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Alicorn comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong
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Honestly, that surprises me. I could see disagreeing for signal:noise ratio reasons, or not having time - actually, I spent time addressing those in my post since I knew they'd be common objections.
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. For the record, I'd advocate you do this sincerely, and never insincerely. Me, if I don't like anything someone is saying and all the points are dumb, I just ignore it. I'll only venture to give feedback if I see some merit, and then I highlight that merit.
But seriously, I want to get to the bottom of this. Eliezer writes about how when he was fundraising, lots of people wrote in to criticize, but no one was comfortable publicly announcing and praising the cause and expressing their donation.
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.
At least, that's how I see it... anyway, I'd like to explore this more. In the comments and/or via PM's or email, if you like. I wrote this post because I'd like to see our kind of people, groups, and areas of concern be more effective. The fact that there's a very strong negative emotion from a prolific contributor to the community is surprising to me, and I'd like to find out why and reconcile our points of view to some extent if possible.
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".
I wonder whether that "skin-crawling/teeth-on-edge" reaction only arises when this style appears as text, or whether you get the same reaction from spoken word. Same style, but here (in this vid) it is being used to actually communicate, rather than simply to illustrate a point.
It does give me the same teeth-on-edge reaction, only stronger. But then I may be atypical. I never cared for Mr. Rogers either.
Me too. Even politicians don't usually come across as that nice. Which I interpret as evidence that it is too extreme to be really effective.
Edit: fixed broken link.
Link didn't come through properly, but I'm curious.
I find listening to the linked person only slightly grating. I can't make out most of the words, though, so most of my reaction is "this needs subtitles".
Alright, I think we're on the same page. I picked very, very basic examples of the most literal interpretation of my suggestions. Even adding "Interesting point" or "That's thought provoking" or "Cool, though I wonder..." before a criticism/concern can make things go over better.
That said, that's a little more subtle, and I wanted extremely clear and obvious examples.
Feel free to ditch my examples if they're not helpful for you at all, or replace with your own. I read your linked post on politeness and agree with the sentiment of it, so I think we're mostly on the same page. Toss all my examples if you understand the underlying principles - there's almost certainly a more subtle, elegant, less saccharine-earnest-seeming way of doing it in any given case.
Perhaps it helps if you define "impolite" as "status-grabby". Thus when someone says "nice" things in what comes across as a condescending tone it can be recognized as impolite on that basis -- regardless of their intent.
It's a relativistic criteria though: a given statement can offend some but not others. As an example, the degree of technical explanation afforded for a complex topic. If you put in too much, the experts feel like they are being condescended to. If you put in too little, the less trained feel excluded because they cannot follow all the jargon enough to relate it to anything they know.
Perhaps the real cheat code in this case would be the skill of writing things in a manner that people can interpret into their own preferred range.