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 the options wise => smug, good => priggish, foolish => subtle, bad => hard-headed,... something like that.

Once the labels have been neutralised, the options can be discussed objectively. The mainstream guy doesn't feel under social pressure to argue for the common-sense option, the contrarian guy doesn't feel under social pressure to argue to the wacky option. They can talk mechanisms and consequences.

Conflict arises when a mundane slaps a feelgood label on their preferred option and a smart person rips off the feelgood label and replaces it with a snarky label. The top level post frames this as the smart person being rude and needing to solve this by being polite. That might be correct, but I'm unhappy about the way that the conclusion is prejudged by the choice of labels.

The Purpose of This Post: I think many smart people "defect" by accident.

Accident? That is a slippery concept with the conscious layered over the sub-conscious running on untrusted hardware. Mundanes aren't using emotional labels willy-nilly and accidentally trashing their preferred option with a label with negative emotional connotations. Its all neuro-typical, all the time. If you ask a mundane "I know that you are awfully proud of your ape ancestry and hate having to talk like we are in the Logic Room on Planet Vulcan, but can you please give it a rest for five minutes so that we can get some work done?", well, you are so not going to get five minutes of calm logic.

The rules of politeness are there to be gamed and they get gamed hard.

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.

Yeah, well, how did that happen? It's not like the presenter was unaware of the importance of budget and skills.

"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."

Now you have conceded that the idea is a really good one, upgrading it because you felt obliged to be polite about the presenters lack of concern over budget and skills. That wasn't an accident; you've been out maneuvered.

I'm in strong agreement with lionhearted about the importance of developing social skills, both by reading books and cultivating awareness in real life. But where does it take you?

One place it takes you is a greater awareness of setups. You try to be polite but you start noticing the person who wants to get their way has set things up so that if you disagree you will come across as rude. You could develop a thick skin about the social awkwardness. You could try to avoid them. You could try to see it coming and engage in a social fencing match, trying to dodge being backed into a corner where you must either submit or give offense. None of this works all that well.

There is a fork ahead in your personal path. Do you exploit the rules of politeness and become the kind of person that others find it difficult to say no to? Do you deliberately reject that path, and leave other people polite outs?

And what of your role as passive participant in social set ups? If you suspect that some-one deliberately left obvious stuff out of their presentation, intending to run out the clock on the question and answer session before it got on to the tough questions, how are you going to feel about somebody else falling for the gambit and taking up time in the meeting with polite padding on their questions?

The deep problem here is that it is never deliberate. Mr A gives his presentation and accidently leaves out some obvious points. Mr B is there when Mr A gets an easy time of it because the weaknesses in Mr A's presentation got passed over in favour of going over the stuff that got left out. Mr B learns by example (not analysis) that this is the way you do things: leave out some obvious stuff so that there are some obvious questions to ask with easy answers. Mr B can probably feel the emotional comfort of not facing awkward questions even though he doesn't know how the trick works. He does it, but he doesn't intend it, and if you call him on it you will get a perfectly genuine blank look.