= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (770)
I don't watch House nor much TV at all.
I'm a native English speaker, but people often do say I sound "foreign" (usually German, for some reason) and that I speak with a more "intelligent" and "upper class" tone.
I remember messaging you a lot a while back, noting your eerie similarities to me in terms of personal experience. AFAICT, the only real differences between you and me are:
As for being less asshole-ish, I do believe I can pull it off with minimal effort. The problem is that I cannot be significantly less asshole-ish, while also
1) impressing on others the importance of updating in my direction, and/or
2) posting like everyone else does, i.e., if I made my posts less asshole-ish, I would have to avoid making posts like Rain's recent ones, due to mistakenly classifying them as asshole-ish.
Regarding 1), a lot of you believe that my tone of posting is likely to do the opposite, as it turns people off from agreeing with me. While that might be true for social issues like who-"likes"-Silas, I strongly disagree that it holds on substantive issues.
I've spent a lot of my internet posting career , years ago, being "nice" in arguments, which, yes, I'm capable of. I found that, rather than turn people on to my views, it simply legitimized, in their minds, the ridiculous positions they were taking, and allowed them to confidently go away believing it was just a case of "reasonable people disagreeing about a tough issue".
In contrast, when I used my regular, "asshole-ish" tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they'd quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later. For example, I'm famous, under a different name, among the Linux community, for my rudeness toward a Linux forum when I ran into problems trying to switch. I made a number of criticisms of the distro, which were predictably ridiculed.
But then a few years later, most everyone believes those criticisms are valid, but if I point out how I (under that name) made them long ago, giving stark, early insight into what Linux needed to do to gain widespread acceptance in the home PC market, all they do is sling mud at me. Yet at least one Linux consultant has saved the famous thread for use in showing clients why they shouldn't deploy a Linux distro without a reliable support contract.
Or for an example here, does anyone remember Daniel_Burfoot's brilliant epiphany about how to do AI the right way, and my asshole-ish criticisms thereof? And how he stubbornly disagreed every step of the way? Well, what happened to that series? It was abandoned midway.
So therein lies the problem: do I want to change minds, or do I want to be liked? Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn's advice, or do I want to be "part of the tribe"? I think you know what decision I've made, and why you haven't done the same.
Why do you want to change minds? Is there any chance that you could abandon that value? Because I believe, paradoxically, that it would help you achieve that same value :-)
I'm probably better than you at general social skills, but the first drafts of my comments sometimes sound disturbingly like yours. Then I notice that excessive subconscious desire to change minds interfered with my clarity of thought, and rethink/rewrite the comment. I want the "ideal commenter me" to never care who said what, who's right and who's wrong, etc. My perfect comment should make a clear, correct, context-free statement that improves the discussion, and do absolutely nothing else. I consciously try to avoid saying things like "you're wrong", saying instead "the statement you propose doesn't work because..." or even better "such-and-such idea doesn't work because...".
Ironically, people do often change their minds when talking to me about topics I understand well. But I'm not setting out to do it. Actually I have an explicit moral system, worked out from painful experience, that says it's immoral for me to try to convince anyone of anything. I try to think correct thoughts and express them clearly, and let other people make conclusions for themselves.
Can you explain what that painful experience was? Because other people seemed to have learned from their past experience that being "cocky" led to good results instead of bad.
(I know someone else who tried to participate on Less Wrong and stopped after being frequently downvoted due to apparent overconfidence, and his explanation was very similar to Silas Barta's, i.e., his style is effective in other online forums that he participates in.)
When my job and my family self-destructed at the same time, I realized that I had no major personal successes because I'd blindly believed in others' goals and invested all my effort in them. Then I looked over my past to find occurrences where I'd made others worse off by manipulating their motivations, and found plenty of such occurrences. So I resolved to cut this thing out of my life altogether, never be the manipulator or the manipulatee. This might be an overcorrection but I feel it's served me very well in the 4 years since I adopted it. A big class of negative emotions and unproductive behaviors is just gone from my life. Other people notice it too, making compliments that I'm "unusual" and exceptionally easy to be with.
How do you identify it when others are attempting to manipulate you?
This sort of question is always difficult to answer... How does one identify that a shoe is a shoe? I seem to have something like "qualia" for manipulation. Someone says something to me and I recognize a familiar internal "pull": a faint feeling of guilt, and a stronger feeling of being carefully maneuvred to do some specific action to avoid the guilt, and a very strong feeling that I must not respond in any way. Then I just allow the latter feeling to win. It took a big conscious effort at first, but by now it's automatic.
Has this caused you difficulty in social situations where a certain degree of manipulation is usually considered acceptable?
I'm thinking of cases where someone is signalling that they want a hug, or a compliment, or to be asked after. Certainly it would be nice if people stated their needs clearly in those situations, but a) that's not "normal" in our culture and a lot of people never consider it, b) it's sometimes very difficult even when you know it's an option, and c) ignoring people in those situations won't lead them to be clearer next time, it just makes it seem like you don't care about their distress.
Signaling that you want a hug isn't manipulation in my book, it's just nonverbal communication. But I can't be guilt-tripped into a hug or a compliment.
Fair enough. But I'm not sure where the lines are between those things. That question might be a good addition to this post.
I am very glad to hear of someone else who had a similar experience and made a similar choice. While it may be an overreaction, I think that it is not an inappropriate way to live one's life.
Expand? I'd be interested to hear similar stories.
I had been socially maladjusted, but then found that I could be charming and manipulate people rather effectively. I took advantage of this for perhaps a year, but began to feel guilty for my manipulations. I began to realized I was changing who they were without their permission and without them being able to stop me.
Once I had realized that I was for all intents and purposes emotionally violating people, I swore it off entirely. If I cannot make my point and convince someone of something through the facts (or shared consensus, for debates that aren't based on facts,) I stop.
I hope this was informative. If you have more detailed questions I would be glad to expand, but I haven't thought about this in a few years and I don't know that I summed it up completely.
I'm a little confused at this: I understand not wanting to manipulate people, but why does that mean you can't (openly and honestly) try to persuade or convince someone? That doesn't seem necessarily manipulative.
The problem is, I was/am a very manipulative person by nature, so I really need the conscious overcorrection. Whenever I detect within myself a desire to change someone's opinion, I know how much it weakens my defense against making bad arguments. It's like writing emails late at night: in the process of doing it, I like the resulting text just fine, but I know from experience on a different level that I'm going to be ashamed when I reread it in the morning.
Another belief that is worth changing is 'conversations should be fair'. Having no expectations of others beyond bounded Machiavellian interaction can allow one to guide a conversation in a far more healthy direction.
What do you mean by 'bounded Machiavellian interaction'?
I'm being terse to the point of being outrright opaque but I mean that if you expect people to try maximise their own status (and power in general) in all their interactions rather than trying to be reasonable or fair then you will find conflict laden conversations less frustrating. I say 'bounded' because people aren't perfect machiavellian agents even when they try to be - you need to account for stupidity as well as political motivations.
This reminds me of one of my heuristics-- if you claw at people, it's reasonable to expect them to claw back.
This doesn't mean "never claw at people". It just means "don't add being offended at them clawing back to the original reasons you had for clawing at them".
I'm very interested in this system, as it matches some of my own recent moral insights. How exactly did you go about implementing it?
Do you have problems with detecting manipulation in yourself and others, or problems stopping it when you've detected it?
Depends on what you mean by manipulation. I can (obviously) easily detect falsehood in myself, and have more or less suppressed it. I can also easily detect and suppress "technical truth" answers and other methods of deception.
However, I think I need to work on detecting manipulation in others and resisting its effects. I'm pretty good at resisting flattery, but I'm sure that there are more subtle methods out there that I am unaware of and therefore susceptible to.
For me the biggest problem was guilt-trips, not flattery.
I think I used to be closer to that level of detachment, though it wasn't a matter of explicit morals so much as not being interested in modeling other people's minds. I think my current state is an improvement emotionally, but I don't know how it affects my ability to argue effectively.
However, there's at least one more reason not to be hooked on winning. I don't think I'm the only one who's more likely to be convinced if I'm getting evidence and argument that points in the same direction from more than one source. This means that various sources contributed, but no one of them was definitive in changing my mind.