= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ahartell comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (590)
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.
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.
Here is why your comment strikes me as unfriendly and not particularly rational:
You wonder? If you really wanted to know you would either ask me or you could just read through my comment history and determine that, no, I am pretty direct and people still misunderstand me. Or you could identify specific examples where this did happen and let me know in a helpful way where I messed up my argument. Instead, you just sort of demonstratively express your hypothesis so people who already agree with you can see it and pat you on the back. Pretty mind-killery, in my opinion.
But it's okay! I understand! These things happen. =]
To be honest, I'm surprised by the hostility of your comments here. I was bringing a hypothesis to your attention so that you could evaluate it. I suppose I could have read all of your comments but I don't really care that much I guess. "I wonder" was meant to identify this as a passing thought. And in my second comment I updated away from the hypothesis, so I'm not sure why this tone would be present.
I might be misreading it, but your last sentence sounds sort of fake-nice and passive aggressive due to the rest of the comment. I normally wouldn't make an entire comment just about tone, and I actually like the tone on Lessswrong, but this conversation is sort of about it, and like I said, I was surprised.
See, this is where the whole thing gets confusingly meta, but a lot of what you're saying contributes to my overall point. You're right, my comment was written in a pretty hostile tone (and I apologize), but it was also pretty sparse and direct, and ... how else do you respond to someone who claims that your writing is too cluttered with niceness? It's kind of difficult to balance.
This is where I'm not sure what the overall stance on writing things is in the LW community. It seems like there are sequence posts that urge people to pay attention to the effect of their writing and how it will be interpreted by others. So I go in with the assumption that most people have read them and are also paying attention to tone and word choice. Which leads me to assume that if their tone is hostile then it's intentionally so. When someone says "I wonder," it's not clear if they're asking a question or if they're just ... content to wonder. And because I personally find it awkward to start offering up answers when someone doesn't want any, it starts feeling like the comment was designed to not have a response.
Add in the large, scary-sounding opposition claiming that they come here to talk about intellectual things and don't need to care about people's feelings, and if feels like your stand-alone comment was just going to attract mind-killer-ed people from the other camp even if it wasn't intended to.
I also apologize that the last part sounded passive-aggressive, but I also feel like that demonstrates the extent to which the community is intolerant of flawed, biased humans that make mistakes. I really wish we had more of a culture that pointed out a bias, and then responded with a
*patpat*, "happens!" (like sneezes!) rather than "you are a bad rationalist, go feel bad now." (Which I'm sure no one ever actually said, but culture gets constructed through things people don't say as well?)Right, because words like "sorry" and "thank you" and occasional exclamation marks make my writing completely incomprehensible.