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Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People
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
- I'll define "defecting by accident."
- I'll explain a common outcome of defecting by accident.
- I'll give some recent, mild examples of accidental defections.
- I'll give examples of how to turn accidental defections into cooperation.
- I'll give some examples of how this can make you more successful at your goals.
- I'll list some books I recommend if you decide to learn more on the topic.
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.
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."
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:
- (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
- (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
- (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
- Generally, be gracious and thankful. This goes immensely far. Things like starting a reply with, "Thanks for this" or "Thanks for sharing these insights."
- Praising someone makes it more likely they'll accept your criticisms. "I thought your point A was excellent, however point B..."
- If you're going to disagree, summarize the person's main argument beforehand - this has a few positive effects. First, it forces you make sure you actually understand. Second, if the author has a different main point and wasn't clear, that comes out. Third, it shows some respect that you actually took the time to read and understand the post. So you could write, "I know your main argument is A, but I wanted to explore your minor point X."
- If you think something is wrong, give an explanation of what would be correct and better. "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, and I don't really understand martial arts so much. Maybe next time you could provide some examples from other fields? For instance, I remember reading you're an accountant and you write poetry, maybe some examples from there?"
- If you point out something is wrong, do your best to make the mistake-maker not feel stupid. This makes them massively appreciate that. "Hey, you got your math on example X wrong... I think it actually works to 11.7. Anyways, I only recognize that because I made that mistake dozens of times myself, it's a common one to make, just wanted to point it out."
- Explain why you care about a point. This has a few positive effects. First, it lets the author cater a reply to exactly what you want. Second, you'd be amazed at how many people assume evil intent and worst-possible motives - it neutralizes that. Third, it forces you to think through how you'd like things to be, which is again good. "Hey man, I really liked this post, but I wonder if you could have split it into pieces and made it a three-parter? I ask because I surf the web from work, and I can only read in 10 minute chunks... longer posts are harder for me to get through, and I like reading your writing."
- Consider correcting someone privately while praising them publicly. This combination has been observed to engender loyalty and good feelings throughout history. I recently read an example of a samurai encouraging lords to do this from the early 1700's book "Hagakure." It works.
- 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.
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When the Stakes Are High
- Any and all books on negotiation you can find (I'd recommend you read at least five highly-reviewed books on negotiation to get different points of you)
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.
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Comments (420)
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 are and aren't good at it but assume that they are. I've certainly met a few nice people who simply aren't aware that they're rude - for example, the young man who accidentally pushed in line at a bar whilst making a sarcastic comment relevant to the previous conversation, and had no idea until we told him how close he'd been to getting punched by a man that he never even looked at. They are unlikely to read this post in its current form, since they will assume they already know how to be polite. How would you feel about restating this advice in a "humorous angry rant" or something similar?
I think I disagree with some of your examples, but in such a way that it doesn't affect the main point of your post. The first example - "wizened" - I had just skipped over when I first saw it, since it wasn't really relevant to the post. I further assumed that the poster wouldn't particularly mind this, and hadn't intended eir post to have a high signal/noise ratio. I get the sense that this website favours a very high signal/noise ratio even at the expense of niceties - for example, the very first line of this comment. This might make some people resistant to adding what they might view as "noise" - things like saying "Thanks" when they might consider "Thanks" to be implicit, given that they're bothering to comment at all.
The second post I think they already had applied something of what you're saying. If I take this
"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."
and rephrase it as a knee-jerk thought
"Why has this been posted without observations? It's idiotic to put up your beliefs without giving us a good reason to go along with them."
then we can ask if this knee-jerk example is a realistic example of something one might say. I think it is; I think that Poster #2 was genuinely being polite. Perhaps there's some different cultural context in the background? I read "odd" as being quite a gentle word to use to criticise someone.
(I've now thought of some examples for your previous post re threats; I'll post them soon. Thanks for reminding me to do so!)
You make an excellent point here: polite isn't a on/off kind of property.
As you say, "it's kind of odd to read a post <like yours> without <revision>" is more polite (in the standard mode) than "You should add <revision>!"
It's also less polite than "Great post! I'd love to see <revision>, though."
And there are many still-better (along that axis) formulations.
In the long run, where I am on that axis matters less than whether I am improving.
That's an interesting evaluation, actually. In many (non-LW!) contexts, I might interpret the first as being a sort of passive-aggressive sniping, a criticism that is intended to make the author feel foolish about his obvious omission, whereas at least the second lays it all on the table.
In my opinion, for maximum politeness, you could say the same thing ("please add examples of observations") without forming it as a criticism of anything except your own lack of imagination:
"I'm interested in your description of how you moved from theory A to theory B, but I found myself curious about what specific observations helped change your mind. Were there any individually compelling things that prompted your conversion?"
I agree with you (as I said initially) that the first is far from optimal, and in particular I agree with you that it has insulting overtones.
My intention was not to offer a maximally polite rephrasing (which depends on one's audience anyway), but to offer some points that suggest an improvement slope. Clearly, though, I failed to do that unambiguously.
Your version is, I agree, a further improvement. In particular, it stops being a criticism of the original post at all, and becomes instead an invitation to continued conversation.
Unrelatedly: the only context I can think of where I'd interpret the bare imperative as more polite is one among friends close enough to play the "we're close enough friends that I can be rude to you" metagame.
Or maybe one in which I'm not sure the speaker is from my culture at all (I have Chinese coworkers who often make bare imperative comments like this, for example, and I've learned to assume that they are being polite by their own social norms).
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.
When one's opinion is expressed as a flat yes/abstain/no, a natural consequence is that an item that elicits wide, mild approval but little or no disapproval will be more successful than an item that elicits narrow, ecstatic approval with significant disapproval. This applies as much to blog commenting as it does to democratic politics.
On LW, a partial fix is the "controversial" rating, which ranks a +20/-10 comment higher than a +10/0 one since it's likely to be a more substantive one, and the "top comments" page which is ranked purely by upmods.
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.
See, that's the thing- the dance isn't the important part. I already did the dance with "I don't think that's the word you want to use." lionhearted's absolutely correct point is doing the correction in public is the "look at me" option and correcting him in private would have been the polite option, regardless of how much dancing went on in either. Unless people are thick-skinned by intention or ignorance, they notice when you take the impolite option.
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.
Thank You For Smoking has a wonderful moment along these lines (and is a thoroughly enjoyable film for other reasons).
This describes what I do on the other forum I frequent; I treat anyone politely for about 3 posts, and then if they're still an idiot I just start tearing them apart for the amusement of myself and others. But I was surprised that I did it here (I wasn't planning to), and even more surprised that it was so well received.
Personally, I think I would have taken more offense at the suggested substitution
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.
Is that because the wording changed, or because the location changed? Split the two apart- compare the thing I wrote PMed to you vs. posted as a comment and the thing he wrote PMed vs. posted as a comment. My guess is the optimal combination for you is the thing I wrote PMed.
How much of the dance to do is not clear unless you know the person in question, but where to dance seems pretty clear.
That depends on the nature of the group I was in, I think. If I cared particularly about the regard of the other members of the group, and did not feel like I had a secure position of status in it, then I would probably prefer receiving the message by PM. If I felt secure in my social position, I would probably prefer that the message be posted openly, so that other people could appreciate it.
People are complicated. I've put a lot of effort into working out how to deal effectively with others in social situations (working my way up from a very low starting point I'm afraid,) and one of the lessons that has served me best is to not to suppose that even my best tried and tested heuristics will apply to everyone, and to be prepared to discard them when necessary.
On Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957354
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
(nods) Agreed, what you describe is a perfectly fine attitude for a corner of the Internet that is willing to reinforce social habits that are inappropriate for dealing with the wider population.
It is, of course, a counterproductive attitude for a corner of the Internet that wishes to train its members to deal increasingly effectively with the wider population. An entry-level skill for that is complying with the communication protocol your listener is likely to use.
It's a matter of what this corner of the Internet conceives of its purpose as being, and what it is willing to do in support of that purpose.
Of course, it is possible to do both... to train fluency with the popular communications protocol in a specialized opt-in channel, for example, and allow interactions elsewhere to use "nerd-default" protocols.
My ideal would be that people be explicitly taught that social conventions are just that, and not a universal mode of interaction. We already have cached wisdom like "when in Rome" but we (both LW and society in general) can and should be doing much better. And part of that would be learning that politeness is a matter of context, with examples of places where default polite behaviour is perceived as rude.
Another such cached wisdom:
Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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.
I admit, I oversimplified. My real-life experience isn't that nerds have fewer social conventions, it's that they have different ones which just happen to look like fewer from a non-nerd perspective. And since nerd/non-nerd isn't a binary distinction you get all the levels of politeness in between as well.
The nerd social rules as I know them include things like getting to the point faster and welcoming minor corrections mid-sentence, but don't include hostile language.
Unfortunately, practical experience of what people mean when they advocate less politeness in the cause of more communication says otherwise. Follow that link and you'll see people over and over defending not just being inconsiderate but actual hostility - blatant rudeness and direct intentional offensiveness - as "honest communication" and treating people wanting them to stop as "suppressing communication" or "being politically correct". And this is just one set of examples.
As such, the argument in practice appears to be that people don't like being asked to consider others when transmitting, and - and this is a key part - aren't especially keen on listening unless it's in the precise terms they want. That is, they are observably not filtering on output and are observably very fussy indeed on input.
Of course, you could argue that that's not real nerd communication, but using a claim of "politeness hampers honest communication" seems to happen when people say "hey, could you, y'know, stop blatantly being a dick?"
So such an argument is slightly tainted in practice by the uses it's been put to before. And perhaps that's not how an ideal world works, but it does appear to be how this one with people in it works. It's possible to make the argument honestly, and I'm not saying you're not; I am saying that by using that argument, you're welcoming others using the argument as an excuse for making the communication space much more hostile than it needs to be.
And it remains unclear to me how the repeated special pleading for bad communication skills in this thread constitutes a refinement in the art of human rationality.
I am reminded by this comment of Dan Ariely's analysis of market norms versus social norms - namely that if you replace a social norm with a market norm and then try to remove the market norm, it takes a long time to re-establish social norms.
I think this is what tends to happen in nerd communities - not that social norms are being replaced by market norms but that social norms are removed on the grounds that they can make communication more difficult, and then people act badly because we're not well-equipped to operate without norms. The successful nerd communities that I've seen (here and a couple of other places) have either involved the founder exercising strong control over the tone of the comments and banning the offensive ones, or strong social norms that were instituted as soon as the community was founded, so that people conformed to the new norm.
Implicit value judgement of what constitutes good and bad communication. The norms are different in different environments. One of my lecturers likes to use the example of when she lived in New York - she was verbally abused by the vendors there for wasting their time with small talk. This doesn't mean that New Yorkers are rude (well, the ones that actually abused her may have been), it means they're operating by different politeness conventions that prioritise brevity.
Question: do you consider the tone here at LW to be an example of bad communication? I find the vast majority of comments to be quite polite, pointing out flaws and other points to consider without resorting to personal attacks or empty statements of value like "this post was awesome/terrible".
Maintaining a non-repellent tone is part of tending the garden.
No, in fact it's remarkably good. The comment section is fantastically good and the karma system here - vote up not for agreement but for "more like this" - seems to really work well.
This is why it surprises me to see so many people attempting to justify a lack of or wish not to bother learning communication skills or dismiss such as mere "polite words", "noise" or "grease", as if communication were not an incredibly important part of being effective in dealing with humans.
My pet theory based on my own reaction is that Lionhearted erred too far in the other direction while trying to advocate politeness. Here are two methods of framing the same idea that I would find equally rude but for opposite reasons:
"this post would suck less if it had more examples"
"this post was great! It really gave me a lot to think about. Just one tiny thing, I'm really slow so I would appreciate it a lot if you just added a couple of examples to illustrate your points so that people like me can get it more easily :) Thanks!"
Lionhearted isn't quite advocating the second type of comment but comes fairly close. Politeness is hugely important, but there comes a point where it crosses over into fakeness, passive-aggressiveness, and a bunch of other negative behaviours, and I felt like some of his examples crossed that line, or at least stuck a few toes over.
Oh yeah, happy medium for sure.
I would personally be inclined to downvote this on the principle of "less like this", even if I agreed. It strikes me as unduly abrasive and more likely to cause not just the poster, but other people, to feel scared of posting. LessWrong is intimidating enough.
(I have been downvoted for such unhelpful abrasiveness before and, frankly, deserved it.)
The minimum number of words I would respond with would likely be "Good post. Could do with examples for each point. Tell, then show."
Commenting on LessWrong is difficult because smart nerd audiences are incredibly picky, so one must write anticipating as many possible objections as one can come up with. This is why I end up post-editing a lot. (Could really do with a "preview" button to check it renders as intended.) But good communication always takes effort.
That is a rather offensive piece of pattern completion you just did there. If you want to characterize what you have seen on this thread as "repeated special pleading for bad communication skills" then you may be putting your finger on something important. But when you try to conflate that with the incidents reported in your link, then you are engaging in a particularly inappropriate form of stereotyping. Where, on this thread, have you seen overt hostility to women? Or any other form of nastiness?
As with any other male-dominated community, we exhibit traces of sexism. But I see no evidence that rationalizations against politeness here are some kind of cryptic anti-woman signaling. Some of us, of both sexes, really do prefer to receive our negative feedback undiluted.
It was, of course, posted as a real-world example of how the "let's be unvarnished" meme tends to work out in practice: people who claim they want unvarnished communication tend to lash out when they actually get some back.
And, of course, I didn't say that, or anything like it. I said that people who demand unvarnished speech tend to mean they want to transmit it, and tend to show little sign of being able to receive it and decode it sensibly.
Put it this way: if erratio got it and you didn't, your inward filtering may need adjustment.
I upvoted for the the rest of the comment but object to this:
Lesswrong exhibits traces of sexism (of more than one kind) and this is an example of it.
"Or any other form of nastiness?"
I've noticed over the past week just how often LW posters talk about (to create a typical example) a "generic rational agent, who does something, then he...", attributing all generic rational agents the male gender. It's extremely irritating to read that being rational means one is ¬¬male! (modus tollens).
(But David_Gerard wasn't making a point about sexism; rather, a point about defending for too long signalling that other people find impolite.)
Here's the link, for people who'd like to read a bit more on that: the tact filter theory.
It was very convenient that your link included a link to fanspeak-- a description of a speech therapist's presentation to fans about distinctive features of how sf fans talk with each other.
In particular: "She also seemed quite concerned that we would feel offended by what she had to say, but what she told us was so interesting, and often so recognizably true, that I don't think anyone was."
I haven't heard about any further research on fan speech habits, or on whether they're the same as geek speech habits.
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.
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.
I wanted to point out that the last bit is especially true because there are many who judge a person based on how they treat those who have no sway over your life, and this is one reason why I strive to be polite to waiters/waitresses/janitors/etc. I would also like to point out that I think your keyboard stuck on the 'especiallyif.'
The suggestions at the end are pretty good. I was surprised about how many of those habits I have picked up, dropped, and relearned over the years.
It actually looks to me like every time the article has italics start or end, a space is missing. Is there an issue with how the site deals with italic tags? I'm viewing this on Chrome in Windows 7.
Wow, I didn't even notice all the other ones. Nice catch. One counter-example to consider is in the first paragraph:
I added the formatting for italics back in, since it didn't survive transcription. Is there any way to view your comment before posting? I'm always kinda nervous to submit without an opportunity to see what I wrote as the world sees it.
I don't know of a way to preview comments, but each comment has an "edit" button if you made a mistake.
For the italics I'll do a test in this comment.
Edit: I didn't lose my spaces, but comments might work differently than articles.
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
The thanks for that is somewhat superfluous. Your example is already polite by starting off with "I enjoyed this post a lot."
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.
Did you see Ann Althouse going off on Garance Franke-Ruta?
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).
How do you see politeness of this sort as hurting discussion here?
Decreasing signal-to-noise ratio, creates a precedent for pure noise posts (which currently - correctly - suffer prejudice).
It is a nerd commonplace that an increase in politeness results in a decline in signal.
However, I'd suggest we need actual quantified evidence. After over fifteen years, there should be people by now who've done the numbers.
I mean there will literally be more words in each comment. The signal-to-noise ratio will decrease because we have the same signal with slightly more noise (polite words).
Yes, the maximally concise polite post likely uses more words to express the same number of thoughts than the maximally concise non-polite post.
That said, a typical LW post is far from maximally concise.
The question is, does a typically concise polite post use more words per thought communicated?
I agree with David_Gerard here: if the answer matters, I'd like to see some actual measurements.
Conversely, if we don't care about the measurements, maybe the answer doesn't actually matter.
You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.
Opposite plausible assumption: If the communication is deprecated or even ignored because of the absence of polite words, then the polite words are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.
As I said, to make assertions like this one needs actual numbers. If you don't have any, that's fine, I don't either ;-) But I can recognise that we've reached the stage of opposed but plausible statements, which means we have something falsifiable, and maybe should have a go at doing so. If no-one has already.
Exercise for the reader: Which words in this comment are noise?
We could, I suppose, experiment.
But I share your intuition, both that this is probably well-covered in the sociolinguistics literature, and that politeness markers can increase the effectiveness of a communication.
It's also worth noting that what counts as "noise" (in the sense we're using it here, which includes redundant signal) depends on my audience. If I know who is reading my words and I know what their priors are, I can communicate way more efficiently -- I only have to provide evidence for the places where our priors differ. (Case in point: in pretty much any other community, I would have needed to use more words to express that thought, rather than rely on a shared understanding of "evidence" and "priors".)
Anyway, I don't feel like actually, you know, doing research, but I'll ask around among the appropriate cohort of my friends and see what comes up.
ETA: Heh. Your most recent comment said essentially the same thing. Ah well.
Which words in that comment are noise?
and
That is, at least, my view on noise. Sure, it's no major problem; I parsed your comment just as easily, it took barely any extra effort on my part, it didn't obscure anything - it wasn't actively bad at all. But it wasn't good either, it was just grease. I don't see a need to counsel people towards more grease on LessWrong specifically. In almost all cases, yes, smart people need a lot more grease than they use. But part of the LessWrong aesthetic is a sort of soft Crocker's rules.
What I am mostly concerned about: about halfway down the comment, when AlanCrowe talks about the budget meeting example: that 'upgrading' of an idea is not desirable on LessWrong. To illustrate the point, if we upgraded Ben Goertzel's ideas on AGI from 'flawed' to 'great idea, have you thought about friendliness?', we would be making an error.
The answer is, of course: none of it was "grease." It was superfluous to you, but would not have been superfluous to others. A public comment intended to be read by many people on a blog expressly aimed at effectiveness in all regards, including communication, requires comments to be constructed robustly and with an eye to alleviating misinterpretation. Failure to do so is failure.
If you don't agree, then do please consider there are other people than you reading it and that you may be incorrect.
Exercise: Was this sufficiently unvarnished or could it have been unvarnished further? Would the unvarnishing have contributed an element to the communication that advanced the quality of LessWrong or put it back?
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 politeness can be a range of possible values rather than a discrete quality. Being polite but also direct is fine, it's just when you start to edge down the spectrum of politeness towards being politic that it might detract from the quality of the dialogue. I do believe that one should still adhere to the rule of thumb: "Don't be a dick" even if one is being direct though.
One example: I had a strong negative reaction to this advice:
My reasons:
The advise offered by the OP strikes me as generally good in a typical corporate or academic environment, but quite frequently wrong in an environment like LessWrong. One the other hand, I know that our "direct and unvarnished" style sometimes drives away newcomers who could contribute a lot to our community.
I'm perplexed. Is there a way for us to become more polite without becoming fawning and insincere? It is a tough balancing act, but it may be worthwhile to give it a try.
A suggestion: use polite words in order to help your communication be received.
Strunk & White were on the money: "Omit needless words."
However, I think it's clear from the examples given that polite words are not necessarily noise - if they help the communication be received, rather than deprecated or even ignored, then they are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.
Your objection appears to be to application of a specific rule in a specific situation. This means, of course that one needs to adjust one's communication style to the situation. This takes work, but that doesn't mean it's optional to success.
If it's redundant, it's redundant in the good computers and communications sense of "makes the signal more likely to get through." I submit that this is actually quite important.
(If you look through my comments, you'll see I post-edit almost all of them. I take care not to change the meaning (that would be extremely socially rude) - but I frequently dash off something, realise it's brash enough it may affect it being received, and go back and fix it. Impolite words hamper communication, and IME just because nerds say they prefer unvarnished communication does not mean they like receiving it rather than feeling free to send it. So I consider it "adding signal." I continue to take pride in being a good writer with an excellent turn of phrase, despite the evidence I need to think more before hitting "comment" ...)
I agree with much of what you say here and in your linked suggestion. I particularly endorse your suggestion that if politeness "greases the way" to the understanding of a message, then it is an integral part of the message.
However, I still believe that there is some value in "pushing on the envelope", in doing one's bit toward shifting societal norms in the direction of greater honesty and less ego massage.
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.
As usual, I wish it was possible to upvote things more than once.
"Assume good faith" is really hard work in an environment of massive collaboration. (It's as hard work as "neutral point of view.") I believe I am the first person to have noticed that "assume good faith" translates as "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." Although calling the stupid stupid violates the "no personal attacks" rule.
You know how Wikipedia can't keep idiots out of experts' faces? Wikipedia can't keep idiots out of anyone else's faces either. This is a special case of "people are a problem."
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."
This is quite excellent. I'd copy it to the Wikipedia project page if I thought it had any chance of lasting more than a second. (So I'll put it on RW, where you get a free lesson in French as well.)
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!
"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.
Either the switch from "we can't get the budget or the resources!" to "how can we get the budget and the resources?" retains the essential meaning, or it doesn't. Only the original speaker can know that for sure.
If it does, then I'd say the restatement is better. Not just because it's polite, but because it's efficient: we can now focus our energies on brainstorming ways to secure the funding and the resources to implement a good idea.
If it doesn't -- that is, if the original speaker didn't think it was a worthwhile opportunity in the first place and doesn't actually care about the funding or the resources -- then I agree with you that the proposed restatement is a bad one... but the original wording kinda sucked, too. (Not least of which because it offered a false rejection.)
The speaker in that case would have done better to think clearly about their actual reasons for rejecting the idea, and then construct a polite expression of those reasons.
Just because you're being rude doesn't mean you're communicating efficiently.
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.
Is a group with a "blunt" norm or a "polite" norm more susceptible to being influenced by these conscience defectors?
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.
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.
(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 implemented, and it's clear in those functions. It's as polite as makes sense: more humble dancing about would only be annoying to many people, and replacing it with an extended "Oh, thanks so much, silly me not paying attention to the squiggly red lines, hey do you need any help on your projects that I might be able to offer?" would be weird and not productive.
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. ;-)
Agreed that this is part of it, but I think there's more to it.
Yes, one thing that makes a compliment rewarding is the implication that someone considers me worth devoting effort to establishing a social bond with, and the degree of effort they devote to it (either in the form of time spent thinking carefully, or of time spent paying attention, or of time spent earning resources to gift to me, or whatever) is a big component of that. Absolutely.
But also, it's rewarding to contrast myself positively with my surroundings... to reflect on my superiority in whatever areas I feel superior in. And the more detailed and specific that contrast, the better. And if I've internalized the idea that "tooting my own horn" in this way is a Bad Thing, then it's even more rewarding if someone else does it.
And, also, my perception of the status of the person of the person making the effort is an important component. In a forum like this where perceived status is tied to perceptiveness/intelligence/etc., a compliment that demonstrates perception and intelligence is therefore more rewarding than one that doesn't.
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.
This is something that seems to apply more generally when complimenting. Direct praise seems cheap, at best a signal of supplication. It is often better to identify something that the person does and express approval of that activity in general, and hence compliment their identity.
I would add that acceding to the corrections of another is somewhat of a compliment - particularly to nerds. In fact it is a strong enough status signal that I don't expect high status people to acknowledge such correction unless they cannot get away with not doing so.
This is one of the things that bothers me most about LessWrong, and intelligent people in general. Of all the silly status games that I would think and hope people here are mature enough to see through and realize the silliness of playing in this environment, avoiding giving thanks and acknowledging errors is one that should be close to the top of the list -- but sadly, it isn't.
Are you guessing, or did you test this?
Because I used to think the same way, but I now find I get better results with just a dash of politeness. I don't think it takes very much time or is so bad for signal:noise ratio either.
Well, I think the "oh silly me" is fluffy, you could just say thanks. But offering to help in return I think is a great think. Most people won't take you up on it, but it goes over really well.
Maybe try it for a month or two and see how it goes? I'm always really grateful when someone offers me a hand, and then I'm more likely to ask them a question or for a book recommendation or whatever. Even small things, most people won't ask you for them if you don't invite them to. Which is a shame, because then we miss opportunities to connect with people.
I'm not saying politeness is good because it's good. I'm saying it's good because it makes people more effective. I reckon that's true in most non-emergency cases.
I strongly agree with Alicorn's comment. When you suggested
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.
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.
It's not the "right" way. Just one choice out of a thousand possible.
Here's a sample email:
--
Subject: Typo in your article
Hi author,
I saw your article and liked it, but wanted to give you a heads up. You spelled (word) wrong. Best wishes,
Writer
--
What's that take? 15 seconds? You'd probably have some goodwill afterwards.
Okay. And you're highly analytical, right? Normal people don't work well with ultra-direct communication.
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. That would be a reason not to act on it, but not a reason to dismiss its validity.
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.
My style, or Lionhearted's? If mine, please do comment on problems in my comments. If not mine, you may be typing too fast.
Bah, sorry, Lionhearted's, I lost track of who was saying what. Editing.
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".
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.
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".
There is a wide middle ground between being uncomfortable saying out loud the good things you believe about a cause you donate to, and being unwilling to criticize something without also finding something nice to say about it.
I think you have that backwards. I assume that by 'this' you mean the situation that obtained while Eliezer was fundraising. I assume that if 'this' is the best way, then a group employing 'this' will have better outcomes (by definition?), but you conclude the opposite.
This far into the thread it shouldn't surprise you. You have had the causes of the objection explained to you multiple times by multiple people from multiple perspectives. Read through this thread again with the assumption that those who are speaking to you understand the value of tact and politeness, probably better than you. They have an intuitive feel of social dynamics, what works, what is inappropriate and what is insulting. They are also analytical people - they have the ability to describe a model of social behaviour that demonstrates why 'polite and nice' can also be a condescending slight depending on how it is done.
siduri's comment is a good place to start. Then you can look further and try to understand how you have managed to alienate your audience to the extent that they have completely written you off. WrongBot's reaction is in no way bizarre or unusual. It's what you should expect from humans if you provide the verbal stimulus like what you have provided here.
The person one is correcting is not always the intended benefactor of one's reply.
Well, that's just it. I'm not surprised people disagree. That's to be expected. I'm surprised people had a significant emotional reaction to it.
Actually, there's been overwhelmingly more appreciation of this than disagreement. It got submitted to HN and was +110 there, and 80%+ of the comments were positive. I also got a half dozen emails saying thanks.
But you know what? You're right. I thought I would try to address everyone's concerns, criticisms, and share my experiences. And some people are taking personal offense, on an emotional level. That's not my intent - so yes, indeed, I'll bow out of the discussion now. If anyone has any questions or comments, they're welcome to email me. Really, I do think this is an area that some minor changes can produce huge dividends. Or maybe I'm mistaken - happy to discuss via email if anyone has questons or comments and wants to discuss, but I'll move on from the comments now.
I think you should take your surprise as a sign that your model of tact is in need of updating. You were not mistaken when you claimed that following the social norms we do here would tend to serve one ill in real life, but the approach you've suggested substituting for it seems like a case of reversed stupidity. I think it would be a good idea for you to review the suggestions others have made in this thread so that you can apply your own advice in a more effective manner.
Offering to help a coworker and offering to help a stranger from an internet forum are two radically different things. The former is something I do on a regular basis; I agree that it is produces good results.
Standards of politeness are incredibly sensitive to context, and from your first line in the parent I take it you agree. Why do you believe this standard of politeness is appropriate to the contexts of both work and a semi-anonymous internet forum?
Thanks - I was looking for a good way of saying that.
Okay, cool. You might try offering after a decent exchange - if you look at my profile or "About Me" section on any place I hang out, or any site, I encourage people to look me up for a coffee, or if they have any questions, or I can help at all. Most people don't take me up on it, but some do - I've helped people with their marketing, I've helped people get pay raises, improve their writing and creative output, I've recommended books and places to stay and go in various cities... and it's been good. I've made friends and colleagues like that.
I learned this because I met one of my best friends this way. When he was a stranger, he emailed me a technical question, and I went over and above the call of duty and wrote him back a 5 page reply with specs and details. He then referred me to a job because I sounded like I knew what I was talking about and invited me to stay with him if I was ever in Los Angeles. I did, and he became one of my best friends. Later, he helped me close a $60,000 deal when I bought out half of a company. We've been skiing together in Japan and had lots of cool memories and insights. All because I helped a random stranger, and he was really cool about it afterwards.
It might seem different, but I think most people appreciate it. A fairly prolific photographer/technical blogger emailed me a while back, and after a short exchange, he asked if there's anything he could help me with. I asked how he made a few of the pictures that were really beautiful? And he shared some software recommendations with me. We're now friendly acquaintances, and we'll probably go out for food together next time I'm in San Francisco.
Some people might take it poorly. But who cares? The upside of making a new friend or colleague because you're always happy to help anyone is huge. Someone doesn't like it? Well, what's the downside? Who cares? Most people are grateful anyways, actually, but if a couple people don't like it... so what? You offer to help someone and they take it the wrong way? Well, nothing significant lost on anyone's end. The friends and colleagues you make, and the general good you do for the world more than compensates for the (very rare, if ever) negative reaction.
Good comment/question. I generally try to err on the side of being more polite and gracious unless there's a reason not to, because I don't see any real downside to it. You're right - we're all strangers on the net, so there's no real repercussions if something goes over poorly. But I think there are opportunities to connect with people, make new friends and colleagues, share good information, and help each other. I think is generally good and virtuous, and try to encourage it when possible.
That does not bear any resemblance to anything I have said. In fact, I vehemently disagree with your assertion that no harm is caused when you annoy or creep someone out on the internet.
I am sufficiently annoyed by this conversation that I will probably not be able to comment further in a productive fashion.
Does that mean you think the politeness - effect curve is usually much flatter on the right side of the maximum (optimal politeness) than on the left?
Exaggerated politeness often seems insincere, distancing or worse so I'm skeptical of the merits of systematically overshooting like that.
Upvoted for this. The 'or worse' also includes making people disregard the content of what you're trying to say because you're signalling low-status/self-effacement so hard that it's difficult for anyone to take you seriously
This is the kind of defection by accident that analytical more often fall in to. Condescension with advice!
I'm not saying you should always be polite. Just you should be aware of the consequences and secondary effects for not being so.
I agree with you on that point, yet I'm making my own. Analytical people are usually aware of politeness but take somewhat longer to realise that advice, instruction and offers to assist can be far more of a significant social slight than merely being curt. Those who are familiar with analytical types can see that they mean well and are just making nerdy faux pas. There are some, however, who will take offence - because the exact same words could be used by less nerdy person as deliberate one upmanship.
It's about one part historical experimentation with styles of politeness, and one part noticing how your post made my skin crawl.
I second everything WrongBot said in the sibling comment.
A lot of that feeling is probably explained by the mere fact that we are discussing social calculations openly. Doing so almost always leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
I don't ordinarily feel skin-crawly when discussing social norms/calculations/scripts/etc.
That's right, I almost forgot you had posted on the subject before, which is odd because I've actually used your "Considerations in favour of niceness" post to convince people to rein in their conversational aggression.
A couple of lionhearted's sentences sounded slightly cringeworthy to me too, but many times I have been surprised at how well such things actually go over with non-analytical people. 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. (Bla bla anecdote bla bla correlation not causation).
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.)
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).
The errors of others, or the errors of those of superior social ranking? Do Korean teachers refrain from correcting students?
No, students get hit with rulers for mistakes. I think it's that you don't correct your social superiors, and (but I'm not as sure) you don't correct those at your social level.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, well, how did that happen? It's not like the presenter was unaware of the importance of budget and skills.
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.
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.
A relatively simple in-the-meantime solution for this situation is to create a channel whereby people can offer up anonymous criticism to your idea, and then publicly make a big deal about a specific anonymous criticism that was really useful, so as to encourage people to use that channel. (You can even seed the mechanism by making that anonymous criticism yourself.)
Sure, that's not as pervasively useful as changing the culture so that everyone acts as you prefer, but it's more cost-effective.
I'm afraid I don't understand this at all. You want me to encourage people to use an anonymous channel by publicly praising their anonymous advise? Why would any normal status-seeking individual want that kind of praise? Wouldn't they prefer private praise for private advise, or better yet, public praise for public advise.
As for the question of individual action rather than changing the culture, you are the one advocating a change to the culture here on LW. (Your prescription makes no sense at all as advise to an LW person seeking to interact with the outside world.) So, you should be advising sensitive people on LW to post including a boilerplate notice that only private or anonymous criticism will be considered by this author, should they prefer to operate that way. And let the rest of us continue to operate in public.
Or did I miss your point?
That would be even better, if they make praiseworthy anonymous advice. What I was actually suggesting, though, was encouraging people by publicly praising other people's anonymous advice, which I'm guessing makes even less sense to you.
Theory aside, I do observe that many people seem to be motivated when their output is praised publicly, even when they aren't identified as the author. I can take advantage of this even if I don't understand why it happens.
Similarly, I observe that publicly praising an act often encourages others to mimic it.
Neither of those observations strike me as implausible: they identify the action as praiseworthy. Many people are motivated to do things their culture identifies as praiseworthy.
I don't think I am, actually... certainly not in this thread.
Here, I'm responding to JoshuaZ's proposed "in the meantime" solution for a scenario that lionhearted introduced as "If you're at a meeting and someone gives a presentation and asks if anyone has questions."
If I'm advocating cultural changes to LW in some other thread, it might be helpful to point to it, so we both know what advocacy you're referring to.
In that case, of course, it's a useless comment. Naturally, I thought it made sense in that context when I wrote it. (And I haven't yet understood why it is senseless, actually.)
The issue I was concerned with was not that people might be too sensitive to receive criticism. It was that in a culture where people won't "bluntly tell" JoshuaZ there's a problem, they might still be willing to anonymously do so, so setting up a channel that allows them to do so would be an "in-the-meantime solution" that gets him the feedback he wants without first altering the entire culture (his proposed "long-term solution").
The rest of you hereby receive my official permission to operate in public.
I don't know if you did or not. Nor am I especially motivated right now to work with you to figure it out. Perhaps my replies helped clarify things; perhaps not.
It seems I did miss your point. I was confused by the switch, from JoshuaZ's "in the meantime" advice to the critic, to your advice directed to the potential target of criticism. And in particular I missed that the motivation was to allow the target to get the feedback he needs from an audience culture which is disinclined to provide negative feedback.
My apologies for misunderstanding. I didn't try hard enough to find a sympathetic reading.
Apology accepted; thanks. I'm glad we could clear that up.
Because they are bugged. We do not correctly account for anonymity since it is a relatively new phenonemon. This is most obviously visible in voting habits. (Humans vote as if they are making declarations of support in a public arena.)
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.
Good advice for the real world, maybe. But consider that here on LW, we are among analytical people, and wouldn't have it otherwise.
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 be that criticism is meant at face value without further implied disapproval, and that the post karma is the better clue to readers' overall impressions.
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 <edit>health</edit>, 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.
"is correlated with" is not transitive, the conclusion is true, but it doesn't follow from the premises.
I guess this is exactly the sort of comment that the original post was supposed to be warning people against making - does the fact that I've noticed this, and am pointing it out here in apology help to mitigate it?
That's an interesting possibility, but do you have more than one data point to base it on? I don't think it's clear that beautiful people having a general tendency to behave in an inane manner is an actual phenomenon requiring explanation.
The Emperor's New Clothes? If only... ;)
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.
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.
At its best? That would be when the social payoffs were set up in such a way as to penalise the most 'stereotypical neurotypical' default behaviours.
You might be right, or you might be defining neurotypicality by its worst features.
More precisely, I may be defining "most stereotypical neurotypical default behaviours" by the worst features, where each of 'most', 'stereotypical' and 'default' is a significant qualifier. 'Default' is particularly interesting - our civilisation devotes a large amount of resources to setting up institutions to prevent 'default' behaviour.
Perhaps Metafilter? There are sometimes a few flame wars, but the discussions are usually informed and sincere, with a variety of nice people, and the moderator team is good at keeping things on-topic and on-track.
The majority of it isn't one-on-one conversation, though, since the comments aren't threaded. So it might be a little hard to find really awesome examples pertinent to our discussion here.
What do you consider to be 'best'? I've been part of a couple of communities that drove me away because it cost me too much effort to match their levels of praise and politeness. I'd be happy to try to dig up links if I can remember what they're called..
Good question, and I'm not sure. However, neurotypicality can't be totally incapacitating, or they wouldn't be in the majority.
If you remember the names of those communities, please post them.
I don't think that neurotypicality is incapacitating in general, only for me and other people who didn't acquire neurotypical social skills for whatever reason. It cost me a lot of effort to participate in those communities because I was effectively trying to speak a foreign language, and I'd only just started to learn how at the time.
One of them appears to have died. Here's(I would recommend just skimming the first 5 pages or so to get a feel for it) a forum thread I was reading recently. I haven't participated but the tone in there strikes me as simultaneously extremely polite and quite focussed on the subject at hand.
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.
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!", "Hey cracker!" partly as a bonding mechanism to show that they're close enough to allow what would normally be offensive). If everyone is on board with this, someone who goes around being extremely polite and telling others to be extremely polite might seem to be distancing eirself from the community and denying friendship.
I realize you don't intend polite comments that way, but as you say in this post, it doesn't matter what you intend so much as how other people interpret it. I'd agree that politeness is generally a good thing, but carpet-bombing all social interactions with politeness will tend to freak a lot of people out, and Less Wrong is probably more prone to that than other places.
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.
Yes, but I don't think this is what the majority of technical people are doing when they're going around accidentally offending people. Think of the I.T. Guy stereotype who constantly insults everyone else in the office for being so stupid, but is unaware of it. That's a stereotype, but there's a grain of truth in it. There's a huge difference between that and being loose and easy around your friends.
I consider this particularly selfish and evil. If you know there's a place where someone's map doesn't correspond to the territory, you should tell them before they inadvertently drive off a cliff. Even if it would be a status hit to yourself. And you can't tell me that's a part of their map they weren't even using, as they had just used it!
Evil? Really?
Yep. Ignorance kills. Seeing an opportunity to do good, and then avoiding it because of a perceived status hit to oneself, is evil.
Not if it is an inconsequential detail like who wrote what book...
Ignorance also saves lives. Depending on the culture I could save your life, for example, by refraining from giving you information. Fortunately we don't condone casual murder by leaders in western civilisation. So correcting people when it is inappropriate could just get you fired. Arrested too - don't correct cops on points of law unless you have a lot of witnesses present.
I disagree. I think this attitude is naive, bad math and dangerous.
Status matters. A lot. Really. I read this as similar to "because of a percieved potential loss of a limb" (calibrate limb loss probability to match the expected value of the status risk).
Wow. I don't usually expect people to be more epistemilogically idealistic than I. Yet when I remember to curb my impulses I occasionally bite my tongue and let unimportant things go. I don't consider it evil. But come to think of it my personal emotional aversion is centred around bullshit - a different kind of 'evil'.
It's about picking and choosing battles. It's like when someone is giving a presentation on money policy, and gets the current interest rate wrong by .1%. If it doesn't affect the main point, it's better to let it go. There world is full of mistakes and errors - if you stopped and corrected every one you saw, that'd be a full-time, nonstop job. And moreover, you'd waste a lot of people's time by bringing up minutia that doesn't make a difference.
So I think you have to pick and choose your battles, and let some things slide if they make no real-utility based difference. Mistaking the author of a 30 year old, not-all-that-important book doesn't lead someone off a cliff. That's basic prioritizing.
But how much utility does that portion of the map hold for them in any case? That specific mistake seems unlikely to ever have greater repercussions for them than causing a bit of embarrassment, and if you correct them in a public forum, that's exactly what you're going to cause. If you did not provide the correction, there are other ways in which the person might have made the same discovery without as much embarrassment, such as looking one of the authors or books up on Wikipedia, but I suspect that there is a low probability of them ever facing greater repercussions due to their mistake.
If you judge the correction to really have a positive expected utility for them, then it may be for the best, but if you make a general habit of correcting others without considering the necessity of each case, you're liable to lose status to no benefit.
That's a good analogy for a noble goal, but I think the topic at hand demands a bit more than a cliff. If someone's map doesn't mark bumps and cliffs marked on your superior map, don't spend the car ride pointing out all the little bumps when the person is unwittingly driving toward a cliff!
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 ego-challenging behavior, and likely to provoke a hostile reaction.
So, like Alicorn etc, I agree with your premise but disagree with your suggestions for successful execution of the goal. Also, as others have pointed out, it's important to tailor your style for the audience. The three examples of criticism which you brought up as overly blunt strike me as perfectly tailored to the audience--the first uses friendly humor, which is actually a great method of softening criticism, and the second two are direct and succinct without being hostile.
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.
Let me see if I can come up with a good real world example. Here's one from Hacker News:
In response to someone saying Google Chrome has ugly design -
"I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. This is partly, I guess, because its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful, I think."
That's an example of what I mean. "I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think " is filler. It doesn't add anything, we already know it's his opinion and it's subjective. But if what if he'd been more blunt? What if he'd written -
"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."
See that second one? I see the equivalent of that sometimes among smart people. And it's bad. The first one - well, maybe it adds a little fluff. But it's not going to make the person he's replying to hostile. The second way would.
Well, again, context. That reply is to someone who is saying, "I don't think that would work" - and I don't know what to say other than, "Why not give it a try?" I'm advocating change in phrasing based on real world observations of what's effective. If someone disagrees but has no data of trying it, I don't know what else to say...
Ah, that's not my intention at all. I know I used to do it the other way, and my results have gone up since I changed. Really, the counterarguments I'm seeing are exactly what I would have argued ten years ago, and I believe greatly held me back at the time. So I really, really, really would encourage someone to try a little softening and praise, even if it's unnatural or doesn't "seem right" - because it works in the real world.
Also, tangentially, it's been kind of strange for me to have a discussion after writing a piece like this. Normally I'd start this comment with, "Thanks for the feedback, Siduri" - because I do appreciate it - but it'd feel kind of strange to do so now, and I'd fear coming across as insincere. So perhaps I'm going a little too far in the other direction now that that I'm self aware of the words I'm using? It's a strange feeling for me, I'm kind of suppressing and editing out some polite/gracious things I'd normally use.
Anyway, that's kind of meta. Thanks for the feedback. I don't hold out myself out as an expert or a shining example of any good things - rather, I want to highlight an area that could lead to massive utility increase for people. To that end, I do encourage people to try it, even if it feels unnatural at first. (Maybe especially if that's the case) In raw, abstract form it might not seem right, but I've had good results in a variety of situations since I moved in this direction.
Leave out the last sentence, and I would definitely respond to the second better than the first. Pointing out that one's opinions are subjective is vacuous, it's obvious enough that I'm inclined to think less of someone who bothers calling attention to it, and the "and therefore fairly meaningless" part makes it considerably worse. It's way too self effacing, and triggers in me the kneejerk response "if it's so meaningless, why bother bringing it up?"
Whenever I encounter someone prefacing a statement with "this is just my subjective opinion," or some variation on that, it immediately causes me to revise my opinion of them downwards.
The examples you keep bringing up seem to be sledgehammer approaches to politeness. It's better than sledgehammer rudeness, but it's not well optimized for smoothing social interactions.
I agree that it sounds lame. But couldn't there be a variation that makes them look cool?
"While it could be argued that all such opinions are subjective, my personal opinion is definitely X."
I think a simple "in my opinion" serves better. All opinions are subjective, otherwise they wouldn't be opinions, and it comes across as passive and weasel-wordy.
There are variations that can improve on the basic "in my opinion" disclaimer, but they're situation appropriate. For instance, you might use "In my objective and incontestable opinion," which is clearly facetious, and signals a deliberate reaction to overly self effacing disclaimers, but it won't earn you points in circles where self aggrandizing humor is frowned upon.
Why do you keep the hedge phrase "I think" in your improved version?
After all, "I think" is just as meaningless as the hedge phrases you remove: I already assumed that you think it, otherwise you wouldn't have said it. So, if hedge phrases are bad, "Chrome is the most visually appealing..." would be even better.
Unless you agree that hedge phrases have some value, in which case this is much more of a "haggling over the price" sort of disagreement than it seemed at first.
I do agree that hedge phrases have some value. They have more or less use depending on the social circles you're dealing with. Here, you could probably leave out the "I think" as implicit, but in many circles dropping it would be taken as abrasive and overprivileging of one's opinion. Remember that there is no shortage of people to whom "other people don't have to share your opinion" seems like a genuine insight.
I'm not taking issue with lionhearted's general point that social signals that would seem fluffy in this community can be legitimately useful in many situations, but like many others in this thread, I question his grasp of what sort of signaling actually tends to be most effective.
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.
Because of the final sentence, yes, that WOULD be likely to provoke a hostile reaction. Without that last bit it would be fine--a simple statement of personal preference, unlikely to cause any offense.
See, though, I stated up front that I believe in niceness. We don't have any argument over whether niceness is better than rudeness: we have a difference in perception about what's actually nice (and likely to make people react positively) and what's condescending and/or dismissive (and likely to make people react poorly).
It is odd, and meta, but also interesting, so thank you for starting the discussion--and for responding politely to criticism, which is always difficult.
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 meaningless,..." as a prelude to declaring that your subjective preferences are fairy meaningless. Having belittled subjective preferences, they impose theirs on every-one, and your objections carry little weight because "it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless."
I'm very attached to, and defense about, the little areas of my life that are subjective. My taste in food, my taste in music, my taste in web-browser user interfaces. Being advised to apologise in advance for my "fairly meaningless" love of Chopin hits my hot button.
There had better be a more general point to this comment than "Alan likes marzipan." I think it is that I am not unique; other people have issues too. Which means that there will always be problems with bits of harmless filler, inserted out of politeness, unexpectedly rubbing people the wrong way.
Given that both my comments in this thread have turned out more negative in tone than I intended, I should clarify that I think that lionhearted has written an excellence post. I have up-voted it. He deserves a medal for being brave enough to write on a fraught and important topic.
Fraught topic? The topic itself is utterly trivial and commonly acknowledged. Pretending that it is the topic itself that is dangerous is rather insulting to the community.
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'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.
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 worth it) be brief for goodness sake!
I hereby pre-commit to downvoting anyone who corrects one of my many spelling errors by writing a paragraph like
...
will suffice. If you can't leave it like that "Wisen, not wizen, you idiot." does less psychic damage than making me read that paragraph. The funny joke that was made in the original example would be the best, though.
I do not make a precommitment. I don't need to. I do make the observation that any such comment would provoke a downvote from me based on merit.
(Note that the very fact that you declared a precommitment essentially as a threat very nearly prompted me to declare that I would downvote you every time you made a spelling mistake and upvote the corrector. I stifled that impulse because the promised action was so obviously reasonable.)
I don't see how it was a threat anymore than all precommitments to do negative things are 'threats'. I don't really understand why you would take issue with me here.
The OP is promoted with 34 upvotes, apparently we do have to clarify our commenting standards. I don't see any difference between a precommitment and your 'observation' regarding future downvotes.
It isn't.
I'm not. I'm agreeing with you. Just noting that if I didn't strongly agree with you I would counter the use of force with my own. Expressing what my initial reaction was until I read as far as the actual quote.
One reasonable definition of a threat would be: "A precommitment to harm someone else if they perform, or fail to perform, certain actions."
So, it's not more of a threat than any other precommitment to do negative things in response to others actions.
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.
The last, and most overlooked, of the areas where social niceties are important is the internet. Here, not only are you often talking to people who don't know you well, but they are also deprived of tone of voice and facial expressions, which provide important clues about intent. A comment which would be perfectly polite with a pleasant smile can seem downright rude in plain text.
Another point is that Less Wrong is not a place without social codes, it simply has it's own. Whether these codes are more rational than standard social mores is irrelevant when it comes to dealing with people who don't know them. Social codes are another type of language, and the most important factor in communication with language is speaking a common tongue. If the lojbanists succeeded in creating a perfect, logical, utilitarian language, the fact remains that it would not be particularly useful in ordering a milkshake at McDonald's. When someone butchers the English language, even if I did understand what they meant to say, I am bothered, and it affects my impression of their statement. This holds true for politeness as well.
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 certain cultures as being unrealistic or insincere. The feedback is also more effective than pure criticism, which, as you pointed out in your post, can make the speaker hostile and therefore less likely to listen to you.
About your edit:
This is not a valid argument, and using it puts you in the same reference class with many nasty quack cures.