Yes; apology is an underrated consequentialist tool among nerds.
Some of the social function of apology can be understood game theoretically: Apology explicitly disavows a past action, allowing the one to whom the apology was made to leverage that confession in future: If someone apologises for something then does it again, then response can escalate because we have evidence that they are doing it even knowing that it’s ‘wrong’. The person who apologised knows this, and often the implicit threat of escalation if they do the same thing checks their future behaviour. Therefore apology is (possibly among other things) a signal, where the cost to apologising is the greater susceptibility to escalation in future cases.
Apology falls into a class—along with other things such as forgiving misdeeds, forgetting misdeeds, retribution, punishing an agent against its will, compensation for misdeeds—of things that would make no sense among sufficiently advanced and cooperative rationalists. Some things in that class (e.g. forgiveness) might already have been transcended by LW, and others (e.g. apology) are probably not possible to transcend even on LW, because the knowledge of other participants (e.g. confidence of their cooperativeness) required to transcend apology is probably too high for an online community of this size.
I would guess that the Bay Area rationalist set and its associates—which as far as I can tell is by far the most advanced community in the world in terms of how consummately instrumental x-rationality is forged into their swords—apologizes way, way, way more than the average LW’er, just like they talk about/express their feelings way more than people on LW typically do, and win because they’re willing to confront that prospect of ‘being vulnerable’.
“Well,” said the boy. His eyes had not wavered from the Defense Professor’s. “I certainly regret hurting you, Professor. But I do not think the situation calls for me to submit to you. I never really did understand the concept of apology, still less as it applies to a situation like this; if you have my regrets, but not my submission, does that count as saying sorry?”
Again that cold, cold laugh, darker than the void between the stars.
“I wouldn’t know,” said the Defense Professor, “I, too, never understood the concept of apology. That ploy would be futile between us, it seems, with both of us knowing it for a lie. Let us speak no more of it, then. Debts will be settled between us in time.”
Two mistakes in thinking that my past self made a lot and others might also:
(1) Refusing to apologize if another party was ‘more wrong’. Even if you’re 99.9% right/innocent/blameless, you still have to make a choice between apologizing and not apologizing to the other person. If you refuse to apologize, things will probably get worse, because the other person thinks you’re more wrong than you think you are, and they will see you not apologizing as defecting. If you apologize in a smart way, you can give an apology (which shouldn’t make a difference but has the actual consequence where the other person is more probable to also apologise) without tying yourself down with too broad a commitment on your future behaviour, and without lying that you thought something was a mistake that wasn’t.
(2) Using the fact that, in the limit as rationality and cooperation become arbitrarily great, apology is meaningless, as a rationalization for not apologising, when in fact you just feel embarrassed/are generally untrained and therefore not fit enough to apologise, and you’re therefore avoiding the exertion of doing so.
I want to point out the difference between completely fake apologies for things one does not think were mistakes, and apologising for things that were mistakes even if the other person’s mistakes were much greater. The former is less often the smart thing to do, and the latter is a lot more often than one might think. Once you get fairly strong, you can sometimes even win free points by apologising in front of a big group of people for something that everyone but the other disputant think is completely outweighed by the other disputant’s actions.
E.g. ‘I’m sorry I used such an abrupt tone in asking you to desist from stealing my food; it probably put you on the defensive.’ If you really mean it (and you should, because you’re almost certainly not a perfect communicator and there were probably things you could have done better), then often onlookers will think you’re awesome and think the other person sucks for ‘making you’ apologise when you’d ‘done nothing wrong’. Sometimes even the other disputant will be so disarmed by your unwavering ‘politeness’ that they will realise the ridiculousness of the situation and realise that you’re being genuine and that they made a mistake, whereas when they thought you were a hostile opponent, it was much easier for them to rationalise that mistake.
Notice than in that example, your apology has not even constrained your future actions; everyone was so distracted by the ridiculousness of you apologising when you were innocent and the contrast it made between yourself and your opponent, that nobody will think to escalate against you in future the next time somebody steals your food.
That’s why it’s so important to know how to lose—so that you can win! Just like how the best things you could do to decrease your personal risk from fights are things like practising conflict defusion techniques, learning how to walk away from conflict, being less tempestuous, being situationally aware, or even just learning how to play dead/fake a seizure/panic attack, rather than something that just looks like winning, like practising flashy kicks.
‘I’m sorry I used such an abrupt tone in asking you to desist from stealing my food; it probably put you on the defensive.’
The setting most probable for such a situation would be a school environment, middle or high. The theft would not be about the food, it would be about bullying, and if the thief feels confident enough to even attempt this, it means that the victim is isolated and bereft of allies. In this context, I would expect them to laught at such a phrase, and I would expect the victim to lack the subjective perception of strength to even deliver it properly.
We should do something on bullies and how to deal with them… for the sake of our children if nothing else.
Fair. That’s not a situation where I’ve actually used the ‘overly apologetic’ approach, it was just the first thing my imagination returned when I queried for a possible example that had the feel I was looking for. I had in mind (university) student life, where theft of food would (in my experience) not generally be due to bullying so much as greed and the perpetrator would probably know they made a mistake but might get defensive when called out. Also, the wording of that example is off, because
(1) ‘stealing my food’ is relatively harsh and explicit and can feel like an accusation, hauling the perpetrator across the coals
(2) ‘probably put you on the defensive’ could also be construed as a further dig.
Better would be, ‘I’m sorry I used such an abrupt tone when talking to you about this before; I think it might have seemed like I was attacking you?’ (where ‘this’ is unambiguous due to conversational context). Raise voice at end of sentence to emphasise query. This encourages other person to make a snap decision between answering that it did and risk escalating or answer that it didn’t to foster reconciliation. Often they will go for the latter even if they did kinda feel under attack, just because they’re on the spot and don’t want to risk defecting from the reconciliation process. And if they go the former route, you should take it graciously (using your rationality training to avoid being outraged), and if appropriate even thank them for letting you know.
Actual example from my experience: Being woken up/kept awake at a somewhat unreasonable time by a housemate showering and moving around on the floor above (paper-thin ceiling) for a long time. Eventually I dragged myself upstairs in just boxer shorts (since I didn’t want to get dressed, which seemed like it would waste time and drag me further away from sleep), knocked on their door, and garbled some sort of hinty explanation that they were making a fair amount of noise. Since both of us are somewhat bodily thick males and he’s a man and didn’t know me very well at the time, I think it possibly seemed like I was using an intimidation tactic along with being terse (actually I just wasn’t conscious enough to muster a high level of politeness), and he seemed a lot more defensive than usual. The next day we swapped apologies (I apologised for being rude/seeming like I was getting on his case), which immediately set the tone for a productive discussion that made both of us more aware and considerate.
It did occur to me that I left it ambiguous as to when a situation is susceptible to calculated losing, and when (e.g. bullying, as you pointed out) apology can actually make things worse. Having clarified that by acknowledging such counterexamples exist, I can’t think of any other situations where someone might misinterpret my advice to disastrous effect; generally I think it’s either clear-cut (e.g. being bullied has a very different feel to being carelessly woken up), or at least ambiguous enough that erring on the side of ‘politeness’ is generally better. But it’s possible I’m failing to think of something or overlooking a potential example situation where it’s obvious to me but maybe not to others?
In the sense I’m using it here, forgiveness is an arbitrary ritual whereby the ‘I’m angry at you about this’ tag is switched to ’Nah, ‘s cool’ for the forgiver. For the forgived, it’s a way of saying that they’re ‘allowed’ to stop feeling guilty about their past action because the forgiver has ‘granted them’ forgiveness.
Forgiveness can be useful if you don’t have the self-awareness to know when you’ve fully learned your lesson from a mistake, and someone attuned to it (the forgiver) is better positioned to discern when you have. It can also serve a social function as a ‘lowering of weapons’, or as a way of saying ‘I am now over my emotional disgust and am ready to engage again’, or so forth.
Insomuch as forgiveness is an approximation to these various component propositions and is coloured by magical thinking (e.g. intuitively thinking that it makes sense to have an epiphenomenal ‘mad at you’ tag that should determine your disposition towards someone), advanced cooperating rationalists would not use forgiveness, because it encourages magical thinking about the various components, and this magical thinking is susceptible to lost purposes, e.g. turning into a game of ‘winning forgiveness’ that is divorced from the actual purpose of doing better in future or understanding mistakes better.
‘Forgive and forget’ is even worse; advanced cooperating rationalists would not permit each other to forget misdeeds, including their own, because that would be throwing away evidence. Of course, ‘forget’ here does not literally mean forget; misdeeds might be brought up again if the same mistake is made in future. But this is still a binary thing of ‘Allowed to bring this up as evidence’/‘Not allowed to’ which is a crude approximation to the continuous and constant nature of past misdeeds as evidence about a person.
I don’t remember ever seeing a forgiveness ritual take place on LW, but I do know that I’ve seen lots of cases in an exchange where someone explained their own misdeed and its cause to prove they could avoid it in future (and sometimes committed to avoiding it in future), and that was good enough for all involved.
I probably phrased this a bit strongly in the first place, since I could see e.g. Bay Area instrumental x-rationality pros using forgiveness rituals as an informal time-saving shorthand for the underlying rigorous game-theoretical/Bayesian concepts. But I suspect they would be less susceptible to losing sight of that underlying core (e.g. less susceptible to ‘win forgiveness’ games). This would be ‘post-rigorous forgiveness’, but I’d remain suspicious of pre-rigorous forgiveness.
Once you get fairly strong, you can sometimes even win free points by apologising in front of a big group of people for something that everyone but the other disputant think is completely outweighed by the other disputant’s actions.
Why would this be true? If the other disputant was so clearly in the wrong, wouldn’t it be obvious that that’s what you’re trying to do, thus voiding the effect?
Sure, it wouldn’t always be effective. But things that—when described linguistically to you—sound obvious can be subtle enough when they actually happen to others that they work anyway. Actually believing that you have acted imperfectly and can do better next time and conveying this in apology form makes it less obvious. And in fact, if you are trained to apologise for little things in the face of big things even without an audience, then your outward conduct may even be mostly indistinguishable between the two cases anyway.
Yes; apology is an underrated consequentialist tool among nerds.
Some of the social function of apology can be understood game theoretically: Apology explicitly disavows a past action, allowing the one to whom the apology was made to leverage that confession in future: If someone apologises for something then does it again, then response can escalate because we have evidence that they are doing it even knowing that it’s ‘wrong’. The person who apologised knows this, and often the implicit threat of escalation if they do the same thing checks their future behaviour. Therefore apology is (possibly among other things) a signal, where the cost to apologising is the greater susceptibility to escalation in future cases.
Apology falls into a class—along with other things such as forgiving misdeeds, forgetting misdeeds, retribution, punishing an agent against its will, compensation for misdeeds—of things that would make no sense among sufficiently advanced and cooperative rationalists. Some things in that class (e.g. forgiveness) might already have been transcended by LW, and others (e.g. apology) are probably not possible to transcend even on LW, because the knowledge of other participants (e.g. confidence of their cooperativeness) required to transcend apology is probably too high for an online community of this size.
I would guess that the Bay Area rationalist set and its associates—which as far as I can tell is by far the most advanced community in the world in terms of how consummately instrumental x-rationality is forged into their swords—apologizes way, way, way more than the average LW’er, just like they talk about/express their feelings way more than people on LW typically do, and win because they’re willing to confront that prospect of ‘being vulnerable’.
HPMoR status:
Two mistakes in thinking that my past self made a lot and others might also:
(1) Refusing to apologize if another party was ‘more wrong’. Even if you’re 99.9% right/innocent/blameless, you still have to make a choice between apologizing and not apologizing to the other person. If you refuse to apologize, things will probably get worse, because the other person thinks you’re more wrong than you think you are, and they will see you not apologizing as defecting. If you apologize in a smart way, you can give an apology (which shouldn’t make a difference but has the actual consequence where the other person is more probable to also apologise) without tying yourself down with too broad a commitment on your future behaviour, and without lying that you thought something was a mistake that wasn’t.
(2) Using the fact that, in the limit as rationality and cooperation become arbitrarily great, apology is meaningless, as a rationalization for not apologising, when in fact you just feel embarrassed/are generally untrained and therefore not fit enough to apologise, and you’re therefore avoiding the exertion of doing so.
I want to point out the difference between completely fake apologies for things one does not think were mistakes, and apologising for things that were mistakes even if the other person’s mistakes were much greater. The former is less often the smart thing to do, and the latter is a lot more often than one might think. Once you get fairly strong, you can sometimes even win free points by apologising in front of a big group of people for something that everyone but the other disputant think is completely outweighed by the other disputant’s actions.
E.g. ‘I’m sorry I used such an abrupt tone in asking you to desist from stealing my food; it probably put you on the defensive.’ If you really mean it (and you should, because you’re almost certainly not a perfect communicator and there were probably things you could have done better), then often onlookers will think you’re awesome and think the other person sucks for ‘making you’ apologise when you’d ‘done nothing wrong’. Sometimes even the other disputant will be so disarmed by your unwavering ‘politeness’ that they will realise the ridiculousness of the situation and realise that you’re being genuine and that they made a mistake, whereas when they thought you were a hostile opponent, it was much easier for them to rationalise that mistake.
Notice than in that example, your apology has not even constrained your future actions; everyone was so distracted by the ridiculousness of you apologising when you were innocent and the contrast it made between yourself and your opponent, that nobody will think to escalate against you in future the next time somebody steals your food.
That’s why it’s so important to know how to lose—so that you can win! Just like how the best things you could do to decrease your personal risk from fights are things like practising conflict defusion techniques, learning how to walk away from conflict, being less tempestuous, being situationally aware, or even just learning how to play dead/fake a seizure/panic attack, rather than something that just looks like winning, like practising flashy kicks.
The setting most probable for such a situation would be a school environment, middle or high. The theft would not be about the food, it would be about bullying, and if the thief feels confident enough to even attempt this, it means that the victim is isolated and bereft of allies. In this context, I would expect them to laught at such a phrase, and I would expect the victim to lack the subjective perception of strength to even deliver it properly.
We should do something on bullies and how to deal with them… for the sake of our children if nothing else.
Fair. That’s not a situation where I’ve actually used the ‘overly apologetic’ approach, it was just the first thing my imagination returned when I queried for a possible example that had the feel I was looking for. I had in mind (university) student life, where theft of food would (in my experience) not generally be due to bullying so much as greed and the perpetrator would probably know they made a mistake but might get defensive when called out. Also, the wording of that example is off, because (1) ‘stealing my food’ is relatively harsh and explicit and can feel like an accusation, hauling the perpetrator across the coals (2) ‘probably put you on the defensive’ could also be construed as a further dig.
Better would be, ‘I’m sorry I used such an abrupt tone when talking to you about this before; I think it might have seemed like I was attacking you?’ (where ‘this’ is unambiguous due to conversational context). Raise voice at end of sentence to emphasise query. This encourages other person to make a snap decision between answering that it did and risk escalating or answer that it didn’t to foster reconciliation. Often they will go for the latter even if they did kinda feel under attack, just because they’re on the spot and don’t want to risk defecting from the reconciliation process. And if they go the former route, you should take it graciously (using your rationality training to avoid being outraged), and if appropriate even thank them for letting you know.
Actual example from my experience: Being woken up/kept awake at a somewhat unreasonable time by a housemate showering and moving around on the floor above (paper-thin ceiling) for a long time. Eventually I dragged myself upstairs in just boxer shorts (since I didn’t want to get dressed, which seemed like it would waste time and drag me further away from sleep), knocked on their door, and garbled some sort of hinty explanation that they were making a fair amount of noise. Since both of us are somewhat bodily thick males and he’s a man and didn’t know me very well at the time, I think it possibly seemed like I was using an intimidation tactic along with being terse (actually I just wasn’t conscious enough to muster a high level of politeness), and he seemed a lot more defensive than usual. The next day we swapped apologies (I apologised for being rude/seeming like I was getting on his case), which immediately set the tone for a productive discussion that made both of us more aware and considerate.
It did occur to me that I left it ambiguous as to when a situation is susceptible to calculated losing, and when (e.g. bullying, as you pointed out) apology can actually make things worse. Having clarified that by acknowledging such counterexamples exist, I can’t think of any other situations where someone might misinterpret my advice to disastrous effect; generally I think it’s either clear-cut (e.g. being bullied has a very different feel to being carelessly woken up), or at least ambiguous enough that erring on the side of ‘politeness’ is generally better. But it’s possible I’m failing to think of something or overlooking a potential example situation where it’s obvious to me but maybe not to others?
Could you explain this specific example further?
In the sense I’m using it here, forgiveness is an arbitrary ritual whereby the ‘I’m angry at you about this’ tag is switched to ’Nah, ‘s cool’ for the forgiver. For the forgived, it’s a way of saying that they’re ‘allowed’ to stop feeling guilty about their past action because the forgiver has ‘granted them’ forgiveness.
Forgiveness can be useful if you don’t have the self-awareness to know when you’ve fully learned your lesson from a mistake, and someone attuned to it (the forgiver) is better positioned to discern when you have. It can also serve a social function as a ‘lowering of weapons’, or as a way of saying ‘I am now over my emotional disgust and am ready to engage again’, or so forth.
Insomuch as forgiveness is an approximation to these various component propositions and is coloured by magical thinking (e.g. intuitively thinking that it makes sense to have an epiphenomenal ‘mad at you’ tag that should determine your disposition towards someone), advanced cooperating rationalists would not use forgiveness, because it encourages magical thinking about the various components, and this magical thinking is susceptible to lost purposes, e.g. turning into a game of ‘winning forgiveness’ that is divorced from the actual purpose of doing better in future or understanding mistakes better.
‘Forgive and forget’ is even worse; advanced cooperating rationalists would not permit each other to forget misdeeds, including their own, because that would be throwing away evidence. Of course, ‘forget’ here does not literally mean forget; misdeeds might be brought up again if the same mistake is made in future. But this is still a binary thing of ‘Allowed to bring this up as evidence’/‘Not allowed to’ which is a crude approximation to the continuous and constant nature of past misdeeds as evidence about a person.
I don’t remember ever seeing a forgiveness ritual take place on LW, but I do know that I’ve seen lots of cases in an exchange where someone explained their own misdeed and its cause to prove they could avoid it in future (and sometimes committed to avoiding it in future), and that was good enough for all involved.
I probably phrased this a bit strongly in the first place, since I could see e.g. Bay Area instrumental x-rationality pros using forgiveness rituals as an informal time-saving shorthand for the underlying rigorous game-theoretical/Bayesian concepts. But I suspect they would be less susceptible to losing sight of that underlying core (e.g. less susceptible to ‘win forgiveness’ games). This would be ‘post-rigorous forgiveness’, but I’d remain suspicious of pre-rigorous forgiveness.
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
Why would this be true? If the other disputant was so clearly in the wrong, wouldn’t it be obvious that that’s what you’re trying to do, thus voiding the effect?
Sure, it wouldn’t always be effective. But things that—when described linguistically to you—sound obvious can be subtle enough when they actually happen to others that they work anyway. Actually believing that you have acted imperfectly and can do better next time and conveying this in apology form makes it less obvious. And in fact, if you are trained to apologise for little things in the face of big things even without an audience, then your outward conduct may even be mostly indistinguishable between the two cases anyway.