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ciphergoth comments on On Saying the Obvious - Less Wrong
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I have a different explanation: this is a status defense mechanism. If you say something that other people find obvious, in a way that suggests that you didn't find it obvious, you lose status-points for not being as smart as them. By adding the word "obviously", you in effect say "please do not infer that I think this remark is a great discovery of mine (and thus that I am ignorant relative to you) from the mere fact that I think it needs to be stated explicitly".
As an added benefit, if the remark turns out not to be obvious to your audience, yet demonstrably true, you gain status for having been smarter than them.
You might think, then, that there is no downside to simply prefacing every statement you think is true with "obviously". Obviously, however ( :-) ), you have to avoid making it transparent what you're doing, and thus restrict your usage of "obvious" to particularly plausible cases. Calibrating this sense of plausibility with your own epistemic powers is one of many mysterious (in the sense of not being spoken about or taught explicitly) techniques of human status negotiation. (And heaven help you if you label "obvious" something that is false...)
Is there something we can do about it? Are there community norms we can encourage to lower these status-based barriers to understanding?
If "obvious" things are still being said, prefacing them with "obviously," doesn't seem to be a barrier to understanding.
Signalling doesn't have to be that straightforward. A clever individual (of which we have a few) may choose to be significantly more circumspect, and imply that a piece of knowledge is obvious by omitting it from a statement that presupposes it, or alluding to it off-hand. We do this all the time, but I'm going to say that this probably has more to do with mind projection than anything else. It often simply won't occur to us to modulate a statement to encompass the receivers.
However, I don't know if this is a ploy we can entirely defeat just by making obviousness a bad word. If anything, that just requires people trying to make such a ploy to be circumspect...
Well, my first thought reading this was "look at that, worrying about what people think of you and trying to look cool messes everything up again."
This 'obviously' insertion trick may be rewarded with social pretentiousness brownie points, but as we can see, it also has negative consequences that, I feel, are rather more important. As a remedy, I invite you (and everyone) to join me in working on not caring so much about sounding cool enough.
This is an ongoing project of mine and I'm not nearly at a point yet where social insecurity and pretentiousness don't make any of my decisions for me any more, but at least realising that these are petty and counterproductive things to worry about helps to loosen their grip on your brain a bit.
I'm working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you're really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don't signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind, and might even get you stuck in delusions of entitlement to admiration that you haven't earned. And I appease my remaining urge for pretentiousness with the thought that being noticeably great at something without showing it off makes you look all the more badass. Someone with an amazing skill you never would have known they had (and if they've had that hidden in them, who knows what else they can do!) seems a lot cooler to me than someone -- even a more skilled person -- who milks their merits for every last thumbs-up they can get out of them.
Note however that I am not involved with important political matters where my reputation as a Very Smart Person could actually benefit me in more substantial ways than ego boostery.
People are also good at ignoring things that are inconvenient for them. Consider an office politics situation where being good at your job may mean that someone else's status gets lowered. You may have to signal that you're good at your job in order to get noticed at all.
There's also the problem that even if it's obvious, obvious+signal is still going to beat out your obvious+no signal. By your reasoning you don't need to walk into a job interview wearing a suit, because your resume should speak for itself. But then the next guy with an equally good resume and a suit comes in and gets hired over you.
More generally: If you've "rationally" deduced that you don't really need to follow pointless social conventions, you're almost certainly wrong and have failed to consider something. Chesterton's Fence applies, at least.
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people's impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you're amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won't notice, which works well for art but not for traffic signs.
That's not really my purpose with this, though. The purpose of this idea is mainly to liberate yourself from the urge to impress people at all. Again, you can't always afford to do that -- we all know a job interview is not the moment for modesty -- so the scope would have to be limited to those situations where looking clever really isn't all that important, but I think that still covers a sizeable proportion of them. Including, very much, writing comments on LessWrong that may or may not contain the word 'obviously'.