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Comments (590)
Thanks for posting this! I agree with Submitter B that LW can be cold and unfriendly and that this seems to be a general failure mode of the kind of people who post on LW. I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.
While I am personally actively trying to become more warm and friendly in my personal demeanor, and think that nicer comments are, ceteris paribus, more effective comments, I worry about seeking to institute niceness as a terminal rather than instrumental value. If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.
But it does seem like niceness as a terminal value is strongly linked to a more balanced gender ratio. Increased niceness will attract more women, and attracting more women will increase the amount of niceness.
It seems that the current population of LW undervalues niceness relative to the general population, but I can't tell if that's necessary or contingent. How would we know?
Personally I feel quite strongly that 'niceness' is way too vague a concept to in any way promote, no matter the social context.
I'd like to talk instead about the value of comments that are specific, positive (+ hopefully warm, without gushing), and cooperative. In short, creating a norm of definite, positive, 'working together to work out what's true' attitudes. I think it is fine to make comments that only express approval, as long as it is approval of a specific behaviour / characteristics and not blanket 'good job'. These kinds of specific comments help people evaluate themselves and encourage them to continue doing what works.
LessWrong is not a debate club -- we're trying to approach the truth, not merely win the argument. That means that things which keep us working together on that are a net win, providing they do not obscure the truth.
I appreciate the specificity of this breakdown; each of those three is something that I would endorse as directly useful most of the time.
Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.
One thing that may be on some folks' mind is that expressions of appreciation that don't also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely "I'm glad you posted that!" I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don't know. I think I'd be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don't endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)
I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing "mere" approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
I have sent several messages like; to the best of my knowledge, they have always been taken well. Every message I've received like that has made my day; I suggest lowering your estimate of how creepy it actually is.
I do agree with you that such messages are murkier when at least one party could interpret it as romantic, and while that murkiness can be resolved it takes additional effort.
That tends to be the pattern I notice for posts/comments that seem to be well-made; generally, more disagreeing / correcting comments than downvotes, and many more upvotes than comments that only express approval.
What I was wondering was a bit different:
Imagine a forum with no upvotes and downvotes. (It might still have a "report as spam/abuse" button, moderation, and the like — I don't mean that it's completely unfiltered.) It will have some level of people posting comments of agreement and ones of disagreement.
Now, imagine a forum identical to that one, but with upvotes and downvotes added. Some people who otherwise would comment on others' words, instead use a vote button. (And some do both.)
In the second forum, there may be fewer total comments — because many people who would post "I agree!" or "Me too!" or "No way!" or "Shut up!" will instead use the voting mechanism. But does the addition of a voting mechanism absorb proportionately more expressions of approval than disapproval?
(It may be that what I'm thinking of here is the old Usenet annoyance at people who posted merely to agree with another poster — "posting 'me too' like some brain-dead AOLer", as Weird Al put it. Voting mechanisms let us tell people not to post "me too" posts, but maybe some "me too" posts are more rewarding for the person they're responding to.)
I've long wanted a 'me too!' facility in forum posts - where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It'd be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - 'I'd sign that without reservation"
I think it'd be helpful to have a small textbox to add a short comment to a poster where I can put "I agree!" or "Fallacious reasoning" or "inappropriate discussion" that only shows up in the poster's view so there is some feedback besides Up/Down, yet doesn't clog up the thread.
I've never seen that function in a forum though, so perhaps the programming is simple.
Me too.
In seriousness, I was thinking that allowing us to see who has upvoted our comments/posts would probably be helpful and encouraging, although hiding who has downvoted would help protect the voter's integrity and help avoid downvotes being taken as a personal insult.
The risk would be the development of identifiable cult followings, undeserved reciprocation of upvotes, and similar.
Identifiable cult followings is an upside. We WANT people who get upvoted by the same people over and over to be noticed for this, and to notice it.
I have seen other forums that use this mechanism. They list which users "liked" the post right underneath the post itself. Those forums did not have a karma system, though, and it might seem that the systems are somewhat redundant, but I, for one, would process the two types of feedback differently in my meat-brain.
In short, I sign the above comment without reservation.
One of my first reactions to the relevant part of the OP was thinking of this phenomena and feeling some sympathy for the Usenet old hands. I've been on forums were "me too" posts are common, and while they can sometimes be nice I also think that they can get annoying/distract from useful comment.
Usenet old hand speaking: Me too!
The norm I've noticed around here is to upvote for agreeing and general warm fuzzies, but not to downvote for disagreement alone. Downvoting seems to be reserved for thoughts that are not merely incorrect, but broken in some way. (logically fallacious, for example)
For my own posts, I find I appreciate an upvote as if it were explicit encouragement. I'm wondering if this mental reaction is common, and if so, whether it's limited to the males here. (as a pseudo-"score", I could see this being the case) Perhaps the karma system produces more warm fuzzies for the average man and little-to-nothing for the average woman. With karma being the primary form of social encouragement, that could make for a very different experience between genders.
Request for anecdotal evidence here.
For my own part, I like the karma system precisely because it provides a way to indicate appreciation without cluttering threads with content-free approval posts. That is probably the usenetter in me speaking. (tangent: I miss the days when usenet was where all the interesting conversations happened. Oh well.)
I may be a somewhat atypical woman, but I appreciate upvotes. I do find it frustrating if I post something I think is substantial and it only gets upvotes. I'm here for conversation, not just approval.
Hrm. I think I agree on the frustration bit, but I'm unsure what to do about it.
Datapoint: I almost didn't post this because it felt too me-too-ish. If you hadn't been responding to me, I probably wouldn't have.
I'm a woman, and I feel exactly as you do, so it isn't limited to males.
I just don't understand the downvote/upvote thing, especially if the norm is/should be for broken thoughts.
When I get downvoted (or upvoted), I often don't get a comment explaining why. So it's unclear where I'm broken (or what I'm doing right). That's frustrating and doesn't help me increase my value to the community.
It'd be nice to have downvoters supply a reason why, in order to improve the original.
A downvote without explanation can basically be translated as "Lurk Moar, Noob"
When I downvote without explanation it's because I want less of what I'm downvoting AND I don't want the forums to be cluttered with explanations of what should be obvious.
I sometimes downvote without explanation if the post was highly upvoted and I thought it was merely decent.
I think so, and the evidence I was providing was an estimate of what percentage of 'negative' responses (including corrections as negative) were comments vs. downvotes, and what percentage of 'positive' responses were comments vs. upvotes.
Note that there are strong alternatives to the absorption model, since the activation energy is lower to vote than comment.
I agree with your second paragraph completely, and I would be averse to comments whose only content was "niceness". I'm on LW for intellectual discussions, not for feel-goodism and self-esteem boosts.
I think it's worth distinguishing niceness from respect here. I define niceness to be actions done with the intention of making someone feel good about him/herself. Respect, on the other hand, is an appreciation for another person's viewpoint and intelligence. Respect is saying "We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner."
When I began this comment with "I agree with your second paragraph", I wasn't saying it to be nice. I wasn't trying to give fubarobfusco warm fuzzy happiness-feelings. I was saying it because I respect fubarobfusco's thoughts on this matter, to the point where I wanted to comment and add my own elaborations to the discussion.
There's not much purpose to engaging in an intellectual discussion with someone who doesn't respect your ideas. If they're not even going to listen to what you have to say, or consider that you might be correct, then what's the point? So I think respect is integral to intellectual discussions, and therefore it's worthwhile to demonstrate it verbally in comments. But I consider this completely separate from complimenting people for the sake of being nice.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn't respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
(For what it's worth, I'm female, albeit a rather distant outlier. I'd emphatically prefer that "niceness" not become a community norm. For me, it takes a lot of mental effort to be nice to people (because I have to focus on my internal model of their feelings, as well as on the discussion at hand), and I get annoyed when people are gratuitously nice to me. This post makes me wonder if I'm unusual among LW females in holding this opinion.)
That's a good interpretation, but I wonder if status is a simpler lens. Defining people and their traits is a high-status thing; the guy retorting that she's a thinker moves power from her to him in a way that suggesting wouldn't.
Respect also seems subjective; I have basically stopped stating opinions around a friend whose rationality I do not respect because I don't think discussing contentious subjects with them is a good use of either of our times. If they say that they're a good judge of character, and I can think of three counterexamples, I'll only state those counterexamples if I respect them enough to think they can handle it.
I also wonder about how much respect is subject-specific, and how much it's global. I can easily imagine someone who I trust when it comes to mathematics but don't trust when it comes to introspection.
This made me think of something irrelevant to your post, but relevant to the topic. I've been told that women are socialized not to overtly disagree with or otherwise oppose men. (this usually comes up in the context of careful date non-refusals) I tend to interpret such things as vaguely insulting, along the lines of saying I can't handle the truth. (or refusal)
Is this interpretation shared by anyone here? What do the women here think of it?
Avoiding overt disagreements is solid advice for anyone who wants to be well-liked, because they are often a social cost to the disagreer, and primarily benefit the person they're disagreeing with.
It's not clear to me that the advice to not overtly disagree with men is as specific as it sounds, since it seems like overt female-female disagreements are also discouraged. To the extent that it is specific, I do suspect it is due to the physical risks involved.
I agree it's insulting.
I also believe that when people are rationally frightened of a group, the fear can take generations to fade even when conditions get better.
Perhaps I should update to interpret it as "I don't know if you can handle the truth and I can't take the chance." I guess that's easier to swallow, at least for strangers.
That sounds like an improvement.
More generally, I think that if you focus on a single interpretation of someone's motives when you don't have a lot of information, and the interpretation makes you angry, then you're probably engaging in an emotional habit. I admit I'm mostly generalizing from one example on this.
Your comment has me wondering whether some folks expect niceness and respect to correlate. I've noticed some social contexts where fake niceness seems to be expected to cloak lack of respect. I wouldn't be surprised if some people around here are embittered from experiences with that.
No kidding.
(And I'm having difficulty responding to the rest of this without using unhelpful words such as "normals" or "mundanes", so I'll leave it at that.)
The human brain is fallible. That includes assertions made about internal experiences - such assertions may be wrong. If person A has reason X to believe that the result of person B's introspection is wrong, which is the more respectful course of action?
How about a third option:
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
A non-gender example:
Atheist: Pentecostal, my model predicted that people would go home from church feeling bored, guilty, or self-righteous, because former church people I know talk about those experiences, and church people who are active in politics seem to be big on guilt and self-righteousness. But your experience sounds like church is a fun party, that you go home from feeling giddy and high. I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your religious experiences!
Indeed I agree that it is possible, and probably desirable, to phrase the argument less bluntly than I did. However, it seems to me that submitter B is arguing against making such arguments at all, not arguing to make them in a more polite fashion.
Furthermore, here of all places, "If you (think you) posses evidence that I do not, show it and update me!" should be a background assumption, not something that needs to be put as a disclaimer on any potentially-controversial statement.
I rather doubt that submitter B would have had a problem with, "Really? Why? I ask because from out here it seems like you're a thinker."
Certainly the cited reasons for the actual statement being objectionable do not apply to this modified form.
She writes:
Which I read to mean that she is not opposed to them expressing confusion or saying something like "Huh, you always seemed more like a pure thinker to me." (as opposed to "No way. You're totally a thinker.") It seems precisely how the statement is phrased and how the discussion is conducted that is at issue here.
My communicating my differing perception to the other person in Option 1 is my invitation to have them update me.
Going through the song and dance of your third option is not required with some people, making them more efficient partners at finding the truth. I find people who require constant ego stroking in this manner, or who give it, literally tiresome in an intellectual endeavor.
It seems to me that flat contradiction without any communication of being open to being convinced is a strongly suboptimal invitation to update the speaker. This is especially so in cases of strongly asymmetric information (either direction).
'Song and dance' appears to me to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for 'communicating what you mean' as opposed to 'indicating something in the general vein and hoping the receiver figures out what you meant'.
Edited to add: option A is much more reasonable than I credited it, so while I'll stand by my first paragraph above, it's not particularly relevant to the post above. And yes, option 3 could be streamlined.
It works just fine with a lot of people.
For me, you can take that I'm open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are. Aren't you?
Thank you! I've been looking for that word forever.
Not really, because 'communicating what you mean' was not what I meant. I was referring to kabuki dance of your ritualized formula for disagreement to stroke a person's ego so that he doesn't feel a threat to his status by my disagreeing with him.
I don't think the fellow is really confused about whether I'm open to being convinced of the error of my ways. If I say "I think you're wrong because of X", does not the human impulse to reciprocity sanction and invite him to respond in kind?
Does that fellow really need it explained to him that if I disagree with him on when the bus is coming, that he is free and invited to disagree with me right back? I don't think so.
He: The bus is coming at 3:00.
Me: No, it's coming at 3:10; that's when I caught it yesterday.
He: But yesterday was Friday. Saturday has a different schedule.
That seems like an everyday, ordinary human conversation to me, that no one should get all excited or offended about.
Well, except that you would not be actually stating an invitation or request for more information. You would be assuming that the other person will interpret contradiction as an invitation for further discussion rather than as a dismissal, insult, threat, or other sort of speech act.
(Humans use language for a lot of other purposes besides the merely indicative, after all.)
If you say, "I'm having a party on Saturday," some people in some situations will take this to mean that you are thereby inviting them to come to the party. Others will think that you are merely stating a fact about your own social life. Still others will think that you are excluding them, just as if you had added, "... and you're not invited, you disgusting worm!"
Some people hear an invitation. Some hear a statement of fact. Some hear an exclusionary insult.
If you want to make it clear that you are inviting them, you say, "I'm having a party on Saturday, would you like to come?" or "... and you're invited!"
This is not bullshit song-and-dance ego-stroking. It is clear communication, and in particular a way to address people's differing priors about what your communication could mean. It probably depends on recognizing that people have different priors, and that they arrived at those priors legitimately.
(For that matter, if expressing curiosity about other people's experiences is an effective way to get data from them, then rationalists should practice doing it a lot until it is automatic and cheap System 1 behavior!)
Yes. In this context, and most contexts, that's my null hypothesis. Isn't it yours? People are here to discuss, and not dismiss, insult, or threaten.
Do you think I'm here to dismiss, insult, or threaten people? Do you think a large percentage of people here are? Do you think that anyone who says "you're wrong" is? That strikes me as a bizarre and thoroughly inaccurate prior. Or I certainly believe and hope it is.
Am I wrong? Is it just foolish innocence on my part to think that people are here to discuss, and not stomp on other people to social climb or satisfy sadistic impulses? It wouldn't be the first time. In other contexts, yeah, there's a lot of that going on. And it admittedly took me a long time to figure that out. But I don't see it here. The trouble is, if it were, most of the people who know aren't going to tell you.
After the discussion, I think I've got a more concise option that achieves this end.
Option 4:
I disagree, because blah blah blah.
Concise, and makes it about my differing perceptions and evaluations. Better than my original "you're wrong, because blah blah." I doubt that this entirely satisfies the nice camp, but I think it's a baby step in their direction.
I think it's actually a fairly large step, but I'm probably a moderate on niceness.
I think you are framing the question in order to presuppose a conclusion. This is an error that is just as endemic on LessWrong as it is everywhere else.
The first alternative is designed to look nice, respectful, and false, and the second to look nasty, disrespectful, and true. The bottom line is "Niceness is dishonesty", and the example was invented to support it.
Compare this with an example from the original post:
This does not fall into either of those categories. It looks like this:
Which is what person A would say if they spoke honestly while thinking "meh, person B can't handle the truth, I'll just shut up and say nothing." Person A appears to be running an internal monologue that goes: "I know the truth. You do not know the truth. I have reasons for my beliefs, therefore I am right. Therefore your reasons for your beliefs must be wrong. Therefore you should take correction from me. If you don't, you're even more wrong. You can't handle the truth. I can handle the truth. Therefore I am right. (continue on auto-repeat)"
That, at least, is what I see, when I see those two alternatives.
The real problem here is what person A is actually thinking, and the invisibility of that process to themselves. For it is written:
As long as A is running that monologue, how to express themselves is going to look to them like a conflict between "niceness" and "truth". And however they express themselves, that monologue is likely to come through to B, because it will leak out all over.
I was not arguing about the specific example given in the OP, where he (the person with whom submitter B was arguing) was apparently unable or unwilling to provide evidence for his assertion that she was mistaken about herself. You, and submitter B, may be entirely correct about the person she was arguing with.
Perhaps I am overestimating the sanity of this place, but I do hope (and expect) that if similar arguments occur on this forum, evidence will (should) be put forward. In this place dedicated, among other things, to awareness of the many failure modes of the human brain, to how you (yes you. And I, too) may be totally wrong about so many things, in this place, the hypothesis "I may be mistaken about myself; I should listen to the other person's evidence on this matter" is not a hypothesis that should be ignored. (note how submitter B does not consider this hypothesis in her example, and indeed she may have been correct to not consider it, but as stated I'm arguing in general here).
The homeopath who has treated thousands of patients, should listen to the high-school chemistry student who has evidence that homeopathy doesn't work. The physics crackpot who has worked on their theory of everything for decades should listen to the student of physics who points out that it fails to predict the results of an experiment. And the human, who has spent all their life as a human in a human body, should listen to the student of psychology, who may know many things about themselves that they are yet ignorant of.
In brief, Tu quoque.
As an A, I'll tell you what my deluded perceptions are of my internal dialogue. If I say "you're wrong, because blah blah", that's because I am presuming you can handle the truth, otherwise I wouldn't bother offering my comment, as indicated by the original poster.
That's what you do when you think the person can't handle the truth - you shrug and move on.
I think I've identified two Person A values relevant to this discussion:
Expressing honest disagreement is a sign of respect.
Crafting that disagreement to manage feelings is a sign of disrespect.
Two different species - those who manipulate things, and those who manipulate people. They don't get along too well. There's probably a third that does both, but I don't think they're large in number.
Those are all things I'd have to discover about you. There are some here I consider worthwhile conversation partners because I recognize their usernames and have formed opinions of them.
I don't expect respect from people who don't know me, and I don't even expect it from those that do know me. I am not due respect from anyone, I have to earn it, by their lights.
I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. Or maybe when they feel like they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. And this may happen while the disagree-er is completely oblivious to this perception, and I think it is a little bit on the disagree-er to add some padding of niceness?
Like you're not going to be a bit careful if you're in danger of accidentally stepping on people's feet in real life, right? That has pretty little to do with respect and more to do with compassion. It's a mutual understanding that human feet are squishy and hurt to be stepped on. Or you'd add niceness if you accidentally offend someone in a meatspace discussion? So why not here? I feel like it doesn't take away from the discussion to say "Oh sorry! I really meant [this]" instead of "I said [this] not [that]," which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.
(Also, I feel like I'm the only person here that regularly uses exclamation marks. )
I feel like I've come across a lot of discussions where it's pretty obvious that the parties involved are frustrated, but they don't acknowledge it because there's a little bit of that Spocklike rationalists-don't-get-frustrated attitude still lingering around.
I think that showing respect can stop disagreements from seeming like dismissals.
Hmm, I definitely see where you're coming from, and I don't (usually) want my comments to hurt anyone. If my comments were consistently upsetting people when I was just trying to have a normal conversation, then I would want to know about this and fix it - both because I actually do care about people's feelings, and because I don't want to prevent every single interesting person from conversing with me. It would take a lot of work, and it would go against my default conversational style, but it would be worth it in the long run.
However, it sounds more like there's a cultural/gender difference on LW. That is, different people prefer different paddings of niceness. Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
So the question here is, should we change LW culture? I personally would prefer we didn't, because I like the culture we have now. I don't support rationalist evangelism, and I'm not bothered by the gender imbalance, so I don't feel a need to lure more women onto LW by changing the culture. Is this unfair to rationalist women who would like to participate in LW discussions, but are put off by the lack of friendliness? Yes, it is. But similarly, if we encouraged more niceness padding, this would be unfair to the people who prefer a more bare-bones style of interaction.
(It could be that it's easier to adjust in one direction - maybe it's easier to grow accustomed to niceness padding than to the lack thereof. In that case, it might be worth the overhead.)
Regarding your example...
See, I would have classified this as "disrespect" rather than "unfriendliness". In the first version, the person is admitting that he/she was unclear, and is trying to correct it - a staple of intellectual discussion, which often serves to elucidate things through careful analysis. In the second version, the person is saying "I'm right and you're wrong", which means that the discussion has devolved into an argument, instead of two people working together towards greater understanding.
What about these examples?
I would tend towards the second or third, personally. The first has "sorry" in it, which seems unnecessarily apologetic to me. People frequently state things unclearly and then have to elucidate them; it's part of the normal discussion process, and not something to be sorry for. The fourth sounds unnecessarily abrupt to me (though I imagine it'd depend on the context). I'm curious what other people think w.r.t. these examples.
Personally, I find the niceness-padding to be perfectly well-calibrated for dealing with disagreements because people are thoughtful and respectful. I find it to be insufficient when dealing with people talking past each other. It's really frustrating! This is a community full of interesting, intelligent people whose opinion I want to know ... that sometimes aren't bothering to carefully read what I wrote. And then not bothering to read carefully when I politely tell them that they misread what I wrote and clarify. So then I start thinking that this isn't a coincidence, so maybe they don't want to read what I write... ? So then I feel like they don't like me even though I like them. Nooooo, sadness.
Here is how I see the difference: the people who think there's too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it. The people who think there is insufficient niceness-padding are getting hurt.
This makes me personally err on the side of niceness. And while I understand that excessive niceness turns into clutter, I think that even the lowest of the four levels that you demonstrated doesn't happen as often as it should in some discussions.
You're making the wrong comparison; comparing the impact on one group ("hurt") with the other group's emotional reaction to the impact on them "annoyed". What you want to compare is "hurt" to "have one's time wasted", which is a form of harm.
If you start reading something and feel like your time is being wasted, you can just stop reading the rest of it. (For example, the complaint about the crappy evopsych doesn't bother me because I just don't read it.) You can also get good at skimming over niceties.
If someone feels hurt they're going to have to do extra work to get themselves back to their previous state, which is a slightly different form of harm. It's harder to predict when the next thing you're going to read has that kind of effect on you.
If you start reading something and feel like you're going to be hurt, you can just stop reading the rest of it. You can also get good at being tolerant of the direct mode of communication.
If someone's time is wasted, it's literally impossible for them to get that time back. Also, whilst it's easy to skip many potentially offensive topics (don't read anything tagged gender), it's much harder to know which random new commentators will have worthwhile contributions.
i.e. I don't think you've identified a significant distinction here.
Also, it's much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn't want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
Isn't this how we got Karate America? Making things softer and softer to appeal to more and more people until the martial art is a useless exercise for children?
I think that happened mostly because you need to actually attract customers to stay open and make money, and parents got softer and less inclined to pay money for places where their children get hurt. Especially if the children won't, with good probability, need to use those skills elsewhere in society.
Yep, I agree! But I also want to clarify that, unlike a martial arts dojo, the safeguards aren't unnecessary when you get good at rationality. They become unnecessary when you trust the person ... Which is kind of an orthogonal thing.
I wonder if your niceness padding has led to people missing your point and to you being frustrated by their failure to understand you.
Haha, because words like "sorry" and "thank you" and occasional exclamation marks make my writing completely incomprehensible. =P
It doesn't seem like that would be the case, no. I expected your alterations to have been deeper than that, including stuff like softening your disagreement.
Right, because words like "sorry" and "thank you" and occasional exclamation marks make my writing completely incomprehensible.
Yes, any niceness level will involve a trade off between the two preferences. I prefer a leaner and meaner LW.
The ideal might eventually be a two or more track LW. I'm willing to bet that we're losing some people whose thinking we'd want, but who find the courtesy level too polite or too harsh. I'd also bet that, while it seems that the courtesy level here isn't friendly enough for a lot of women, there are also men who'd like a friendlier version.
It's Rattler's and Eagles all over again, but probably worse. It's not evaporative cooling, it's cluster dissociation with actual differences from the start. The general behavior of each group shifts toward their new means - away from each other.
The best answer is hard. We continue to talk about this in a productive manner until our preferences, behavior, perceptions, and trusts shift.
Some behaviors change. Some interpretations change. Some reactions change.
I don't know that it will make such a big difference. The preferences may start biologically, and are likely reinforced in other parts of our lives regardless. But this could at least improve information and separate real preferences from habitual unexamined behaviors.
I cannot agree with this enough.
I also want to be clear that I do not think that this requires putting niceness padding on every statement and interaction. Just enough padding on enough interactions that a new person can believe that they will get a padded response instead of seeing no alternative but that they will receive an unpadded response.
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone leaving because the discussion was too polite or too nice for their tastes! I may be biased in this, but my intuition is that people who are against encouraging niceness really overestimate how much noise it would actually add, and maybe even how few hedons they'd get from receiving it (but I may well be wrong on this second part).
And I definitely agree that niceness isn't an attractor to just women. I think a better way of looking at it is that there is a distribution of prioritising niceness in each gender, so the current level might be too low for something like 70% of women and 20% of men (I find myself on the fence about whether I want to bother engaging with the community, for example, and a higher level would probably push me over towards the engagement side).
My impression is that there are people who really like the freedom to be insulting.
I agree with the rest of your points.
To add a single data point: I left one other community largely because it was developing (and enforcing) social norms that had me jumping through too many hoops before I could voice criticism or disagreement; and I had serious issues with a second one for similar reasons, although different things drove me away in the end. I'm happy with LW's current culture, but there's a fairly wide range of preferences and I don't think I'm on the extreme aggressive end of the spectrum.
I think I get better responses even on Less Wrong if I put effort into sounding friendly when I write my comment.
I would tend towards the last two, I think, and wouldn't find the forth to be rude (though it might depend on the nature and scale of the clarifications, with this method being most apt for smaller ones). However, I am one of those who likes the style of discussion on lesswrong.
I've noticed that women and girls tend to use more emoticons than men and boys, too. It also seems to me that the emoticons used by women are more likely to be noseless -- such as :) as opposed to :-) -- than those used by men, but it's not like I did stats on this so I'm not very confident about this. So, as a compromise between having people misunderstand my tone and looking too effeminate, I do use emoticons when I need to, but I give them noses.
As for exclamation marks, I used to almost always use ellipses to terminate sentences in contexts where a full stop might sound too formal and no punctuation at all might sound too slovenly (namely, in comments on Facebook, and certain times in text messages), but then I noticed that that looked too wimpy, whereas exclamation marks looked more assertive, so I now use either ellipses or exclamation marks depending on (among other things) my instantaneous level of self-confidence. (I can't remember noticing any gender difference in the use of punctuation.)
I never thought the smileys with noses were inherently manly, but I do think that smileys without noses result in a cuter face, which may explain that correlation if we assume that cuteness ideals are shared by most people.
These confessions of textual insecurities are enlightening and endearing. =] I had no idea guys worried about this stuff until yesterday. We should do this more often!
When I use a smiley, it's noseless, but it's because I don't think the hyphen adds information. How geeky!
I use smileys with a nose, but that's probably just because I'm old, and that's how I first learned them. :-)
I either give a smiley a nose or not, depending on what looks better given the default font that the places uses. I think that on LW ":)", looks pretty squished-together and hard to even make out, so here I use ":-)" instead.
(It has always struck me as a little weird that nobody else seems to do this - if they use smilies at all, it's either always with a nose or always noseless. But then, my active vocabulary for emoticons tends to be broader than that of most folks in any case.)
Oh yeah, the ^_^ face looks bad in some of the wider fonts.
I sometimes feel that pull to adopt something as a convention because it seems reasonable to me. But then I realize that it's not really a convention if no one understands or follows it, and it requires a lot of work to explain and popularize. So I'm always left reminding my own brain of its pointlessness despite its ... seeming reasonableness. For (a California-specific) example, I always want to signal left in a left-turn lane to let the people behind me to know that I'm going to U-turn. But I'm probably the only person that does that so people behind me just figure I didn't turn my signal off or whatever. =/
I think people who regularly talk to you probably pick up on your smiley meanings intuitively; people hopefully don't regularly drive behind me.
I acknowledge it, but that doesn't mean I pander to it. They likely find my callousness mean. I find their sensitivity tiresome. We have different preferences and sensitivities that are mutually inconvenient. Not all people get along well.
I feel like "pander" implies doing something you specifically wouldn't do of your own accord with the sole aim of getting people to like you. In contrast, being dismissive, acknowledging that someone probably felt bad as a result of something you did and then not doing anything about it -- that's not even insensitive.
"Ow, you stepped on my foot."
"I acknowledge that your foot probably hurts, but I find that tiresome and inconvenient."
You're definitely not expected to get along with everyone, and if you could accurately predict exactly who you're going to hurt before you have a conversation with them, you could just avoid them ahead of time and everything would be fine. Since we don't know how to do that, you're probably going to hurt some people accidentally. What you said sounds like you have no problem hurting people accidentally and don't care if they feel bad because of it.
I believe the real issue that B. raised of LW being cold won't be effectively improved by posting "I agree!" replies, but requires some emotional involvement. A response that offers something to the OP, that gives something back.
Like, why do you agree? What are the implications of you agreeing? Or, what thoughts or emotions does the content of the post bring up for you? The response doesn't have to be long, but it should be personal and thoughtful.
A little bit more of that may go a long way towards developing community.
I've posted a lot of messy examples all over this thread, but I think I've finally gathered my thinking now.
I would like to make a simple case that niceness clarifies communication. This is because not all disagreements are perfectly rational and sometimes contain defensiveness and other stuff that is difficult to filter out. Furthermore, even disagreements that are balanced and rational often fail to engage the original comment, and thus they come off as dismissive -- therefore, they unintentionally communicate "I don't respect you" or "I don't like you." Therefore, if it is difficult to predict whether your comment will unintentionally communicate "I don't like" you to the other person, then adding "but nevertheless I still like you" into what you said in some socially accepted way does increase the likelihood that what you wrote is perceived as what you meant to write.
Sometimes, this can be as small as a smiley. Or an exclamation mark. It doesn't have to be a crazy stream of niceties and smalltalk and hugs that them mundanes engage in on a daily basis in conversations of no substances because they're not cool like we are.
Hmm, so I'm thinking about smileys and exclamation points now. I don't think they just demonstrate friendliness - I think they also connote femininity. I used to use them all the time on IRC, until I realized that the only people who did so were female, or were guys who struck me as more feminine as a result. I didn't want to be conspicuously feminine on IRC, so I stopped using smileys/exclamation points there.
It never bothered me when other people didn't use smileys/exclamations. But when I stopped using them on IRC, everything I wrote sounded cold or rude. I felt like I should put the smileys in to assure people I was happy and having a good time (just as I always smile in person so that people will know I'm enjoying myself). But no one else was using them, and they didn't strike me as unfriendly, so I decided to stop using them.
Until I saw this comment, I had forgotten that I had adjusted myself in this way! In light of this, I may have to take back some of my earlier comments, as it really does seem like culturally enforced gender differences are getting in the way here, and that LW has little tolerance for people who sound feminine (perhaps because of an association between femininity and irrationality, which I'll admit to being guilty of myself).
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with feminity, or is it just me?
(EDIT: Now I'm thinking that smileys vs. lack thereof might also be a formality thing. I also limit the amount of smileys/exclamations that I put in work emails, because they seem overly friendly/informal for a professional context. LW feels more like a professional environment than a social gathering to me, I think.)
Apparently! I started talking to someone about this and he just told me this exact thing independently of you. He said men can only use smileys with women because it's flirting. (??) Which is weird to me because I've met men who are WAY more animated than I am in meatspace. Do they also not use exclamation marks? I don't think I'd be able chat with them online if they didn't; my brain would explode.
But actually, I think this whole issue comes up because we subconsciously communicate a lot of those "I still like you! I'm not hostile! I'm still having a good time!" messages in meatspace through non-verbal things like smiles and pats and vocal tone, etc. So people that resist adding those into their text think they're being asked to do something extra that they never do, but I think, they do do it and just don't realize it because it comes more naturally.
I agree with you, but:
I might suspect that for many people on Less Wrong this does not come as naturally as it does to most people :P
You know, I was just about to make a poll about this! But I'm on an iPad, so that's a bad idea.
Do you think a lot of LW people are bad at those cues in real life? Do you think they actively resent having to be good at them in real life as well? I figured LW-ers would recognize the utility of these messages out in meatspace, but it might have just not crossed their mind.
I'd rather not speculate about "a lot of LW people," since I am just one person and I'm not making observations about myself, per se.
But I have at least one friend in real life who struggles with social cues and I think she'd be pretty excited to find an environment where she didn't have to deal with them. So I'd imagine there are people with different perspectives on it, some of them actively against it, some passively supportive of the current setup, and some unaware that there's a decision being made, and I have no idea how to distinguish how many of each. I guess a poll would be appropriate.
I sort of assumed that even people who struggle with social cues would understand their instrumental value, at least on an intellectual level. But there's definitely a typical mind component in that thinking because I know nothing about the social lives of most LW-ers or the average LW-er and how much they interact with humans in meatspace and how they feel about it.
So I thought more about this poll and realized I would need one of those "strongly agree -- strongly disagree" matrices to get any good results. Which is an even heftier undertaking.
Meta: an excellent example of how a post can look friendly without reducing information content (or even using smileys!)
I'm hugely more likely to use smileys when talking to someone I find attractive online
Because you are trying to be extra-friendly and non-threatening, or because you're trying to use smileys to directly indicate your attraction/interest?
I'm both emotionally more inclined to be smiling and thus typing smileys when chatting with someone I'm attracted to AND occasionally consciously aware of smileys and that I might want to toss one in to be extra-friendly. I don't think it's a known notion that smileys are flirtatious or about attraction so I don't really use them that way, though maybe I should.
Nono, I don't think you should! I think this is actually where that "smileys are flirty" impression originated.
...
^_^
Okay, after threatening, I had a go at hacking up a smiley gender detector for lesswrong irc.
Looking at the counts of smileys-per-message by nick, no obvious pattern.
Looking at averages:
male avg 0.015764359871 female avg 0.0194180023583
The dataset I'm using is so male dominated I don't think the results can be particularly meaningful.
Also, the fact that LW itself isn't smiley friendly. An interesting project would be to gather data from the real life facebook pages of both males and females on LW and see if a discrepancy shows up there. People would have to volunteer their facebooks for you to look at which might cause a bit of a selection effect. (The less trusting/interpersonal types might be less likely to both volunteer their fb, and to use smileys)
The reason I say this, is because I severely limit my smiley usage on LW.
One user who's part of the female dataset has already reported cutting out the smileys deliberately. As I say, I don't put much faith in the results.
I did consider scraping lesswrong.com for data, but a) I wasn't sure of the etiquette b) I don't have a list of female users (maybe I can get them from the survey?) c) it's a lot more coding.
How are you determining gender of users?
The number of female users is so small I just hardcoded known female nicks.
As I say, I don't think the results are particularly meaningful.
My associations... Well, first I check if the smiley significantly clarifies the tone of the comment. If so, I take that as the explanation.
Beyond that, I associate youth, extroversion, being hip to tech, and emotional openness.
This last has a tendency to be associated as feminine, though not particularly by me.
RE: smileys in formal settings. I grew up speaking Russian, which is a language that has a formal-you pronoun, and I spent most of my school life feeling really weird writing "you" to adults in emails, because it felt too friendly and rude and presumptuous. Badly-raised child! I generally don't use smileys in professional emails unless the other person has used them first or I really want to make a nerdy joke. But sometimes that policy feels weird if your co-workers in meatspace are fun, joking, informal people. Why would you limit yourself with people if you know you don't have to?
Also, I will add this link to a relevant post you might find interesting, mostly because I didn't notice this until the author pointed it out but also because I'm proud that I managed to hunt it down. (It is unfortunately not that well-written and touches on a lot of mind-killer topics.)
we must create a smiley based gender detector! for science!
I am male, don't associate smileys with femininity, and often use them in most text conversations and also posts online if I would smile in meatspace when saying what I'm typing (which usually is not the case in work emails). It can occasionally put me on edge if I type with someone who does not use them, in a conversation where I would expect them to smile in meatspace.
Rest assured we are in agreement about this. But I don't think a comment has to directly serve my terminal values to be worth upvoting.
Agreed, and I may be overbroadening "terminal value" by applying it as "things worth upvoting." A comment being "nice" makes it more likely that comment will be "helpful," and I think "helpful" comments are worth upvoting; do I think comments that are nice but not helpful are worth upvoting? Not really, and a policy to upvote for niceness alone won't capture that value judgment.
But it could be that niceness is the best cause or proxy for desired consequence, and thus is worthwhile.
Signal to noise.
A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader. For people looking to exchange useful information on the internet, it will act as noise that needs to be filtered to get to the useful stuff.
With the important exception that it reinforces the behavior in question, which is actionable and useful information. The trouble is that this is mostly useful for the recipient, and not as useful for bystanders, and it is much more useful if the affirmation identifies the specific behavior it seeks to reinforce.
But if you're trying to reinforce behavior, wouldn't that also reinforce the behavior in the observers as well? Is public stroking more reinforcing? For some, in some context.
Here's the thing. Don't you feel it's rather cheeky, or at least manipulative, to be responding to people for the explicit purpose of reinforcing their behavior? "Good boy!"
Maybe the consequentialists like it, or think they do, but it rubs me the wrong way. Somewhere along this thread I thanked someone for bringing me the word "dysphemism". I wasn't trying to reinforce his behavior, I was expressing appreciation and gratitude.
I don't like to "handle" people. I don't like to be "handled". I find it disrespectful. Besides the mental energy involved to handle people, that's probably where my aversion to it comes from.
Apparently, some people want to be handled. They consider it being nice and friendly. Considerate. I guess I can see that, even while noting that this fact doesn't alter my aversion and distaste for handling.
This is one of the big reasons that niceness annoys me. I think I've developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to comments like "good job!" because I don't want to be manipulated by them. Even when the speaker is just trying to express gratitude, and has no knowledge of behaviorism, "good job!" annoys me. I think it's an issue of one-place vs. two-place predicates - I have no problem with people saying "I like that" or "I find that interesting".
If I let my emotional system process both statements without filtering, I think "good job!" actually does reinforce the behavior regardless, while "I like that!" will depend on my relation to the speaker. I know that my emotional system is susceptible to these behaviorist things, and I think that's part of why I've developed a negative reaction to them - to avoid letting them through to a place where they can influence me.
Another reason niceness annoys me is that it satisfies my craving for recognition and approval, but it's like empty calories. If I can get a quick fix of approval by posting a cat picture on facebook, then it will decrease my motivation to actually accomplish anything I consider worthwhile. This is one of the many reasons I avoid social media and think it encourages complacence. (Also, I get the impression that constant exposure to social media is decreasing people's internal motivation and increasing their external motivation. But I'm not sure if I believe this becaue it's true, or because I enjoy being a curmudgeon.)
I have a real problem with "good job".
For me, it's associated with positive encouragement after someone screws up on a team sport. No, it wasn't a good job, it was a screw up. It's epitomized by a very sweet, very positive Christian girl in PE class, while playing volleyball. The contrast of a hypersaccharine "good job!" and the annoyance at the screw up had me grinding my teeth.
The more general issue on "good job" is the inherent condescension. I am your superior, here to judge your performance and pat you on the head to encourage you to improve. No thanks.
That goes a little with your point about the difference between "good job" and "I like that". I made a similar distinction between "You're wrong"/"That's wrong" and "I disagree". It does seem less annoying or insulting to have people phrase their opinion in terms of themselves, instead of an objective fact about you or reality.
Convey your evaluation as your evaluation, instead of as a objective fact. Seems to feel better for the issues we're annoyed with.
But do the nicies want to hear "good jobs" that the meanies don't?
This is important enough to be worth its own discussion, and I would recommend discussing it here.
Negative affirmations (for example) are also noise. But more unpleasant noise.
The problem with the comment was that it wasn't clear what it was a disagreement with - the facts referred to, particular facts referred to, or the implicitly proposed community behavior (as I took it).
In that way, this is one of the worst kinds of comment - ambiguous disagreement. They haven't made any effort to be clear. You don't know what they've said, so it invites requests for clarification. It otherwise invites counter disagreement, based on an assumption of what was disagreed with. On the bright side, no one followed up.
But if he was just disagreeing with a proposed policy, and made that clear, it would have been an appropriate comment in my estimation.
And "I disagree" on a substantive fact is not really a negative affirmation in the sense I meant. It is a not very informative sharing of a personal attitude. In general, I find "I agree" noise to be filtered. But I wouldn't call that comment unpleasant at all. It lacked all emotional tone for me.