(hmm) The organization of this post is very good; it's easy to follow from point A to point B throughout and makes effective use of references. Predictably, I'm also on board with the general project described.
That having been said, the specific style of politeness presented here seems tedious, noisy, slightly condescending, and potentially even obfuscating. The virtues of brevity and clarity can be maintained alongside the virtue of politeness.
Multi-sentence thanks for "insights" to soften a criticism take up space, may sound sarcastic, and aren't even the most warming kind of softening praise. "Thanks for these insights" and similar sound token at best and fake at worst. If someone wants to soften a criticism of one of my posts, I'd rather hear what their favorite line is or be informed that they upvoted it. But if all they have to say that's nice about the post is a stock phrase that could be equally well applied to any original text, I'd prefer they skip it.
Consider the brief reply to a correction, "Fixed, thanks". This could be interpreted as abrupt or even rude, but it is short, it acknowledges the help as received and useful and implemente...
if all they have to say that's nice about the post is a stock phrase that could be equally well applied to any original text, I'd prefer they skip it.
What I find interesting about this is that you're basically saying that their signal isn't costly enough to make you feel good. I wonder if that's the essence of the conflict under normal circumstances, i.e., by being direct (and thus not paying the additional costs of being polite) you are signaling that you do not value your audience as alliance partners very much, or that you are so far above them as to not need to make an investment in pleasing them.
Perhaps us geeky types simply prefer our costly signaling to be in the form of someone actually having thought about what we said. ;-)
What I find interesting about this is that you're basically saying that their signal isn't costly enough to make you feel good.
It's not about the effort or cost, as if I expect people to be more honest when they are using more resources. The problem is that the same stock phrase could be said of anything, because it is vague and difficult to interpret at lower levels of abstraction where its truth value could be evaluated. Writing a sonnet in general praise of insights would not be nearly as valuable as identifying a single specfic insight and why it is useful, though it would be a costlier signal.
You seem to be assuming that what you want to hear is how people should be learning to communicate ("I'd prefer they skip it"), but part of the point is that we are not like most people. If you want to communicate effectively with the broader population, then you have to focus on what they like to hear, not judge communication suggestions based on whether you would like hearing it.
Also, I love brevity, but I charitably assumed that the politeness examples were exaggerated to make the point. Exaggerated examples, while they often bother analytical types who already get the point ("but that's too far the other way!") are (IMHO) quite useful at helping get across new ideas by magnifying them.
And compactness is hard, as is habit change. So developing compact politeness seems harder than developing politeness and then polishing it with brevity and clarity. Maybe too hard for some people - one habit at a time is often easier.
I strongly agree with Alicorn's comment. When you suggested
"Hey Sebastian, I wanted to give you a heads up. I saw your recent post, but you spelled "wisen" as "wizen" - easy spelling error to make, since they're uncommonly used words, but I thought you should know. "Wizen" means for things to dry up and lose water. Cheers and best wishes."
as the appropriate way to point out a typo, I had to resist the urge to flame you. While there are people for whom such verbosity is the most effective mode of communication, I and the people I enjoy communicating with are not among them. Like Alicorn, I read that paragraph as tedious and condescending; if such a message were written to me, I would think that the author was either vacuous or thought I was an idiot.
But offering to help in return I think is a great thin[g]. Most people won't take you up on it, but it goes over really well.
I would find such an offer confusing at best and pretty creepy in the average case. "Politeness" is not a natural category and you should not expect an audience to consider something polite because you or another audience does.
So, are you surprised that it's commonly offered advice on how to become one of the most productive and connected people in any work environment? Offer to help anyone on anything, do double duty on work, and be gracious of it?
Because that is, in fact really common advice. I'd really, really encourage you to try it. I used to believe in being a "straight shooter", "all content no fluff", etc, etc, etc. Seriously, try it the other way for a couple weeks. I think you'll be amazed as what happens.
Try it! Don't guess, try it. Seriously, it might change your life.
While there may be environments in which this is in fact spectacular advice and would be well-received, I find these paragraphs so obnoxious that they set my teeth on edge. Why should I believe advice about making people feel good which sets my teeth on edge?
Because whether it works or not is independent of whether it sets your teeth on edge.
I am a person. I belong to the same reference class as those who this sort of thing would be expected to work on.
I do not find this style of politeness to "work" for me.
It is, I grant, a weak reason to dismiss the claims, but it is a reason, and conjoined with other, similar replies under this post, it adds up to a more compelling reason.
But I'm surprised it actually results in a strong negative emotion from you - "sets your teeth on edge."
Honestly, I'm not sure why.
I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I think I can explain this for you.
It sets her teeth on edge because it's condescending and dismissive. Specifically, with the line "So, are you surprised that it's commonly offered advice" you're adopting a professorial tone--purporting to teach Alicorn something she may find surprising about the expert consensus on the subject, with which she is presumed to be unfamiliar. So right from the beginning she's going to react by feeling insulted, because you're "talking down" to her.
A way of making the exact same point without adopting the condescending tone would have been simply to say, "I offered that advice because I read it in How to Win Friends and Influence People and in [a few other sources]." If you proceeded to give direct quotes, that would be even better, because then Alicorn could judge for herself whether you're accurately representing what you judge to be expert consensus (and whether or not she accepts your sources as expert). By asserting yourself as the expe...
This can't be the best way, can it? If it is, much less analytical groups that are comfortable being cohesive, complimentary, and encouraging will out-recruit us, out-perform us in charity, and cooperate more than us.
I have said, and repeat the sentiment: I'm in favor of being nice and polite and kind and cooperative with each other. It's this style, the specific sort you use in your examples, that gets the skin-crawling/teeth-on-edge/etc. reaction from me. If I had to characterize the style I'd call it something like "saccharine earnestness".
Maybe try it for a month or two and see how it goes?
This is the kind of defection by accident that analytical more often fall in to. Condescension with advice!
I'm often shocked how much completely (to me) over the top super-politeness is optimal when dealing with average people, often more than enough to make me tempted to say "Get on with it!" in a British accent. In fact a good instinct for many of us when dealing with non-nerds is to use just enough politeness to actively piss ourselves off were we in the other person's shoes.
For example, my mother prefaces even the tiniest criticism with 42 caveats and compliments (which feel like mostly white noise to me), but I can't help but notice that she also appears to be a social genius, with at least 30 genuinely close friends.
Yep. Play to your audience. This requires you to gain genuine skill in communication and in assessing the situation, but this is really not optional if achieving your goals requires interacting with humans. Failure to communicate appropriately in a variety of situations will lead to failure.
(No-one said instrumental effectiveness was easy.)
Imagine a group discussion intended to chose one of four options. Language being what it is, the names of the options come with emotional baggage, the good option, the wise option, the bad option, the foolish option. A group of mundanes will have a lively discussion. Having picked either the good option or the wise option, they will go away believing that they discussed the matter thoroughly, little suspecting that bad option and the foolish option never stood a chance in the discussion, whatever their merits.
The emotional baggage of terminology plays out in different ways in different contexts. If you are playing to win, you will try to crank up the level of emotion. In the abortion debate in America one side tries to win by framing it as choice versus slavery while the other side tries to win by framing it as life versus death.
If you are trying to find the truth, you need to push back against language doing your thinking for you. When smart people are having a group discussion intended to chose one of four options they notice that they labeled the options wise, good, foolish, bad, and spot the danger. The convention among smart people is to level the playing field, by relabeling ...
If we're going to talk about the cognitive framing effects of language, as the original post did, how about your use of the word "Mundane"?
To me, it seems actively harmful to accurate thinking, happiness, and your chance of doing good in the world. The implication is characterizing most humans as a separate lower class, with the suggestion of contempt and/or disgust for those inferior beings, which has empirically led to badness (historically: genocide. in my personal experience: it has been poisonous to Objectivism and various atheist groups I've been in).
I'd like to hear some examples where framing most people as both "lesser" and "other" has led to good for the world, because all the ones I'm pullin' up are pretty awful...
Tried it as a kid. They don't. Not sure why, their explicit justification seems to be that social norms are morally good. Or maybe you just make a sucky ally.
I have a theory about "dumb blonde syndrome", the idea that beautiful women are dumb. Folk psychology says that everybody gets the same number of character points to distribute among their attributes, so some people get intelligence while others get beauty. But reality says that beauty is correlated with health, which is correlated with intelligence. Beautiful people should tend to be smart. I think there is some positive beauty/intelligence correlation.
But I remember taking a class with a stunningly beautiful woman, who every week would loudly make some inane comment or question, and not realize it was inane because no one would tell her so. And I developed the theory that beautiful people don't learn to self-censor, because they don't need to. Anybody else would get ridiculed when they said something stupid, and learn to be more shy.
Maybe this also applies to smart people. They're more likely to be correct, and so less likely to be made fun of when speaking their mind, and so less needful of learning how to phrase a question in a way that reduces their chances of being made fun of.
I'm stunningly smart and I loudly make inane comments all the time. This is because I am also stupid.
(Now that I'm older and fatter, I'm realising just how much shit I got away with by being pretty when I was younger. It would have been worse if I hadn't been oblivious to it.)
It is quite important to be aware of one's stupidities, particularly when smart, or one will never be able to even start to alleviate them.
This is really good advice for the workplace and how I would write criticisms for people who I didn't know but wanted the help of. But it is a really terrible suggestion as a norm for Less Wrong.
Here, we've all more or less agreed to not take arguments personally and reward people for admitting they are wrong. Part of what is special about this place is that while it is good to be nice I can focus on whether comments are right instead of whether or not I am threatening a poster's status. As much as possible we try to avoid status maneuvers here - so following your suggestion that we undermine the community's signal to noise ratio in order to make allies (in a way other than being right) is a rather straightforward defection.
This doesn't make being mean is acceptable. I agree with Alicorn's classic post. But you seem to be advocating not just taking steps to avoid being mean but to expend extra efforts and page space on meaningless niceties instead of making forthright and respectful comments. While perhaps too confrontational in most workplaces nearly all of the examples are just fine here. If you're going to bother correcting spelling at all (and only in certain cases is it wort...
I am neurotypical in the sense that I'm not on the Asperger's/autism spectrum at all. And I think, because I'm a woman, I've internalized a fair bit of social finesse/politeness/ways to signal deference and avoid ego challenges. Given that overestimating our own competence is a common bias, I'm hesitant to say "my social skills are good" or anything like that, but I can at least report that I don't generally provoke hostility where I'm not anticipating it.
I agree that niceness is important, for all the reasons Alicorn has laid out. But I also agree with Alicorn and other commentators that the examples you give are off-putting. To me, they do not actually read as nice. They read as smarmy and condescending. At the same time, your advice: "Don't just guess here. Try it out for a month. I think you'll be amazed at how differently people react to you" is off-putting for its condescension. You are dismissing all your critics as not knowing what they're talking about ("just guessing"), and implying that people react poorly to them now--or at least much more poorly than they react to you. In this way you're implicitly claiming superior social status, which is...
I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless,
I find that really upsetting.
I'm just back from shopping at Lidl. Those yummy German chocolate coated marzipan bars are back for Christmas. Hurray! Should I get one for Robert too? No. He hates marzipan. He even cuts the marzipan out of the stollen and gives it to me.
When I read "I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless,..." I get the parental voice starting up: Why are you eating that crap, its mostly sugar, it will rot your teeth, I don't care that you like it, you're just being childish,.... The parental voice has a go at Robert too: What do you think you are doing cutting the marzipan out of the stollen. That is fussy beyond belief. Its just food. Eat it!. Everybody else likes it, what makes you so special?
Huh? What's that all about? It is slowly dawning on me that I carry a lot of mental scar tissue from playing social games with people who play rough. In my experience minimising the importance of subjective factors is an aggressive move. It is made by a player to whom subjective factors are very important. They say "I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly ...
I can see how it'd look like that in the abstract, but in out in the world it really does seem to work. That's the standard I'm using here - works-in-world.
But the commentators who are telling you "this doesn't work for us" are part of the world. This conversation is part of the world. You're getting commenters right now, in the world, telling you that you are provoking a hostile reaction when presumably you don't mean to. So there's something about your style that isn't working right for at least a significant minority of the target audience.
I can imagine situations where the style you're advocating or modeling here would work well. In a specific kind of corporate environment, it would work well.But in an intellectual discussion forum, I think it can have an effect opposite from the one you intend. That's why you're hearing from people saying that it's "irritating" or "sets their teeth on edge" or that it's coming across as condescending.
..."That's weird. I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. Its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful. I don't get how you could think otherwise.
adding phrases...makes the statement seem less confrontational, and that the difference in statement length is negligible.
"It would be great if you could pass the salt."
"There is no objective criteria by which it could be 'great' if - "
"I would appreciate it if you would pass the salt."
"If you think so, then it's probably true, although there are limits to introspection - "
"Trust me."
" - but even granting that, that's really a lame counterfactual scenario to raise - "
"Salt motherfucker. Can you pass it?!"
"I can."
(A short interval of time elapses. Salt is not passed.)
"Pass the salt!"
#1 is kind of clever pointing out a spelling error.
You know the thing that horrified me? When I realized that my "wizened" snark was my most upvoted contribution to this site. All I did was point out the intersection of a typo and an amusing mental image!
You're totally right, though, that I should have found a politer way to do it- focus on the mental image instead of status-seeking sarcasm. Indeed, that's probably the heart of politeness- wording things in ways that they don't threaten the other person's status.
Personally, I think I would have taken more offense at the suggested substitution
Hey Sebastian, I wanted to give you a heads up. I saw your recent post, but you spelled "wisen" as "wizen" - easy spelling error to make, since they're uncommonly used words, but I thought you should know. "Wizen" means for things to dry up and lose water. Cheers and best wishes."
As someone with a fairly extensive vocabulary and good spelling, I wouldn't mind having someone poke fun at an accidental misspelling or wrong usage, but I would be inclined to feel patronized if I thought that the person didn't think I would recognize on reexamination that what I had written was a mistake.
Even with a well thought out set of social heuristics, if you don't know the people you're dealing with very well, you run the risk of inadvertently giving offense. This is where it comes in handy to be a good guesser rather than an asker.
FWIW, I thought your "wizened" remark was a witty way of making the correction, and doing the "great article but I just wanted to say just a teeny tiny correction that I happened to notice and I'm sure it was just a typo but" dance would have been merely tedious, and no more polite.
It's pretty common, though. You wanted the other people reading to think of you as clever, and considered that to be "worth" making the author feel a bit bad. This is what the proxy-value of karma, as implemented by the Reddit-codebase discussion engine of this site, reflects: the author can only downvote once (and even then they are discouraged from doing so, unlike with, say, a Whuffie system), but the audience can upvote numerous times.
Thinking back, I've had many discussions on the Internet that devolved into arguments, where, although my interlocutor was trying to convince me of something, I had given up on convincing them of anything in particular, and was instead trying to convince any third-parties reading the post that the other person was not to be trusted, and that their advice was dangerous—at the expense of making myself seem like even less trustworthy to the person I was nominally supposed to be convincing. This is what public fora do.
Why call this "defection"? I interpret "defection" as meaning not just "a bad thing people do" but as deliberately deviating from a previous agreement. The relationship between the prisoner's dilemma and not being sufficiently polite seems forced, or at least like it could have used more thorough explanation.
I agree with Alicorn and others who find the sort of forced extreme politeness of some of the suggested responses (especially to #1) off-putting. I can't quite explain why, but if I had to guess, it would be for two reasons. First, politeness level indicates status, and when someone uses excessive politeness that ascribes to me extremely high status that I don't feel I've earned, I suspect they're trying to manipulate me. Given that many of the arguments in this post are explicitly about politeness as a tool for manipulating people, this seems to be a valid suspicion.
Second, lack of politeness is a countersignalling method to indicate friendship and community by showing you are close enough to a person that politeness is unnecessary (consider the relatively common story of the friends who greet each other with racial slurs, like "Hey n*gga!&qu...
Why call this "defection"? I interpret "defection" as meaning not just "a bad thing people do" but as deliberately deviating from a previous agreement. The relationship between the prisoner's dilemma and not being sufficiently polite seems forced, or at least like it could have used more thorough explanation.
I wanted to put this into a context of how you could cooperate, raising everyone's payoffs - or defect, raising your payoff at the expense of the other person.
Which might be fine, if you do it consciously. But is really something you should be aware of. Certain kinds of public statements have this effect - raising your standing at the expense of who you're criticizing, like in the meeting example. This might be okay to do, but you really, really should be aware of it. A lot of smart people don't realize that their action/criticism comes across as defection - raising themselves at the expense of lowering the other person.
Second, lack of politeness is a countersignalling method to indicate friendship and community by showing you are close enough to a person that politeness is unnecessary
Yes, but I don't think this is what the majority of techn...
One of the editing guidelines for Wikipedia is "Assume good faith" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith). It strikes me that is precisely what "normal" people do not do when criticized but what analytical people tend to do, especially when communicating with one another (assume that criticism is not a personal attack or status seeking, but rather is taken at face value). In that vein I think your suggestions are useful and valuable for dealing with regular people in real life or people on the more vanilla internet climes like Facebook, but they might not be appropriate for the frank and analytical types of discussions that take place on sites like LW (and HN).
As someone who is often (as the article describes) willfully indifferent to the finer arts of conversation, I personally appreciate the directness and sharpness of discussion here. I feel like I can take people's comments at face value, and that I can usually assess a fair consensus about something by reading people's reactions to it, rather than having to figure out what social factors are influencing the posts. So I'm anti-politeness!
I do know, though, that a lack of grace in these areas can totally drive away some personalities, which is probably a much more severe consequence than making life a little more ambiguous for us few social pariahs. To the extent that LW is made up of people who are willing to assume good faith on everything, I worry that it might be because we insulted everyone else until they went away, or never registered at all.
How do you see politeness of this sort as hurting discussion here?
One example: I had a strong negative reaction to this advice:
Consider correcting someone privately while praising them publicly. This combination has been observed to engender loyalty and good feelings throughout history.
My reasons:
I agree with the general position that excessive politeness can harm the quality of communication. But I strongly disagree that the harm is due to there simply being more words. The harm is due to the presence of actual ("white") lies.
The prescription that seems to flow from your analysis - "Don't waste words" - strikes me as a bad direction to go. I fear that our comments and criticisms are often already too cryptic and confusing due to their terseness. I would advise people to use more words: provide a second example to clarify, quote the passage you are critiquing, explain the point of a link. As the saying goes, words are cheap. Trying to be frugal in their use is false economy.
My advice: aim for maximum clarity. If you are considering adding some polite words simply to soften your criticism ... don't. It damages clarity. On the other hand, if you are considering whether to prefix your criticism with "I liked the first part, but ..." then go ahead. It clarifies the scope of your criticism. Even though it "costs" some words.
I think a more complete translation would be something like "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice; never assume stupidity when ignorance will suffice; never assume ignorance when forgivable error will suffice; never assume error when information you hadn't adequately accounted for will suffice."
You make a good case for being polite in general, but one of the things I enjoy about this corner of the Internet is that it's not overflowing with the constant thanking and thanking-for-thanking and dancing around the point that most people apply in real life, and which in my opinion actually undermine attempts to communicate. (there's a top-level post in there that I'll make one of these days..)
To paraphrase something I read a while back: "Normal people apply tact to everything they say, while nerds apply tact to everything they hear."
As long as people are aware that this 10% is unlike the other 90%, I see no strong reason to change those percentages, since it means that here is one of the few places that I can get to the point fairly quickly rather than trying to work out which arcane rituals I need to perform today.
You may also want to link back to Alicorn's post about why it's useful to be nice
To paraphrase something I read a while back: "Normal people apply tact to everything they say, while nerds apply tact to everything they hear."
This is something nerds tell themselves, but in practice they seem to me to be as susceptible to being infuriated by what non-nerds think is social rudeness as non-nerds are. Just because you think you shouldn't be affected by lack of social niceties, doesn't mean you aren't affected by lack of social niceties.
In particular: demanding of others that they be less affected by social niceties while simultaneously not bothering to use them oneself is a common antipattern in Internet discourse.
Thankfully, Postel's Law - "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." - is a nerd meme, and some nerds even apply it.
Good advice for the real world, maybe. But consider that here on LW, we are among analytical people, and wouldn't have it otherwise.
You know, if you wanted to look at conversation between two people as a prisoner's dilemma, I think it's quite the other way around, isn't it?
Consider the "payoff" of this situation to be the amount which the person you're talking to has considered and valued your concerns, suggestions, ideas, or requests.
C = Say what you mean as clearly and accurately as possible, and interpret the other person's actions as such
D = Choose your words and actions to be polite and non-confrontational
(You C, I C) = We both understand each other and we both wind up communicating to the best of our ability.
(You C, I D) = I am irritated with you for being rude to me and don't care for what you said very much. You probably heard me out, although you think I'm too sensitive and beat around the bush.
(You D, I D) = We both say what we have to say, but it might take longer and there might be minor misunderstandings that neither of us wanted to step on.
We'd all be better off, I think, if we could learn to C, and give and receive criticism in an accurate way, in good faith, without playing status and politeness games about it. But since the majority of the world is D, and probably won't change, we might need to D as well if we ever want anyone to put up with us.
So if you buy this interpretation, we're not defecting by accident -- we're cooperating by default, even when we're playing against Defection Rock and getting poor outcomes as a result.
A major point of the post is that it is possible to both say what you mean clearly and accurately and choose your words to be polite and non-confrontational.
There are two games: a communication game and a social game. You (and the analytical people in the post) only see the communication game, thinking that if you cooperate in it you must defect in the social game.
In fact, you are allowed to cooperate in both games, and receive good payoffs whether or not your opponent is in the analytical cluster.
This post could have been custom-written for me. I have the problems you listed; I was definitely "that kid" in school,... and just five minutes ago I wrote a comment pointing out someone's unclear phrasing. I just went and edited it.
This is a great point you're making. At the risk of being perceived as antagonistic, I've gotta say I don't think the prisoner's dilemma is the best frame for it. It's not that people are trying to cooperate and failing, it's that they just haven't developed the skills they need to accomplish the ends they seek. It's rather like not working on your short game in golf because you're really good at the long game. I think it's a good effort to make the issue topical, but the issue is already so topical that I think it distracts from rather than enhances your point.
I'm confused. If you believe being nasty is suboptimal, then why the analogy to the Prisoner's Dilemma? And if you believe it's optimal, then why be polite? It's not as if the universe cares why you play a winning strategy.
Lionhearted,
Thanks for the post, I think this hits on an issue that makes our community weaker. I'm always surprised by how focused and pedantic geeks feel they need to be, I guess they enjoy showing how clever they are. I don't know if there's an easy way to fix this problem but as someone who runs meetings for our local hackerspace and other groups it can be difficult to keep things on track.
Anyhow, in the name of offering constructive criticism, is there a way to shorten your writing style? This blog post lost me along the way at a few points but I stuck with it and finished it much to my liking. Perhaps some refined editing out of quotes/etc would shorten it?
Thanks for writing!
"Hey Sebastian, I wanted to give you a heads up. I saw your recent post, but you spelled "wisen" as "wizen" - easy spelling error to make, since they're uncommonly used words, but I thought you should know. "Wizen" means for things to dry up and lose water. Cheers and best wishes."
"Hey, thanks... I don't worry about spelling too much, but yeah that one's embarrassing, I'll fix it. Much appreciated. Anyways, what are you working on? How can I help?"
I find this insanely inefficient. The proper protocol is as follows (communicated privately, so as not to take other people's time; the emotional reception on both sides is neutral):
"Typo: "wizen""
"Thanks"
And imho, that's half the purpose of the internet: making me laugh. Can you guess the other half? ^^
Received wisdom leads me to believe that the Internet is for porn.
This post helped coalesce a number of observations I had made in the past, so I would like to leave aside the debate over whether the examples of politeness are optimal and look at a couple of other points.
One point which I haven't seen much of in comments is the relationship between how well people know each other and how polite they need to be. If people know you well, then they know enough to give you the benefit of the doubt if a comment can be taken multiple ways. If, however, they have only just met you or interact with you mostly in formal settings, that extra bit of politeness can go a very long way.
A little politeness is particularly effective when dealing with people who are being paid to do something for you, such as waiters or salespeople, or with people in bureaucracies from whom you need something. While it is not strictly necessary to be polite in these cases, it will often get you better service.
Unless you have a particularly close-knit workplace, that is also an arena where a little extra politeness is a good idea. You certainly don't want to offend your boss, and your coworkers will likely react better to constructive criticism than straight criticism.
Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
I've been told by my Korean college students that in Korean high schools the students with the highest grades are usually the most popular.
Koreans have an extremely strong aversion to correcting the errors of others to such an extent that a Korean airline crashed because the co-pilot who knew that his Captain had made an error which if uncorrected would cause the plane to crash didn't do more then suggest to the Captain that he had made an error. (Source: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell).
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Collider bias. Everyone knows the popular people. And you're smart, so you know the smart people. As a result, you are biased against knowing the dumb unpopular people. Which generates a negative correlation in your perception, even if there isn't a negative correlation overall.
You could phrase it as, "This seems like an amazing idea and a great presentation. I wonder how we could secure the budgeting and get the team for it, because it seems like it'd be a profitable if we do, and it'd be a shame to miss this opportunity."
"This seems like a fantastic example of how to rephrase a criticism. I wonder how it could be delivered in a way that also retained enough of the meaning, because it seems like it would work well if it did, and it'd be a shame not to be able to use it. "
Does this just come of as sarcasm to people of higher intelligence. I guess you've got to alter your message to suit the audience.
Reading this again three years later: I'm still a massive arsehole - I think it's an intrinsic personality problem - but I do occasionally succeed in catching myself and not fucking up my relations with others yet again. (This is actually a conscious thing I actually do.)
That's the really good news: This stuff is actually susceptible to thoughtful consideration!
Random Tip:
If you intend to criticize an idea, then I agree that it is socially productive to first point out something you liked about that idea, and if you didn't like its contents at all, then go with "I like that you brought up this topic/point, because I too find it important, however / yet I think..."
The magic words in the sentence above are "however" and "yet", the latter being superior. Notice how the same sentence would sound if I replaced "yet" with "but" to link the praise/concession with my crit...
Something I have trouble remembering:
To someone for whom it is normal to choose words carefully and connote respect, it's obvious that this is the right way to go about things--it gets other people on your side, so you don't have to fight as much to get what you want or convince people of something. It's also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.
To someone for whom it is normal to be as direct, clear, and efficient in language as possible, it's obvious that this is the right way to go about things--it's much more honest than in...
On further thought I think it's less about the time than about the number of operations involved. For you a typical polite sentence probably looks more like [concept expressed politely], while to me it looks more like [[positive opener][compliment to audience][concept][indicator that my opinion is subjective][self-deprecation/joke]]. At least that's my best guess as to why direct types complain endlessly about the effort and inefficiency of politeness while nice types don't see what the fuss is about. It's the difference between being able to speak the dialect fluently versus having to string a sentence together out of smaller components. Of course, my model of how you communicate may be completely off too :)
Oddly enough, I actually became very popular for some time in school, largely by accident and without developing my social fluency in the process. It was intensely unpleasant having so much social attention, even though it was mostly positive, without having the faculties to deal with it effectively. I think this may have delayed my process of developing my social skills considerably, because I became convinced that being popular was not a desirable state of affairs, and lost interest in pursuing the approval of others.
I agree with your point where it concerns interactions in most social forums, but strongly disagree with your implied suggestion of a social norm for Less Wrong. I prefer a community that produces the given examples to one that produces your suggested corrections.
The karma system somewhat mitigates the "silent approval, vocal dissent" phenomenon here, though I agree with NihilCredo that there still exist confusing side effects, and that a more nuanced system would be superior. But as it stands, the community norm for an author of a post should b...
Strong agree and upvote, with some caveats.
I very much agree that politiking is a way to be more effective in any situation involving another person, and I think this post is a pretty nice defence of "Why should I bother to be polite?". I've several suggestions, and I've decided to try to explicitly bear in mind your bulleted advice rather than rely on my - usually pretty good - sense of what is polite.
I think you could extend the class of people of who could use this advice to be not just those who aren't interested in politeness, but those who...
I generally like this essay on this topic: http://pdf23ds.net/implications-and-debate/
If you read the comments, however, please note that the original essay contained a lot of language that was pretty aggressive and insulting to feminists and sex/gender writers. Some writers (including myself) called out that language in the comments. The essay was then edited multiple times, but no notes were left that it had been edited. This was a great way to make commenters who had complained about the original essay (such as myself) look like crazy bitches, which doesn't seem like a very charitable debating tactic to me. ;)
Otherwise, though, yeah, it's a good essay.
I have to admire the cunning of your last sentence.
Or have I accidentally defected? I can't tell.
EDIT: I think the 'wizened' correction was intended to be a joke. When I read your piece originally the idea of you 'wizening up' made me smile, and I suspect that the corrector just wanted to share that idea with others who may have missed it.
While I agree with the thrust of your article, I think your examples could possibly use a little tweaking. Being polite definitely makes sense, but the impression I get from your examples is that being polite means dancing around the issues / taking longer to get to the point / disclaiming everything.
For example, you give the example
"I enjoyed this post a lot - thanks for that - but one thing that's tough for me is that all the examples are about martial arts [...]
The thanks for that is somewhat superfluous. Your example is already polite by starting off with "I enjoyed this post a lot."
I like this post a lot, it speaks to some of my concerns about this community and about the sorts of people I'd like to surround myself with. As an analytical/systematizing/whatever (I got a 35 on the test Roko posted a while back, interpret from that what you will), I felt very strange about all of these rhetorical games for most of my life. It was only when I discovered signalling theory in my study of economics that it started to make sense. If I frame my social interactions as signalling problems, the goals and the ways I should achieve them seem to be...
I've struggled with this for years and have done a lot of the things you've described, both the bad behaviors and the good suggestions. I still have trouble with it, especially over the Internet.
I'd like to point out that, at least in my experience, it takes a lot of practice to avoid offending others without offending your sense of self. I've also found it much easier in person, where I can use tone and a natural lack of seriousness to paper over any rough edges.
All++ social rules are special cases of "don't be a dick". I suppose the hard part is not inadvertently behaving like a dick.
++ pretty much. I'm sure someone will be along in a moment with a list of exceptions.
Very, very good post.
I realized I had this problem, and how much it could cost me, a few months ago.
I was going to write a small column for a newspaper made by students from my faculty. The subject was a delicate one, and the positon I would argue against was strongly popular among one of the colors in the faculty. I already saw the irrationality in the old false dillemas and the groupthink that guided most color politics, and I thought I could use a chance to criticize the "movement" as well as the specific cause.
I wrote a text with a strongly i...
Current comment count is past 300, and now the most common criticism has become "You're condescending to us, how dare you act like we never try to be polite in our everyday lives." What I would actually say is the biggest problem is that in this form of communication, what you're communicating to the other person is completely distinct of and perhaps even the exact opposite of the exact meaning your sentence has. It becomes a "the wine before me" situation over and over. Examples that happen to me all the time:
English: "Oh, this s...
Great post. I think this form of self-sabotage is one that many analytical people don't realize they are engaging in. As a computer programmer and a mathematician, I definitely fall into the category of analytical people.
One way I've managed to reduce this problem in my life comes from public speaking. When we give other speakers feedback, we always commend something they've done, recommend how they can improve, and finish with another commendation.
This kind of feedback is much more effective than just praise alone, which can be rejected especially in c...
Can anyone recommend an online discussion group which displays neurotypical communication at its best? It seems to me that the politeness examples in this discussion are a little hypothetical.
If I say an idea in public that doesn't work for some reason such as lack of resources, I'd rather someone bluntly tell me. The issue in many of these examples doesn't seem to be so much "defecting" as much as some people preferring their own status over honest discussion. The long-term solution is to change the culture, and in the meantime, just make sure not to other-optimize when trying to talk to people.
Hi! This is great. I got into the same line of thought when I heard my dad mention "How to win friends and influence people" and tried it. I loved it. It can be pretty nice to stop having to constantly heroically disagree.
It's also amazing to think about how many people's instantaneous reaction to a new idea is instantly "no", even when talking to people they allegedly trust.
Thank you so much for writing this.
Of course, not all defection is accidental. There do exist people who use snark and pedantry in place of argument, perhaps supplementing their snark with just barely enough argument to be taken seriously. When debating with you their primary goal is not to prove a point or get you to update your map to match the territory, but to lower your social status and raise theirs.
I liked this post. One thing I'd like to add is that you encourage rationality, in yourself and others, when you don't make disagreements adversarial.
If you want to know what a non-adversarial disagreement looks like, check out Bloggingheads. It's two bloggers, every day or so, having a discussion about current issues, and they never rant -- they always maintain friendly collegiality. I've always admired that.
It's funny, I don't remember seeing this post initially. I just followed a link from a more recent discussion post. Just yesterday I had the experience of reading a comment I posted on a popular blog and realizing that I was being a jerk in precisely this way. I only wish I could have edited it after I caught myself, but posting an apologetic followup was helpful anyway.
I learned this general principle a long, long time ago, and it has made a huge difference in the way people respond to me.
That said, to this day, I haven't been able to fully ingrain the...
I do understand the idea that criticism is best given in a way that considers social implications rather than just the practical ones, but... what if you have nothing to praise? I do some critique (informal, granted, and of nonpublished writing) and I have noticed that, surprise, hammering people with everything that's wrong with their work is not the best way to get them to fix things. Even when I know I'm right and have more experience than they do. But oftentimes the work is of such a quality that there really isn't anything to compliment. So, are you s...
Consider dropping it altogether if it's not a big deal. This about learning to prioritize - I had someone comment on my site thinking mistakenly that The Richest Man in Babylon and The Greatest Salesman in the World were by the same author. It wasn't, but who cares? It makes no difference. It's not worth pointing it out - almost everyone has an aversion to being corrected, so only do it if there's actually tangible gain. Otherwise, go do something more important and not engender the potential bad will.
I consider this particularly selfish and evil. If y...
Excellent point. Something I've observed is that one's ability to deal with frank, no bullshit criticism is highly context dependent, and well approximated by the magnitude of the bayesian update it requires to the status of those involved.
I find myself perfectly willing to give and receive sentences like 'here's why that's bullshit', from colleagues of roughly equal social status. I've noticed that the few other people I can do that with share with me a fair amount of confidence in their own intelligence. I don't have to revise my social status relative...
The problem is that your examples already go overboard. You describe a good upper bound of how nice to be, but you can usually get away with less, and not have to constantly be constructing bullshit in your brain. This is what I think causes people to object.
For example, is this comment really going to upset you? I seriously doubt it. There would be no reason for me to write, say, "You have made a really good point, but I wonder if you perhaps went a tiny bit overboard in your examples, and thus this decreased your effectiveness."
The basic messag...
This is the kind of thing I'd like to see more of on here; explaining how to use e.g. language to get along with people who are socially unlike you is hard and being able to do it is important. I laughed at this:
The most common criticism seems to be that adding fluff is a waste of time, insincere, and reduces signal:noise ratio.
... because as I was reading the post, I was hearing in my head every time I've heard that excuse from a friend. "It's just fluff, it shouldn't matter, it doesn't mean anything if you just say it automatically ..."
It d...
This reminds me of another post Yudkowsky made on a very similar topic.
I would consider most of the people here to be informally operating on at least a milder version of Crocker's rules.
The golden rule prevents me from padding my criticism with a layer of poetic fluff. I (and I assume others) readily see through obligatory rhetorical nonsense. I find it irritating and insulting, because it implies that you think you're tricking me into thinking that I'm not receiving criticism, and that I would have irrationally overreacted to your criticism if you hadn't cunningly veiled it.
If we are working together, I want your honesty, and I do not want us to fail together because I've done something wrong and you were too "polite" to expre...
My speculation: people in "our" personspace cluster tend to be pattern mismatchers/polarity responders (NLP lingo, there are probably some googleable descriptions). Whereas "normals" get good emotions from rapport, "we" are the opposite. A lot of nerd awkwardness probably comes from the failure to understand and utilize rapport.
About your edit:
Don't just guess here. Try it out for a month. I think you'll be amazed at how differently people react to you
This is not a valid argument, and using it puts you in the same reference class with many nasty quack cures.
First, I'm trying to put some of this advice into immediate practice. I think there are many excellent points in this piece. I have found that in my experience, I am best at not accidentally defecting when I am not emotionally involved in the topic, and that asking myself "What am I doing here?" has saved me tons of time and effort. I still sometimes relish battling the masses of the Just Plain Wrong, but more often I find it wearying.
...People matter, and people's feelings matter,especiallyif they have sway over your life, but even if they don
I want to reference this post, and it'd be slightly handy if the formatting was cleaned up a little (i.e. paragraph spaces inserted)
Really enjoyed the article, and thanks for the link to the nerds article. I think it is easy to underestimate how big an effect this has. When growing up my mother was always incredibly helpful with schoolwork, but because she focussed on the negative, stating mistakes directly rather than praising the good first and then carefully broaching the subject, she came across as very harsh and demanding. Despite the best possible motives her delivery made me less happy and made me more resistent to suggestions and mutinous.
Unfortunately I think I've fallen into ...
Oh, I'm not defecting by accident :). In high school, I was, because I didn't have enough self-awareness to realize that the reason I had no friends was because I was too argumentative. In fact, I didn't really get it until I got the "Most argumentative" superlative in the school year book.
Then I got to college, and I decided I wanted to have friends. So I got some. And it was fun for a while, but it turns out that social interactions put me in this awful sort of yo-yo emotional state. It would make me really happy, and then I would crash, h...
Related to: Rationalists Should Win, Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?, Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic, Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"
The "Prisoner's Dilemma" refers to a game theory problem developed in the 1950's. Two prisoners are taken and interrogated separately. If either of them confesses and betrays the other person - "defecting" - they'll receive a reduced sentence, and their partner will get a greater sentence. However, if both defect, then they'll both receive higher sentences than if neither of them confessed.
This brings the prisoner to a strange problem. The best solution individually is to defect. But if both take the individually best solution, then they'll be worst off overall. This has wide ranging implications for international relations, negotiation, politics, and many other fields.
Members of LessWrong are incredibly smart people who tend to like game theory, and debate and explore and try to understand problems like this. But, does knowing game theory actually make you more effective in real life?
I think the answer is yes, with a caveat - you need the basic social skills to implement your game theory solution. The worst-case scenario in an interrogation would be to "defect by accident" - meaning that you'd just blurt out something stupidly because you didn't think it through before speaking. This might result in you and your partner both receiving higher sentences... a very bad situation. Game theory doesn't take over until basic skill conditions are met, so that you could actually execute any plan you come up with.
The Purpose of This Post: I think many smart people "defect" by accident. I don't mean in serious situations like a police investigation. I mean in casual, everyday situations, where they tweak and upset people around them by accident, due to a lack of reflection of desired outcomes.
Rationalists should win. Defecting by accident frequently results in losing. Let's examine this phenomenon, and ideally work to improve it.
Contents Of This Post
Background - On Analytical Skills and Rhetoric
From Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" -
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
[...]
The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?
[...]
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.
I believe that "defecting by accident" is a result of not learning how different phrasing of words and language can dramatically effect how well your point is taken. It's been a general observation of mine that a lot of people in highly intellectual disciplines like mathematics, physics, robotics, engineering, and computer science/programming look down on social skills.
Of course, they wouldn't phrase it that way. They'd say they don't have time for it - they don't have time for gossip, or politics, or sugarcoating. They might say, "I'm a realist" or "I say it like it is."
I believe this is a result of not realizing how big the difference in your effectiveness will be depending on how you phrase things, in what order, how well you appeal to another person's emotions. People in highly analytical disciplines often care about "just the facts" - but, let's face it, we highly analytical people are a great minority of the population.
Sooner or later, you're going to have something you care about and you're going to need to persuade someone who is not highly analytical. At that point, you run some serious risks of failure if you don't understand basic social skills.
Now, most people would claim that they have basic social skills. But I'm not sure this is borne out by observation. This used to be a very key part of any educated person's studies: rhetoric. From Wikiedpia: "Rhetoric is the art of using language to communicate effectively and persuasively. ... From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public speakers and writers to move audiences to action with arguments."
Rhetoric is now frequently looked down upon by highly intelligent and analytical people. Like Paul Graham says, it's not that intellectuals can't learn it. It's that they think it's not a good use of their time, that they'd rather be smart instead.
Defecting by Accident
Thus, you see highly intelligent people do what I now term "defecting by accident" - meaning, in the process of trying to have a discussion, they insult, belittle, or offend their conversational partner. They commit obvious, blatant social faux pases, not as a conscious decision of the tradeoffs, but by accident because they don't know better.
Sometimes defecting is the right course of action. Sometimes you need to break from whoever you're negotiating with, insist that things are done your way, even at their expense, and take the consequences that may arise from that.
But it's rarely something you should do by accident.
I'll give specific, clear examples in a moment, but before I do so, let's look at a general example of how this can happen.
If you're at a meeting and someone gives a presentation and asks if anyone has questions, and you ask point-blank, "But we don't have the budget or skills to do that, how would we overcome that?" - then, that seems like a highly reasonable question. It's probably very intelligent.
What normal people would consider, though, is how this affects the perception of everyone in the room. To put it bluntly - it makes the presenter look very bad.
That's okay, if you decide that that's an acceptable part of what you're doing. But you now have someone who is likely to actively work to undermine you going forwards. A minor enemy. Just because you asked a question casually without thinking about it.
Interestingly, there's about a thousand ways you could be diplomatic and tactful to address the key issue you have - budgeting/staffing - without embarrassing the presenter. You could take them aside quietly later and express your concern. You could phrase it as, "This seems like an amazing idea and a great presentation. I wonder how we could secure the budgeting and get the team for it, because it seems like it'd be a profitable if we do, and it'd be a shame to miss this opportunity."
Just by phrasing it that way, you make the presenter look good even if the option can't be funded or staffed. Instead of expressing your concern as a hole in their presentation, you express it as a challenge to be overcome by everyone in the room. Instead of your underlying point coming across as "your idea is unfeasible," it comes across as, "You've brought this good idea to us, and I hope we're smart enough to make it work."
If the real goal is just to make sure budgeting and funding is taken care of, there's many ways to do that without embarrassing and making an enemy out of the presenter.
Defecting by accident is lacking the awareness, tact, and skill to realize what the secondary effects of your actions are and act accordingly to win.
This is a relatively basic problem that the majority of "normal" people understand, at least on a subconscious level. Most people realize that you can't just show up a presenter and make them look bad. Or at least, you should expect them to be hostile to you if you do. But many intelligent people say, "What the hell is his problem? I just asked a question."
This is due to a lack of understanding of social skills, diplomacy, tact, and yes, perhaps "politics" - which are unfortunately a reality of the world. And again, rationalists should win. If your actions are leading to hostility and defection against you, then you need to consider if your actions are the best possible.
"Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate"
Eliezer's "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" is a masterpiece. I'm only going to excerpt three parts, but I'd recommend the whole article.
From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual fundraising appeal. It was a simple enough format, if I recall correctly. The rabbi and the treasurer talked about the shul's expenses and how vital this annual fundraise was, and then the synagogue's members called out their pledges from their seats.
Straightforward, yes?
Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal. One that I ran, in fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named. One difference was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet. And another difference was that the audience was largely drawn from the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd. (To point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace. If you understood the phrase "empirical cluster in personspace" then you know who I'm talking about.)
I crafted the fundraising appeal with care. By my nature I'm too proud to ask other people for help; but I've gotten over around 60% of that reluctance over the years. The nonprofit needed money and was growing too slowly, so I put some force and poetry into that year's annual appeal. I sent it out to several mailing lists that covered most of our potential support base.
And almost immediately, people started posting to the mailing lists about why they weren't going to donate. Some of them raised basic questions about the nonprofit's philosophy and mission. Others talked about their brilliant ideas for all the other sources that the nonprofit could get funding from, instead of them. (They didn't volunteer to contact any of those sources themselves, they just had ideas for how we could do it.)
Now you might say, "Well, maybe your mission and philosophy did have basic problems - you wouldn't want tocensor that discussion, would you?"
Hold on to that thought.
Because people were donating. We started getting donations right away, via Paypal. We even got congratulatory notes saying how the appeal had finally gotten them to start moving. A donation of $111.11 was accompanied by a message saying, "I decided to give **** a little bit more. One more hundred, one more ten, one more single, one more dime, and one more penny. All may not be for one, but this one is trying to be for all."
But none of those donors posted their agreement to the mailing list. Not one.
So far as any of those donors knew, they were alone. And when they tuned in the next day, they discovered not thanks, but arguments for why they shouldn't have donated. The criticisms, the justifications for not donating - only those were displayed proudly in the open.
As though the treasurer had finished his annual appeal, and everyone not making a pledge had proudly stood up to call out justifications for refusing; while those making pledges whispered them quietly, so that no one could hear.
Indeed, that's a problem. Eliezer continues:
"It is dangerous to be half a rationalist."
And finally, this point, which is magnificent -
Our culture puts all the emphasis on heroic disagreement and heroic defiance, and none on heroic agreement or heroic group consensus. We signal our superior intelligence and our membership in the nonconformist community by inventing clever objections to others' arguments. Perhaps that is why the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd stays marginalized, losing battles with less nonconformist factions in larger society. No, we're not losing because we're so superior, we're losing because our exclusively individualist traditions sabotage our ability to cooperate.
On Being Pedantic, Sarcastic, Disagreeable, Non-Complimentary, and Otherwise Defecting by Accident
You might not realize it, but in almost all of human civilization it's considered insulting to just point out something wrong someone is doing without any preface, softening, or making it clear why you're doing it.
It's taken for granted in some blunt, "say it like it is" communities, but it's usually taken as a personal attack and a sign of animosity in, oh, 90%+ of the rest of civilization.
In these so-called "normal people's societies," correcting them in front of their peers will be perceived as trying to lower them and make them look stupid. Thus, they'll likely want to retaliate against you, or at least not cooperate with you.
Now, there's a time and place to do this anyways. Sometimes there's an emergency, and you don't have time to take care of people's feelings, and just need to get something done. But surfing the internet is not that time.
I'm going to take some example replies from a recent post I made to illustrate this. There's always a risk in doing this of not being objective, but I think it's worth it because (1) I tend to read every reply to me and carefully reflect on it for a moment, (2) I understand exactly my first reactions to these comments, and (3) I won't have to rehash criticisms of another person. Take a grain of salt with you since I'm looking at replies to myself originally, but I think I can give you some good examples.
The first thing I want to do is take a second to mention that almost everyone in the entire world gets emotionally invested in things they create, and are also a little insecure about their creations. It's extraordinarily rare that people don't care what others' think of their writing, science, or art.
Criticism has good and bad points. Great critics are rare, but they actually make works of creation even in critique. A great critic can give background, context, and highlight a number of relevant mainstream and obscure works through history that the piece they're critiquing reminds them of.
Good critique is an art of creation in and of itself. But bad critique - just blind "that's wrong" without explaining why - tends to be construed as a hostile action and not accomplish much, other than signalling that "heroic disagreement" that Eliezer talks about.
I recently wrote a post titled, "Nahh, that wouldn't work". I thought about it for around a week, then it took me about two hours to think it through, draw up key examples on paper, choose the most suitable, edit, and post it. It was generally well-received here on LW and on my blog.
I'll show you three comments on there, and how I believe they could be subtly tweaked.
1.
> I wizened up,
I don't think that's the word you want to use, unless you're talking about how you finally lost those 20 pounds by not drinking anymore.
2.
FWIW, I think posts like this are more valuable the more they include real-world examples; it's kind of odd to read a post which says I had theory A of the world but now I hold theory B, without reading about the actual observations. It would be like reading a history of quantum mechanics or relativity with all mentions of things like the laser or double-slit experiment or Edding or Michelson-Morley removed.
3.
An interesting start, but I would rather see this in Discussion -- it's not fully adapted yet, I think...
Now, I spend a lot of time around analytical people, so I take no offense at this. But I believe these are good examples of what I'd call "accidental defection" - this is the kind of thing that produces a negative reaction in the person you're talking to, perhaps without you even noticing.
#1 is kind of clever pointing out a spelling error. But you have to realize, in normal society that's going to upset and make hostile the person you're addressing. Whether you mean to or not, it comes across as, "I'm demonstrating that I'm more clever than you."
There's a few ways it could be done differently. For instance, an email that says, "Hey Sebastian, I wanted to give you a heads up. I saw your recent post, but you spelled "wisen" as "wizen" - easy spelling error to make, since they're uncommonly used words, but I thought you should know. "Wizen" means for things to dry up and lose water. Cheers and best wishes."
That would point out the error (if that's the main goal), and also engender a feeling of gratitude in whoever received it (me, in this case). Then I would have written back, "Hey, thanks... I don't worry about spelling too much, but yeah that one's embarrassing, I'll fix it. Much appreciated. Anyways, what are you working on? How can I help?"
I know that's how I'd have written back, because that's how I generally write back to someone who tries to help me out. Mutual goodwill, it's a virtuous cycle.
Just pointing out someone is wrong in a clever way usually engenders bad will and makes them dislike you. The thing is, I know that's not the intention of anyone here - hence, "defecting by accident." Analytical people often don't even realize they're showing someone up when they do it.
I'm not particularly bothered. I get the intent behind it. But normal people are going to be ultra-hostile if you do it to them. There's other ways, if you feel the need to point it out publicly. You could "soften" it by praising first - "Hey, some interesting points in this one... I've thought about a similar bias of not considering outcomes if I don't like what it'd mean by the world. By the way, you probably didn't mean wizen there..." - or even just saying, "I think you meant 'wisen' instead of 'wizen'" - with links to the dictionary, maybe. Any of those would go over better with the original author/presenter whom you're pointing out the error to.
Let's look at point #2. "FWIW, I think posts like this are more valuable the more they include real-world examples; it's kind of odd to read a post which says I had theory A of the world but now I hold theory B, without reading about the actual observations."
This is something which makes people trying to help or create shake their head. See, it's potentially a good point. But after someone takes some time to create something and give it away for free, then hearing, "Your work would be more valuable if you did (xyz) instead. Your way is kind of odd."
People generally don't like that.
Again, it's trivially easy to write that differently. Something like, "Thanks for the post. I was wondering, you mentioned (claim X), but I wonder if you have any examples of claim X so I can understand it better?"
That one has - gratitude, no unnecessary criticism, explains your motivation. All of which are good social skill points, especially the last one as written about in Cialdini's "Influence" - give a reason why.
#3 - "An interesting start, but I would rather see this in Discussion -- it's not fully adapted yet, I think..."
Okay. Why?
The difference between complaining and constructive work is looking for solutions. So, "There's some good stuff in here, but I think we could adapt it more. One thing I was thinking is (main point)."
Becoming More Self-Aware and Strategic; Some Practical Social Guidelines
From Anna Salamon's "Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic" -
But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out. We do not automatically:
Anna points out that people don't automatically ask what they're trying to achieve. You don't, necessarily, ask what you're trying to achieve.
But I would recommend you do ask that before speaking up socially. At least for a while, until you've got the general patterns figured out.
If you don't, you run the risk of antagonizing and making people hostile to you who would otherwise cooperate and work with you.
Now, I've heard smart people say, "I don't have time for that." This is akin to saying, "I don't have time to achieve what I want to achieve."
Because it doesn't take much time, and it makes you much more effective. Asking, "What am I trying to achieve here?" goes a long way.
When commenting on a discussion site, who are you writing for? For the author? For the regular readers? What's your point in replying? If your main point is just to "get to truth and understanding," then what should your secondary considerations be? If there's a conflict between the two, would you prefer to encourage the author to write more, or to look clever by pointing out a pedantic point?
I understand where you're coming from, because I used to come from the same place. I was the kid who argued with teachers when they were wrong, not realizing the long term ramifications of that. People matter, and people's feelings matter, especially if they have sway over your life, but even if they don't have sway over your life.
To that, here's some suggestions I think would make you more effective:
Following some of these simple points will make you much more effective socially. I feel like a lot of times analytical and intelligent people study really hard, difficult problems, while ignoring basic considerations that have much more immediate and larger impact.
Further reading:
Edit: Lots of comments on this. 130 and counting. The most common criticism seems to be that adding fluff is a waste of time, insincere, and reduces signal:noise ratio. I'd encourage you to actually try it instead of just guessing - a quick word of thanks or encouragement before criticizing creates a more friendly, cooperative environment and works well. It doesn't take very long, and it doesn't detract from S:N ratio much, if at all.
Don't just guess here. Try it out for a month. I think you'll be amazed at how differently people react to you, and the uptake on your suggestions and feedback and ability to convince and teach people. Of course, you can construct examples of going overboard and it being silly. But that's not required - just try to make everything 10% more gracious, and watch how much your effectiveness increases.