No, I get it. It's definitely way easier said than done. While that story sure sounds frustrating/disappointing (especially the part where the community accepts and respects this person, despite that), it's actually not surprising. Let me climb into what I think this person's shoes might be, from hearing your side of the story... > - Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying "I think my job here is to listen, first." Okay, Person X wanted to hear why I was upset with them. Good. He's been shitty enough that this is certainly called for. At least he has *this* much decency in him. > - Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology, Look, I'm trying to do my part. I accepted his apology in good faith and gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he really only apologized because he knows how bad it'd look if he didn't. Also, it's not like I had a choice. Other people aren't going to see this pseudo-apology for what it is, and he's just going to make me look bad if I don't. He's really manipulative like that, and good at it because I think on some level he's actually doing his best and doesn't know how manipulative he can be. Still, screw this guy, man. His best just isn't enough, and I'm done trying to pretend it is. > which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me Lol, I didn't do anything wrong. What would he even ask me to apologize for? Getting quite reasonably upset when he objectively wronged me by his own admission? > - Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through Maybe he didn't explicitly ask, but we both know what he meant. What kind of fool hears "I think it'd be better if you did X" and doesn't recognize it to be a request for you to to do X? Or like, equate things that aren't literally "insisting" with insisting when the pressure is there. This just sounds like a disingenuous complaint made by someone who is trying to make me look bad. > - Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day I mean, I'm trying to move on with my life. What am I to do, frown all day, to no good end? Again, Person X literally isn't capable of better. He doesn't even know he's closed minded, and you can't tell him because he just tries to explain why "you're wrong". There's literally nothing I could say to get this person to see that he's being a jerk. Some people are just stuck in dark worlds, where no matter how hard I try to let go of what he did and move on, he's still going to hold it against me. There's no way to run the test, but I bet you a hundred to one that he'll still be bitching about this in 2025.   Okay, that was fun. Climbing back out of those shoes now, I can totally see where that person might be coming from. I have no idea what you did to upset this person and obviously can't comment on how (un)reasonable it was/is for them to be upset about it, but I don't think it's important. I spent a few years talking to the most unreasonable person I've ever met, explicitly for the purpose of getting practice dealing with unreasonable people. It was this kind of thing on steroids. To give an idea of what kind of person she was, she complained to me about her boyfriend not hitting her when she asked him to, saying that he objected "You're just going to get upset and say you didn't think I'd actually do it!". She then went on to treat him like shit, up to pouring her drink on his head in clear attempt to provoke him into hitting her -- and then she complained to me when he finally did. I asked how she squares that with the fact that she literally asked him to not too long before, and her response was "I didn't think he'd actually do it!".   She was very difficult to get along with. Even when I would try my honest best and not complain at all about how she was shitty towards me, and she'd still get upset with me. And you know I'm not secretly or "unconsciously" trying to get away with something else, since figuring out how to get along with her was literally the only reason I had for talking to her in the first place. It's not the kind of mental/emotional work I'd want to be required to do on a day to day basis, but I did eventually figure it out. I basically had to get very good at showing her that I understood and cared about her perspective -- even if I wasn't also going to be swayed by it. By the time she got her boyfriend to hit her, she was able to laugh at herself when I pointed out how ridiculous she was being, despite how close that is to "It's kinda your fault your boyfriend hit you" which is a pretty triggering statement in general, let alone for people who are extremely sensitive and live in the darkest of worlds. By any normal/reasonable standards, my initial attempts to get along with her were "clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine". At the same time, the solution involved getting better at rooting out even the tiniest slivers of unintentional pressure and unintentional rounding of her perspective to something it wasn't (quite) -- even if the differences were quite insignificant (at least, in my perspective, which is totally always right. Almost.) This problem of "says one thing in the moment, then reverts to previous behavior later on" closely mirrors a common problem in naively implemented hypnotherapy. Basically, hypnotists almost by definition are good at getting contradicting thoughts out of peoples minds so that they can't block change. "In the office" you can get "miraculous" results and have people can learn to be disgusted by cigarettes in a literal snap of the fingers, only to pick up the habit again later down the line when they get fired or whatever. The problem is that if you don't deal with all the underlying drivers of behavior, then when a situation comes up that reminds them, it'll still be there. In the hypnotists office, this might look like "Fast forward three months and you get laid off at work and you're feeling stressed. What do you do?" -- and noticing if the urge to smoke comes up then. In the context of offering an apology, it might look like "So in three months from now, if you're telling people I didn't really mean it when I apologized, why is that?". If they don't spontaneously start laughing then the situation isn't absurd for them and there's a reason they might. Okay great, you have more work to do. Do I not look sincere enough? Are there more things I have yet to apologize for? What is it? I get that it's all very hard and not necessarily fair and all that. I put a lot of effort into developing the skills to do this, and I still don't get it right all the time. Especially not in the short term. And the most difficult people aren't always who you'd think. What I'm pointing at is that the cause of this difficulty looks an awful lot like difficulty in making the world truly and knowably light. With that difficult woman, for example, the skill was in taking into account her perspective as she sees it -- which is surprisingly hard. It's also necessary though, because if I can't pass her "Ideological Turing Test" and prove that I get it according to her perspective, maybe I don't? And if I don't, then maybe I'm missing something important. For the "light world" interpretation to be true, and knowably so, it seems like "your friends actually care where you're coming from, and aren't dismissive of your perspective -- at least, until they have sufficiently strong evidence that it overwhelms the differences in your preconceptions" is kinda necessary. Does that not match with what you mean when you talk about a "light world"?  

> You can look this up on knowyourmeme and confirm it, and I've done an interview on the topic as well. Now I don't know much about "improving public discourse" but I have a long string of related celebrity hoaxes and other such nonsense which often crosses over into a "War of the Worlds" effect in which it is taken quite seriously...I have had some people tell me that I'm doing what you're calling "degrading the public discourse," but that couldn't be farther from the truth. It's literature of a very particular kind, in fact. Are these stories misinterpreted willfully, just for the chance to send friends a shocking or humorous link? Sure. You can caption the bell curve and label the far ends with "this story is completely true" and the midwits with "I'm so mad you're degrading public discourse." But only the intelligent people are really finding it humorous. And I am sure that what has actually happened is that the American sense of humor has become horribly degraded, which I think is the truly morbid symptom more than anything else, as humor is a very critical component to discernment...But even more than those really truly sad examples, there's a sadder humorlessness in America where people are apparently no longer surprised or amused by anything. This seems like a good explanation of how you have degraded the public discourse.

Not a full response to everything but: As I mentioned in private correspondence, I think at least the "willingness to be vulnerable" is downstream of a more important thing which is upstream of other important things besides "willingness to be vulnerable." The way I've articulated that node so far is, "A mutual happy promise of, 'I got you' ".  (And I still don't think that's quite all of the thing which you quoted me trying to describe.) Willingness to be vulnerable is a thing that makes people good (or at least comfortable) at performance, public speaking, and truth or dare, but it's missing the expectation/hope that the other will protect and uplift that vulnerable core.