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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong
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Exercise: Say "Greetings" or "Salutations" instead of "Hello" or "How are you", because people don't sneeze often enough. Also note that "How are you" itself is an unusually autopiloted question.
(From Shannon.)
I used to do this, but it got on people's nerves.
I actually got in something of an argument with my aunt several years back, because she felt that it was rude of me to make slight changes to trivial social interactions, because it made people uncomfortable to be forced to think about what they'd just said.
Huh. It seems to me that reactions like that are precisely the reason why you should do something like that. If someone is sufficiently accustomed to acting on autopilot that they feel discomfort and annoyance at a stimulus that requires some thought, then they deserve to be provoked thus.
I think that most people view these social interactions as an attempt to make the other person feel comfortable (ie that you care about their well-being).
Thus if you change them, you're messing with their heads by making them uncomfortable on exactly the very thing that should be making them more comfortable... thus why it's seen as rude.
yes, you can force them to change on this - but a) you're teaching a pig to sing and b) I think there are more important battles.
That's more or less what I argued (not that they deserve it, but that they'd be better off occasionally thinking about activities they usually put on autopilot,) but eventually I decided that it wasn't worth the trouble their discomfort caused me when dealing with them. It wasn't a high utility use of social capital.
Huh. I actually did this a while back (not with those, but with other nonstandard greetings) but I don't think it's made me any more mindful. Maybe if you kept switching every [time period], according to die roll? But then, if it's already part of a larger program of habit-switching/mindfulness, that may be more than necessary...
I've found having environmental switches helps more: I try to use British spellings at home, and US spellings at work, and thus have to constantly think about them. I have spell checking dictionaries set up appropriately in both environments, so I get nice little reminders "you're not spelling it right!" to wake me up, too :)
Because I can't settle in to a routine pattern, it keeps me significantly more aware than previous "develop a new replacement habit" changes have for me.
Or one could carry around a satchel of black pepper.
For historical reasons "Ahoy" would be better since "Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell originally suggested 'ahoy' be adopted as the standard greeting when answering a telephone, before 'Hello' ...became common)
A good idea but a bad implementation, as doing this is a bit of a nerd stereotype (e.g. Martin from The Simpsons, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory). IIRC, Leil Lowndes suggests in one of her books that the question "How do you spend your time?" usually be substituted for "What do you do?" With a bit of finessing, it seems like it could replace "How are you?" (maybe "What are you doing today?" -- strikes me as similar enough to get the social meaning across, but different enough that you might also get a useful not-automatic response).
Alternatively, again, use another language.