I’ve always thought being surrounded by people not talking to you while they talk about things you’re not familiar with around you was bad, and this is a conversational gambit intended to avoid that, rather than trying to make someone feel like they don’t belong.
You’re interpreting this as as lot more confrontational than I think it’s normally intended.
Of course I could be wrong and in general people feel attacked in this situation.
If you’re a stranger coming to a new group or activity, and someone asks whether you were dragged there because you don’t appear to conform to normal qualities for members of that group do you...
Most of the times I can remember that happening to me, it was mostly the latter—but if they asked using the wording quoted in the OP, I guess it’d probably be the former.
I voted for feel awkward, but it would be more that if the subject of the meeting was something I was familiar with, I wouldn’t like the assumption that I wasn’t familiar with it.
The other thing I find annoying about the question is that it’s a false dichotomy. I might not know much about the subject, but be mildly interested and willing to accompany a partner. This isn’t being “dragged”.
I was just about to complain about this! No one talking to me could either feel not-welcoming because they don’t include me or it could feel like letting me listen and not putting me on the spot. Someone talking to me could make me feel welcomed, but if they were saying “so you’re like totally an outsider, right?” I would feel not welcomed at all.
The results surprised me (not that the small number of votes so far is all that significant).
It would be hard to make me feel like an awkward outsider (possibly because I am a self-confident white male), and I expected most people around here to be like me.
I was going to warn that a most-people-would-brush-it-off poll result would not generalize to groups not well represented on LW. But then I was surprised that such a result did not happen.
That said, the “feel happy because I somehow have the empathy and charity to see the good intent in the other person’s actions” felt a bit strong. I would have been more comfortable voting for a generic “would not feel awkward”. Maybe that accounts for it.
(Tangent: I wonder if privileged groups are less likely to feel excluded by any given awkward comment?)
Well, that is odd! Of the 25 poll entries with timestamps before 2013-04-20T20:00, 18 gave the first answer and 7 gave the second. Of the 30 entries after that time, 10 gave the first answer and 20 gave the second.
This is what we’d expect to see if people who reply early were overwhelmingly more likely to give the first answer. It’s also what we would see if someone did not like the way the poll was going and decided to rig it.
The entries which give the respondents’ usernames (of which there are only six) do not exhibit this change.
This is what we’d expect to see if people who reply early were overwhelmingly more likely to give the first answer. It’s also what we would see if someone did not like the way the poll was going and decided to rig it.
There is also the third alternative of a great comment defending option two showing up (or having been up-voted enough) at the time you mentioned, to sway “public opinion” in its direction. It seems highly likely that people would read the most visible comments (and be persuaded by them) before voting.
Now, I don’t know which comment was the most visible at (or right after) 2013-04-20T20:00, but it looks like PhilipL’s and buybuydandavis’ comments are the most probably candidates given their current karma scores. They are also a defense of the second option (or at least closer to the second than to the first).
yeah, but isn’t that because people often downvote or upvote in order to bring things back toward the middle? I’ve definitely seem people comment to that effect. Whereas polling shouldn’t have the same effect.
Take a look at the data. There’s a really clear inflection point. It’d be nice if the poll code gave us hashed IP addresses, /24s, or some other suitably privacy-protected way of checking against the more trivial sorts of poll-rigging, but it doesn’t.
I can imagine either feeling awkward or happy depending on the specifics of the situation—what kind of group, how I feel about being there, whether I actually am knowledgeable, etc.
If they looked and sounded friendly while they said it, I would be happy. If they sounded sarcastic or condescending, I’d be right out of there, if it was a small gathering, and I’d go join another subgroup if it was a big gathering.
someone asks whether you were dragged there because you don’t appear to conform to normal qualities for members of that group do you...
That wasn’t what he was reported to have asked, that’s one inference one might make. When asking the hypothetical, you should stick to the situation as given, and leave the inferences to the poll taker.
People expressing surprise at the result of the poll should not mistake it as implying how people would feel in a situation parallel to what was actually reported to have occurred.
Declaring yourself to be operating by “Crocker’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you.
But the meetup is far more than a place to share factual information. There are messages sent entirely within the subtext, and you cannot make those messages explicit without sending additional messages in the subtext of ‘I am explicitly saying this’.
I have an explicit mode and tone of conversation where, by design and by having warned the people around me beforehand of the existence of this mode, the only subtext is:
“If you perceive any other subtext than this one, it’s almost certainly your imagination, and if after verification it so happens to be the one-in-a-hundred where I really was sending some other subtext, punch me. But if you accuse me of something based on some intent or subtext which was not there, I will punch you instead.”
Sometimes, I am saying the above explicitly, for which the subtext is usually “I am serious and I will really punch you or implement some other stringent and severe form of punishment, or failing that cut all further contact and interaction with you ever, if you do not take this seriously.”
Incidentally, once I’ve said the first I can then say the second explicitly, where the subtext for the latter will be the former and the subtext for the former will be the latter! We have a circular reference that can be initiated from outside and closed from inside!
It seems I have found a loophole in the no-free-explicit-message principle.
You personally? You shouldn’t. You should also not trust my words that you shouldn’t read into my description of a potential action I sometimes take the subtext that I would want you to act as if I were saying those words to you now, if you are not so inclined. There’s no reason you should in particular.
In other words, I use this trick for helping my friends understand that I don’t want them misreading my intent and inventing subtext when I am explicitly doing everything I can to communicate only explicit information. It is assumed a priori that said friends will believe me enough to at least take this at face value and trust my efforts, at the very least.
What seems so hard? I just have a method for setting up a rule with my friends where, when the rule is active, we should not be reading any subtext into eachothers’ words, because doing so will usually be detrimental and stupid, with common knowledge that the words we say will be said as if humans were incapable of reading subtext, and thus any subtext “read” will be at best a gross perversion of the actual speaker’s intent / qualities.
Okay. I’m not sure my friends or circles have the same default assumptions about the violence level of the kind of punch someone promises to give a friend if said friend does something stupid.
It may also be worth noting, and omitting this may have been a mistake on my part, that I’m referring especially to intentional subtext (which is the only definition I was using “subtext” for). Things like “This guy probably had trouble with people misinterpreting his intentions due to bad phrasing before” are true, are easily inferred from the grandparent’s words, and aren’t part of the communication—they are inferences based on the evidence presented (the fact that I pinpoint that to talk about in the first place instead of any of the million other things I could talk about).
Some seem to be counting this “inference based on what the other said” as direct subtext in all cases. Is there permanently the subtext “I am a human and I will not catch on fire in the next [0..inf] seconds and I will not eat a train and I will not eat a bear and I will not [...]” in every single sentence I say, just because of the way I say it and it is true that these things can be inferred (trivially) from the conversation?
So the inclusion of every little unintentional, collateral, inferable (?) detail as “subtext” kind of baffles me.
The technique in the grandparent successfully, in all cases I’ve tried, prevents all the instances and sorts of misunderstandings generally attributable to someone reading from “subtext” some sort of “reason”, “motive” or “intention” in my words or behavior that was not there, in fact and in hindsight.
So no, I don’t want them to pretend not to notice subtexts. I want them to stop assuming that there is a subtext!Motive/HiddenIntent. Of course if they entirely mistrusts the words in the grandparent, this will not work. That’s why I don’t even try on people who don’t trust me.
Okay. I’m not sure my friends or circles have the same default assumptions about the violence level of the kind of punch someone promises to give a friend if said friend does something stupid.
It’s almost as if your friends are able to read subtext and infer what you actually mean rather than take your explicit threat of assault literally. That sounds like a terribly useful and generally applicable social skill for them to have that has the potential to greatly simplify their social experience.
So wedrifid!”read_subtext” == Make any inference on the specific intended communicative meaning of a Label (AKA “word”) when the specific real-world meaning of the label or sentence is ambiguous or unspecified
Oh wow, it’s almost like I wedrifid!”read_subtext” on the comment you just made!
Thanks for arguing about definitions without mentioning my point.
In order to distinguish intentional subtext from subtext, the listener has to make a very fine judgement about your intent. That is a very noisy thing to communicate.
How do you avoid the “I am a violent person” subtext along with the “I am masochistic” subtext, while explicitly and implicitly threatening to punch people and telling them to punch you?
Yes, it is, when the punch is relatively benign, weak and as non-violent as any punch can get, yet I promised to punch them if they read such subtexts and I did when they did.
But that’s entirely irrelevant. I think we weren’t using the word “subtext” with remotely the same subtext at all. See my other response here for more details on what I assumed we were talking about.
Yeah, I was including the entire band of communication that isn’t in the words, not just the intentional part. There are messages sent entirely within the unintentional subtext, especially messages about the emotional state and perceived social status of the speaker. Those messages are important to most social groups, and I don’t think typical LW meetup participants can avoid receiving those messages, even when they don’t want to.
Declaring yourself to be operating by “Crocker’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you.
I have never seen Crocker’s Rules in action, but it has always seemed to me that declaring that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you, gives carte blanche for them to optimise their messages for being nasty to you, not for information.
Crocker’s Rule does allow other to be nasty to you. And thus you learn something about those particular people. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to listen to their other advice for you even if you haven’t invoked Crocker’s Rule in that context.
I’ve always thought being surrounded by people not talking to you while they talk about things you’re not familiar with around you was bad, and this is a conversational gambit intended to avoid that, rather than trying to make someone feel like they don’t belong.
You’re interpreting this as as lot more confrontational than I think it’s normally intended.
Of course I could be wrong and in general people feel attacked in this situation.
If you’re a stranger coming to a new group or activity, and someone asks whether you were dragged there because you don’t appear to conform to normal qualities for members of that group do you...
[pollid:459]
Most of the times I can remember that happening to me, it was mostly the latter—but if they asked using the wording quoted in the OP, I guess it’d probably be the former.
I voted for feel awkward, but it would be more that if the subject of the meeting was something I was familiar with, I wouldn’t like the assumption that I wasn’t familiar with it.
The other thing I find annoying about the question is that it’s a false dichotomy. I might not know much about the subject, but be mildly interested and willing to accompany a partner. This isn’t being “dragged”.
I was just about to complain about this! No one talking to me could either feel not-welcoming because they don’t include me or it could feel like letting me listen and not putting me on the spot. Someone talking to me could make me feel welcomed, but if they were saying “so you’re like totally an outsider, right?” I would feel not welcomed at all.
I would probably interpret “dragged” more broadly, though that’d depend on the tone of voice.
You’re right I should’ve reformulated the poll for 4 options
Or possibly only two options with a request to talk about why in the comments.
The results surprised me (not that the small number of votes so far is all that significant).
It would be hard to make me feel like an awkward outsider (possibly because I am a self-confident white male), and I expected most people around here to be like me.
I was going to warn that a most-people-would-brush-it-off poll result would not generalize to groups not well represented on LW. But then I was surprised that such a result did not happen.
That said, the “feel happy because I somehow have the empathy and charity to see the good intent in the other person’s actions” felt a bit strong. I would have been more comfortable voting for a generic “would not feel awkward”. Maybe that accounts for it.
(Tangent: I wonder if privileged groups are less likely to feel excluded by any given awkward comment?)
I’m also surprised, and I asked my consort just now and she gave the same response as most people so I need to update
Well, that is odd! Of the 25 poll entries with timestamps before 2013-04-20T20:00, 18 gave the first answer and 7 gave the second. Of the 30 entries after that time, 10 gave the first answer and 20 gave the second.
This is what we’d expect to see if people who reply early were overwhelmingly more likely to give the first answer. It’s also what we would see if someone did not like the way the poll was going and decided to rig it.
The entries which give the respondents’ usernames (of which there are only six) do not exhibit this change.
There is also the third alternative of a great comment defending option two showing up (or having been up-voted enough) at the time you mentioned, to sway “public opinion” in its direction. It seems highly likely that people would read the most visible comments (and be persuaded by them) before voting.
Now, I don’t know which comment was the most visible at (or right after) 2013-04-20T20:00, but it looks like PhilipL’s and buybuydandavis’ comments are the most probably candidates given their current karma scores. They are also a defense of the second option (or at least closer to the second than to the first).
seems like a really small sample size but yeah I’m surprised to see it end up exactly tied after how skewed it was at first.
Why? Comment voting goes like this all the time.
yeah, but isn’t that because people often downvote or upvote in order to bring things back toward the middle? I’ve definitely seem people comment to that effect. Whereas polling shouldn’t have the same effect.
Take a look at the data. There’s a really clear inflection point. It’d be nice if the poll code gave us hashed IP addresses, /24s, or some other suitably privacy-protected way of checking against the more trivial sorts of poll-rigging, but it doesn’t.
I can imagine either feeling awkward or happy depending on the specifics of the situation—what kind of group, how I feel about being there, whether I actually am knowledgeable, etc.
If they looked and sounded friendly while they said it, I would be happy. If they sounded sarcastic or condescending, I’d be right out of there, if it was a small gathering, and I’d go join another subgroup if it was a big gathering.
That wasn’t what he was reported to have asked, that’s one inference one might make. When asking the hypothetical, you should stick to the situation as given, and leave the inferences to the poll taker.
People expressing surprise at the result of the poll should not mistake it as implying how people would feel in a situation parallel to what was actually reported to have occurred.
Crocker’s Rules might help?
But the meetup is far more than a place to share factual information. There are messages sent entirely within the subtext, and you cannot make those messages explicit without sending additional messages in the subtext of ‘I am explicitly saying this’.
I have an explicit mode and tone of conversation where, by design and by having warned the people around me beforehand of the existence of this mode, the only subtext is:
“If you perceive any other subtext than this one, it’s almost certainly your imagination, and if after verification it so happens to be the one-in-a-hundred where I really was sending some other subtext, punch me. But if you accuse me of something based on some intent or subtext which was not there, I will punch you instead.”
Sometimes, I am saying the above explicitly, for which the subtext is usually “I am serious and I will really punch you or implement some other stringent and severe form of punishment, or failing that cut all further contact and interaction with you ever, if you do not take this seriously.”
Incidentally, once I’ve said the first I can then say the second explicitly, where the subtext for the latter will be the former and the subtext for the former will be the latter! We have a circular reference that can be initiated from outside and closed from inside!
It seems I have found a loophole in the no-free-explicit-message principle.
When you say “If you perceive any other subtext than this one, it’s almost certainly your imagination”, why should I believe you?
You personally? You shouldn’t. You should also not trust my words that you shouldn’t read into my description of a potential action I sometimes take the subtext that I would want you to act as if I were saying those words to you now, if you are not so inclined. There’s no reason you should in particular.
In other words, I use this trick for helping my friends understand that I don’t want them misreading my intent and inventing subtext when I am explicitly doing everything I can to communicate only explicit information. It is assumed a priori that said friends will believe me enough to at least take this at face value and trust my efforts, at the very least.
What seems so hard? I just have a method for setting up a rule with my friends where, when the rule is active, we should not be reading any subtext into eachothers’ words, because doing so will usually be detrimental and stupid, with common knowledge that the words we say will be said as if humans were incapable of reading subtext, and thus any subtext “read” will be at best a gross perversion of the actual speaker’s intent / qualities.
I’m not sure intimidating people with threats of violence to make them pretend not to notice a subtext is actually a “loophole” as such.
Okay. I’m not sure my friends or circles have the same default assumptions about the violence level of the kind of punch someone promises to give a friend if said friend does something stupid.
It may also be worth noting, and omitting this may have been a mistake on my part, that I’m referring especially to intentional subtext (which is the only definition I was using “subtext” for). Things like “This guy probably had trouble with people misinterpreting his intentions due to bad phrasing before” are true, are easily inferred from the grandparent’s words, and aren’t part of the communication—they are inferences based on the evidence presented (the fact that I pinpoint that to talk about in the first place instead of any of the million other things I could talk about).
Some seem to be counting this “inference based on what the other said” as direct subtext in all cases. Is there permanently the subtext “I am a human and I will not catch on fire in the next [0..inf] seconds and I will not eat a train and I will not eat a bear and I will not [...]” in every single sentence I say, just because of the way I say it and it is true that these things can be inferred (trivially) from the conversation?
So the inclusion of every little unintentional, collateral, inferable (?) detail as “subtext” kind of baffles me.
The technique in the grandparent successfully, in all cases I’ve tried, prevents all the instances and sorts of misunderstandings generally attributable to someone reading from “subtext” some sort of “reason”, “motive” or “intention” in my words or behavior that was not there, in fact and in hindsight.
So no, I don’t want them to pretend not to notice subtexts. I want them to stop assuming that there is a subtext!Motive/HiddenIntent. Of course if they entirely mistrusts the words in the grandparent, this will not work. That’s why I don’t even try on people who don’t trust me.
It’s almost as if your friends are able to read subtext and infer what you actually mean rather than take your explicit threat of assault literally. That sounds like a terribly useful and generally applicable social skill for them to have that has the potential to greatly simplify their social experience.
So wedrifid!”read_subtext” == Make any inference on the specific intended communicative meaning of a Label (AKA “word”) when the specific real-world meaning of the label or sentence is ambiguous or unspecified
Oh wow, it’s almost like I wedrifid!”read_subtext” on the comment you just made!
Thanks for arguing about definitions without mentioning my point.
In order to distinguish intentional subtext from subtext, the listener has to make a very fine judgement about your intent. That is a very noisy thing to communicate.
How do you avoid the “I am a violent person” subtext along with the “I am masochistic” subtext, while explicitly and implicitly threatening to punch people and telling them to punch you?
By punching them for reading those subtexts in a context where it was clear that reading such subtexts was entirely their own mistake.
Right. Because punching people is an effective way to contradict the subtext that you are prone to violence.
Yes, it is, when the punch is relatively benign, weak and as non-violent as any punch can get, yet I promised to punch them if they read such subtexts and I did when they did.
But that’s entirely irrelevant. I think we weren’t using the word “subtext” with remotely the same subtext at all. See my other response here for more details on what I assumed we were talking about.
Yeah, I was including the entire band of communication that isn’t in the words, not just the intentional part. There are messages sent entirely within the unintentional subtext, especially messages about the emotional state and perceived social status of the speaker. Those messages are important to most social groups, and I don’t think typical LW meetup participants can avoid receiving those messages, even when they don’t want to.
I have never seen Crocker’s Rules in action, but it has always seemed to me that declaring that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you, gives carte blanche for them to optimise their messages for being nasty to you, not for information.
Crocker’s Rule does allow other to be nasty to you. And thus you learn something about those particular people. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to listen to their other advice for you even if you haven’t invoked Crocker’s Rule in that context.