but even if society currently works that way, I still wish people’s happiness was not affected by winning (or avoiding losing) arguments. Perhaps my resistance to social norms is hopeless, but intelligent criticism improves my perception of reality, and I appreciate others doing it in the fastest way possible.