Morendil comments on Open Thread: March 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: RobinZ 11 March 2010 05:25PM

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Comment author: Morendil 14 March 2010 06:03:43PM 7 points [-]

I'm sure they wanted to help, but it was a very direct, blunt experience

The key observation is that, as far as I can tell, you never actually asked for help.

I call the behaviour you're commenting on "inflicting help". This is a very, very common mistake that even very smart people make. One of the basic tools in a good consultant's toolkit is to be able to recognize actual requests for help, and fulfill those strictly within the bounds of what has been requested.

The good news is, this is a community of people who want to be skilled at updating on the evidence. Hopefully this negative result will be counted as evidence and people here will, in future, tend to refrain from inflicting help.

Comment author: Rain 14 March 2010 06:30:56PM *  0 points [-]

My favorite part was how the person who most directly insulted me was voted up (2 rating as of now), whereas my requests to stop were voted down (-1 and 0 now, both were -2). It was very strong fuel for my martyrdom complex. I actually laughed aloud.

Comment author: FAWS 14 March 2010 06:59:30PM *  0 points [-]

I started writing a devils advocate sort of reply after reading the first link, but for the life of me I can't think of any good reason to vote "No, thank you. I'd rather suffer where I am." down in context. If I was voting based on the current score (I try my best not to do that) I'd vote it back up to 0.