Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe relatively subtle tweaks to your reading style could make a big difference.
A “surprised bafflement” tone is often seen as a social attack because it’s perceived as implying, “You should know this already, therefore I’m surprised that you don’t, therefore I should have higher status than you.” But that’s not the only possible narrative. What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
Good question. When there are conflicts over norms, it’s not obvious how to resolve them in general. I suppose the easy, though less preferred, solution would be some kind of appeal to the will of the majority, or to an authority. The harder, but better, way would be an appeal to a deeper set of shared norms. I’m not sure how tractable that is in this case though.
What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
This is in fact often my reaction. But I will note that neither social attacks nor the writings of clueless self-centered people are particularly fun to read. (Especially not when it seems to be both.)
That may be stating it overly harshly. I do think Said is an intelligent person and often has good points to make. And I find it valuable to learn that others are getting a lot of value from his comments.
The signal to noise (not exactly the right term) ratio has not seemed particularly favorable to me though. But perhaps there’s yet some different reframing that I could do to be less frustrated (in addition to whatever changes Said might make).
Why should we have one set of norms at all? Should we really be driving towards cultural unity? Isn’t it okay for there to be subsets of people who drive differently? Just learn to ignore what you don’t find useful.
When designing norms, we should take into account an asymmetry between reading and writing: each comment is only written once, but read many times. Each norm imposed on writers to not be unduly annoying constrains the information flow of the forum much more than each norm imposed on readers to not be unduly annoyed.
Why should Said be the one to change, though? Maybe relatively subtle tweaks to your reading style could make a big difference.
A “surprised bafflement” tone is often seen as a social attack because it’s perceived as implying, “You should know this already, therefore I’m surprised that you don’t, therefore I should have higher status than you.” But that’s not the only possible narrative. What happens if you reframe your reaction as, “He’s surprised, but surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis—the fact that he’s so cluelessly self-centered as to not be able to predict what other people know means that I should have higher status”?
Good question. When there are conflicts over norms, it’s not obvious how to resolve them in general. I suppose the easy, though less preferred, solution would be some kind of appeal to the will of the majority, or to an authority. The harder, but better, way would be an appeal to a deeper set of shared norms. I’m not sure how tractable that is in this case though.
This is in fact often my reaction. But I will note that neither social attacks nor the writings of clueless self-centered people are particularly fun to read. (Especially not when it seems to be both.)
That may be stating it overly harshly. I do think Said is an intelligent person and often has good points to make. And I find it valuable to learn that others are getting a lot of value from his comments.
The signal to noise (not exactly the right term) ratio has not seemed particularly favorable to me though. But perhaps there’s yet some different reframing that I could do to be less frustrated (in addition to whatever changes Said might make).
Why should we have one set of norms at all? Should we really be driving towards cultural unity? Isn’t it okay for there to be subsets of people who drive differently? Just learn to ignore what you don’t find useful.
When designing norms, we should take into account an asymmetry between reading and writing: each comment is only written once, but read many times. Each norm imposed on writers to not be unduly annoying constrains the information flow of the forum much more than each norm imposed on readers to not be unduly annoyed.
Driving away other writers with annoyingness also constrains the flow of information. Trade-offs abound!