I wrote out a whole response here but didn’t end up posting it. My read is that your interpretation of what Aella wrote is pretty different from the thing she was trying to communicate, but the aggressiveness I read in your comment makes me hesitant to try to clarify.
ortho
Karma: 34
Also, fwiw, I kind of wish I’d left that first sentence out, because it feels like the least important part of my comment but it’s what you responded to. I am much more invested in the rest of what I wrote.
She didn’t say “we should exile the frame controllers”, she said things like “I will try to remove you from the power you might use to hurt anybody else”. Surely the post could have been phrased even more as a first-person-owned-experience thing, but IMO it’s pretty much like that as is. It reads to me much more as “my experience and attitude is X” than as “we (or you) should do X”.
(Also, I agree with you that it makes sense to deliberate seriously on decisions like “declaring war”. I just didn’t take the post as proposing war, I took it as Aella expressing her stance. I’m not sure what a better way to phrase what she was trying to say would have been?)
The comments here
seem less charitablehave more pushback than I would have expected, especially given the post’s score. Maybe because the thing being named is kind of “high stakes” or dangerous/scary or could potentially lead to witch hunts, etc. Personally, I have experienced “frame control”-type dynamics (at unfortunately high personal cost), and there is a truth being pointed to here that I feel is important to validate. The purpose of the post, it seems to me, is to help people be more able to protect themselves and others.“Frame control”[1], or whatever you want to call the thing this post is gesturing at, is, in my experience, extremely difficult to talk about. For each example of “X is frame control”, there is a counterexample where something that looks nearly identical happens harmlessly. And the other way around too. So any objections to specific written examples are, in my opinion, legitimate, and it’s good to be careful not to blanket-label any particular X as “definitely frame control and therefore bad”. (IMO the post was careful not to do this.)
The epistemics are super hard, because the thing being pointed to is subtle and there isn’t really a recipe for identifying it. Different people are affected by things in different ways, so one person may feel/be “frame controlled” in a certain context while someone else doesn’t/isn’t. And, being able to identify frame-control-type dynamics doesn’t by itself say anything about what can or should be done about them. (When I encounter someone who I realize affects me in this way, I tend to avoid ~completely.)
There is also something about online vs in-person interactions. Far more “frame control”-type stuff happens irl, because communication bandwidth is so high, feedback loops are so fast, and because much of the time, the level that this kind of dynamic operates on is not directly conceptual/verbal. This can make it hard to talk about at all, and especially hard to talk about online.
In my experience, I can’t determine whether someone is doing something “frame control”-y by their words alone — it’s also about their tone/cadence/prosidy/etc, what they emphasize or ignore, their body language, their presence, the social context, my history with them, the whole deal. (And, it’s not about those things by themselves, either, but rather about how I’m being affected by them, and how the person responds to signals from my end, etc.) The same words coming from different people (or from the same person at different times) can have very different, even opposite effects. So for a person interested in identifying when something like this is happening, it’s necessary to primarily pay attention to how you feel, rather than to e.g. what someone’s words are, whether the person seems reasonable or well-intentioned, etc. (With regard to that, I have found this checklist to be helpful.)
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[1] I almost want to just say “manipulation”, but maybe Aella wanted a less loaded term, and one which doesn’t come with strong connotations of intentionality and/or malevolence. As others have pointed out, focusing on intention w/r/t this stuff is usually a distraction, since even if everybody decides someone’s intentions are good, harm/manipulation/gaslighting/deception/etc can still be occurring. I’m happy to use “frame control” or other terms; throughout this comment I’ve tried to hedge w/r/t terminology.
(Still gathering my thoughts. Thanks for the response.)