A corollary:
If someone asks you to do or say things a little differently, in order to not scare, upset, or worry them ... don't get offended.
A lot of people turn into "slogan-chanting zombies" when someone informs them that they've scared, upset, or worried someone, when they had no intention to do so. They react with protestations of innocence; with accusations that the unhappy person is "oversensitive", or that their plea is a cynical ploy for a political cult; with baseless cries of censorship; or with biting, dismissive mockery.
This is unfortunate ... and it's bad rationality, too.
If someone goes to the trouble of informing you that the way you're acting or speaking leaves them feeling unsafe, unhappy, or uncomfortable around you ... they are giving you information. If you are interested in not having those effects on others, getting offended and defensive when someone informs you of them is a very bad idea.
It's a fact of the world that some ways of expressing yourself will come across as threatening, triggering, or creepifying to others. This is not because those people want to feel threatened, triggered, or creepified, or even necessarily that they have un...
Hmm, why does this sound familiar? =]
Also, I just want to point out that the best way I can think of testing whether someone wants to be offended is by apologizing and not doing it again ... and then seeing if they're still following me around and pointing out how I offended them that one time.
If someone asks you to do or say things a little differently, in order to not scare, upset, or worry them ... don't get offended.
You should be happy that they are helping you create a better argument for this type of readers.
Of course there is a difference between "saying things differently" and "not saying things". Sometimes the offensive thing is not how you present the information, but the information itself. For example, you can speak about atheism without using ad-hominem arguments about Pope, or without mentioning child abuse in churches. Those parts are not the core of your argument, and are actively harmful if your goal is to make an "Atheism 101" presentation for religious people. On the other hand, if someone is offended by the mere fact that someone could not believe in their God, there are limits about what you can do about it. You could make the argument longer and slower to reduce the impact of the shock; use an analogy about Christians not believing in Hindu deities; perhaps quote some important religious guy saying something tolerant about nonbelievers... but at the end, you are going to say that nonbelievers exist, without immediate...
No. I did think it was likely to be used as a source of rationalizations by people who do offend people, though, without some caveat that, well, offending people is ceteris paribus bad; and that a lot of common responses people have (especially online) to complaints of offense are actually rather weak rationalizations.
My response was intended in the spirit of Eliezer's "Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People" — that this sort of thing may unintentionally provide ammunition for bad behavior.
I used to feel that getting offended was useless and counterproductive, but a friend pointed out that if people are not treating you with respect, that can be a genuinely problematic situation.
Wei Dai suggests that offense is experienced when people feel they are being treated as being low status. So if you feel offended, a good first question might be "do I care that this person is treating me as low status?" If there is no one else around, and you don't expect to see the person again, then your answer may be no. If there are others around, or you expect to see the person again, then things may be more difficult. Yes, you can politely ask people to be more considerate of you, but that's not exactly a high-status move.
So, I don't feel that "never act offended" passes the "rationalists should win" test as a group norm. It might actually be good that "That's offensive" represents a high-status way to say "You're treating me as low status. Stop."
It might even be worthwhile to expand the concept of offense. Currently it's only acceptable to be offended when people treat you as low status in certain narrow ways. If someone says s...
Wei Dai suggests that offense is experienced when people feel they are being treated as being low status.
I would generalize this and say that offense is experienced when people feel they are being treated as being lower status than they feel they are/deserve.
The reason for the generalization: some people get offended by just about everything, it seems, and one way to explain it is a blatant grab for status. It's not that they think they're being treated as low status in an absolute sense necessarily, they just think they should be treated as higher status relative to however they're being treated.
I think that's much closer (and upvoted), but you don't need to invoke such an extreme example to demonstrate it; you just need to notice that offense thresholds are different in different contexts. Treating your boss as if she's your drinking buddy is likely to provoke offense. So's treating your drinking buddy as if he's a child. Yet you're generally safe treating boss as boss, buddy as buddy, and child as child -- in other words, giving people the status they contextually expect.
Machiavelli wrote in "The Prince" about the similar dilemma of advice. If you let everyone give you advice, you seem like a pushover, but if you don't take any advice, you'll probably do something stupid. His recommendation was to have a circle of people who you take advice from, and to ignore everyone else.
A similar system could work well for offense. If you want to be high-status, when most people lower your status, get offended. But for a select few (probably the people who you work with when you're seeking truth in some form or another) practice never taking offense, as the original post suggests. Ideally, these people would know they could offend you, so they wouldn't censor potentially helpful ideas.
No, but social power + respect can be useful for achieving your goals (especially if one of your goals is social power and respect, which seem to be true for a lot of people).
Last I checked (which was admittedly a while ago), there are a decent number of Less Wrong users who act obnoxiously high status in real life (including some who are quite prominent). I'd love to have the egalitarian norms you describe, but I think first we'd have to convince them to stop.
This may not be trivial. I've noticed that my high status behaviors often seem pretty instinctual, and I've also noticed that I have a fair amount of mental resistance to giving up status even if I'd like to in theory (ex.: apologizing).
...there are a decent number of Less Wrong users who act obnoxiously high status in real life (including some who are quite prominent). I'd love to have the egalitarian norms you describe, but I think first we'd have to convince them to stop.
The way you worded this makes it sound as if there are a few people ruining it for everyone. If this is actually the case, then the solution is, when these people begin acting obnoxiously high status, say "You're being obnoxious. Stop." Bystander effect, etc. If you try this and it doesn't work, let me know so I can update.
Name three?
You are asking John to do something that is clearly unwise for him to do in a form typically used with the connotation that if the person does not comply it is because they can not. This is disingenuous.
I believe what army means is that some people mistakenly use evo-psy to make claims along the lines of "we have evolved to have [some characteristic], therefore it is morally right for us to have [aforementioned characteristic]".
I'd add that many people appear to exercise motivated cognition in their use of ev-psych explanations; they want to justify a particular conclusion, so they write the bottom line and craft an argument from evolutionary psychology to work their way down to it. Although it would be hard for me to recall a precise example off the top of my head, I've certainly seen cases where people used evolutionary just-so stories to justify a sexual status quo, where I could easily see ways that the argument could have led to a completely different conclusion.
It's not evolutionary psychology so much, but I've seen quite a volume of evolutionary just-so stories in the field of diet and nutrition: everyone from raw vegans to proponents of diets based on meat and animal fats seems eager to justify their findings by reference to the EEA. Generally, the more vegetarian a diet, the more its proponents will focus on our living hominid relatives; the more carnivorous, the more the focus is on the recent evolutionary environment.
Remember, it all adds up to normality. Thus we should not be surprised that the conclusion of evo-psych agree with the traditional ideas.
We should expect a perfected biology to predict our cultural data, not to agree with our cultural beliefs. 'Normality' doesn't mean our expectations. 'Normality' doesn't mean common sense or folk wisdom. It means our actual experiences. See Living in Many Worlds.
When people claim that they're final argument tends to be a lot less convincing and involve a lot more mental gymnastics than the original.
How strong is that tendency? Try to quantify it. Then test the explanations where possible, after writing down your prediction. Did the first get an unfair advantage from status quo bias? Did the rivals seem gerrymandered and inelegant because reality is complicated? Did any of the theories tend to turn out to be correct?
Actually, yes it does. The results of the theory should agree with our common sense and folk wisdom when dealing with situations on ordinary human scales
You're making two claims here. First, you're making a substantive claim about the general reliability of human intuitions and cultural institutions when it comes to the human realm. Second, you're making a semantic claim about what 'It all adds up to normality' means.
The former doctrine would be extremely difficult to substantiate. What evidence do you have to back it up? And the latter claim is clearly not right in any sense this community uses the term, as the LW posts about Egan's Law speak of the recreation of the ordinary world of perception, not of the confirmation of folk wisdom or tradition. The LessWrong Wiki explicitly speaks of normality as 'observed reality', not as our body of folk theory. Which is a good thing, since otherwise Egan's Law would directly contradict the principle "Think Like Reality":
"Quantum physics is not "weird". You are weird. You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly no...
on ordinary human scales
But this just isn't so. Humans get things wrong about the human realm all the time, make false generalizations and trust deeply erroneous intuitions and aphorisms every day of their lives. 'It all adds up to normality' places a hard constraint on all reasonable theories: They must reproduce exactly the data of ordinary life. In contrast, what you mean by 'It all adds up to normality' seems to be more like 'Our naive beliefs are generally right!' The former claim is The Law (specifically, Egan's Law); the latter is a bit of statistical speculation, seems in tension with the historical record and the contemporary psychology literature, and even if not initially implausible would still need a lot of support before it could be treated as established Fact. So conflating these two claims is singularly dangerous and misleading.
That nevertheless works, and frequently works better than what our System II (conscious reasoning)-based theories can do.
You're conflating three different claims.
Egan's Law: The correct model of the world must yield the actual data/evidence we observe.
We should generally expect our traditions, intuitions, and folk theories to be co
Remember, it all adds up to normality. Thus we should not be surprised that the conclusion of evo-psych agree with the traditional ideas.
If my observations are unreliable, I should not expect more rigorous study of the subject to confirm my observations.
Right. Many armchair evolutionary psychologists don't understand the nature of the evolutionary-cognitive boundary.
I think it's pretty dangerous to describe terms from other fields of study as merely being applause or boo lights. Consider how frequently LW-newbies use "rational" as an applause light until corrected by others. Instead of taking terms from other fields as merely being applause or boo lights, we should consider that the terms might be frequently misused by novices or in popular culture, in just the same way that terms like "rational" or "rationalist" are. (TVTropes link.)
Take "privilege", for instance.
It seems to be widely assumed that when social critics or activists attribute "privilege" to someone, that they are calling that person evil, arrogant, irresponsible, or something of the like. Because "privilege" is used in sentences that are spoken angrily, it is taken to be not merely a boo light but something akin to a swear word. And indeed it is sometimes used that way, because, well, people get angry sometimes when discussing starvation, rape, police brutality, and other things that activists talk about.
"Privilege" has a pretty specific meaning though. It means "social advantages that are not perceived a...
It is perhaps worth noting that the word "status" often gets used on LW to describe position in a social structure, with the understanding that individuals with higher status get various benefits (not always obvious ones), and that a lot of human behavior is designed to obtain/challenge/protect status even if the individual performing the behavior doesn't consciously have that goal. I suspect that talking about the blue weasels as a high-status subgroup would not raise any eyebrows here, and would imply all the patterns you discuss here, even if talking about the "privilege" possessed by blue weasels raised hackles.
Somewhat to my amusement, I've gotten chastised for talking about status this way in communities of social activists, who "explained" to me that I was actually talking about privilege, and referring to it as status trivialized it.
When in Rome, I endorse speaking Italian.
I second this! The mental state of being offended is not useful.
However, I want to point out that I believe there's some typical mind fallacy popping up this post? I think it's geared at the particular group of people whose knee-jerk impulse is to perform offendedness once they are in the offended mental state because the post doesn't clearly precisely distinguish between the two. But that's not the knee-jerk reaction of everyone. For example, I am very conflict-avoidant (to the point of doormat-ness), so I actually had to teach myself to perform offendedness for the social benefit of enforcing boundaries, which is pretty important but is only briefly touched upon in the post. My natural impulse was to tolerate (sometimes deliberately) offensive behavior and do nothing, so because I didn't get defensive or angry, I would just get hurt and sad and ... take it. Until I eventually realized this was a bad strategy. Therefore! I think it would be useful to clean up that distinction and make sure that it's the offendedness mental state that is a bad habit.
Thank you for your reply! I'm really glad you're planning to cover this topic more, and I definitely agree that extremely emotional mental states are derailing for rationality.
Unfortunately, I don't think your reply quite addressed my concern, and I'm starting to see a lot of comments from other people who are also reading this post as "don't get angry" rather than "detect your offended/victimized mental state, don't make any decisions and speedily think yourself out of it" because of the conflated language throughout the post. I would really super-appreciate it if you could edit it to be precise, because it seems to use "getting offended", and "acting angry" and "acting defensive" interchangeably in a lot of places.
Not all offended people act angry. Some people have really peaceful-looking offended states where they're secretly making mental notes to hold a grudge forever! They might read this post and think it doesn't apply to them. Some of us don't get offended at all and need to teach ourselves to socially demonstrate that something is wrong. Some people unfortunately don't even think they're allowed to get offended because they think they deserve every bad thing :(, but aren't in the scope of this post. They might read this and think there isn't anything to learn here.
As a special case of a special case, I've been taking note whenever someone makes a comment about me that I find offensive. More often than not, it's because I've just been called out for a negative characteristic that I do, in fact, possess. Litany of Gendlin applies, and it's almost certainly more productive to deal with the issue at its core than to waste time actually being offended.
Getting offended is a way of discouraging antisocial behavior, perhaps even the primary way. Because this is a public good, it is probably underprovided. (And yet you go on to recommend against it! Frankly, I'm shocked.)
Getting offended for one's own sake, alternatively, is probably a Pavlovian learned behavior because criticism feels bad. Being able to distinguish between different causes of offense seems like a useful skill, due to the costs of being offended that you point out.
More generally, one can better callibrate one's offense-giving by training to be offended at antisocial actions iff your offense actually has the deterrent effect. There is little utility in being offended by someone who is not in front of your face. There is also little utility in disapproving of people do not care for your approval. Inasmuch as people care about being disapproved of even when they are not looking, however, you may wish to cultivate offense even then.
Entire social movements have been built on the basis of acting offended; and some of them, f.ex. the Civil Rights movement
This seems like a pretty big oversimplification.
(Counterexample: Any act of civil disobedience under risk of violence seems to be ill-characterized as "acting offended".)
In addition to calling for edits, I'm going to be a proactive human and type out my procedure for dealing with an offended mental state. Maybe it'll be helpful to people?
- Note: Some people react weirdly to the crying (and I don't know why).
I may be one of the people you'd describe as reacting weirdly to the crying, and my reason for it is this.
In order to not be seen as an Insensitive Person, when someone you know starts crying in your presence, especially if it's because of you, you're obligated to Do Something about it.
I do not have a cache of appropriate procedures for Doing Something.
If you've ever been in a situation where you say exactly the wrong thing, and find yourself scrambling for a way to rectify the social faux pas (tvtropes link), that's more or less what it feels like.
This probably makes me sound a lot more uncaring than I actually am.
Not at all. It makes you sound exactly like I feel a lot of the time–as someone who didn't naturally pick up a lot of social scripts, it just feels frustrating that people have these scripts, and expect you to know when and how follow them even though they're completely counterintuitive, and that people care about how you appear, not your intentions (or what you actually get accomplished).
I do tend to give responses like this, but they feel awfully fake to me. I may appear more authentic than I feel when giving them.
Fake it till you make it! And take this as consolation: plenty of people's natural, instinctive responses to people in distress aren't helpful. The fact that you're actually thinking consciously about your response means you can notice over time what works and what doesn't and adjust accordingly.
So I think I originally had "leave" and I changed it to "disengage" to try to encompass situations where you can't physically leave and I was referring to checking out mentally from the conversation. I'm not sure how many situations this covers (work?), but you could keep repeating "I'm not going to talk about this anymore," and force your brain to space out. A handy epistemic perspective here says to think of what they're saying as "meaningless chunks of wordmeat," which I've personally found to be helpful.
As someone that doesn't get offended in the typical way, I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don't mean what they say. (Whaaa?!) From what it looks like to me, some people get mad and then grasp at the closest words in their cache to verbalize their madness feelings and then spout them out at other people. But once they've done that, their madness feelings go away! So they can't really model them anymore and so they don't even remember what they said, just that they yelled at you. So what would happen to me is that they'd apologize for yelling at me, and I'd say "We have to talk about that thing you...
When I'm feeling snarky, I will sometimes respond to this sort of thing with some variant of "That response only makes sense to me if I assume what I actually said was something more like X. Is that what you heard?" The sorts of people who skew my output on input frequently respond to that in entertaining ways.
I generally mean it whenever I say something awful. And they assume I was just venting or whatever. =P
I am reminded of the following exchange between two housemates in my youth:
X (to Y): "Don't take this the wrong way, but: fuck you."
Y: (laughs)
X: "No, y'see, you're taking it the wrong way."
My ambivalent reaction to this post motivates me to make a distinction between two kinds of advice; I will call the first "community-normative" advice and the second "agent-pragmatic" advice.
On one reading of your post (as community-normative advice), you're basically telling people in general to do what the title says: "Don't get offended!" My gut reaction to that is along the lines of handoflixue's comment, only with less profanity. Everything anybody ever says is a speech act, and some speech acts are harmful, and some are intentionally harmful. So telling someone not to get offended is kind of like telling them to stop getting in the way of moving fists. Potentially a sign of moral myopia.
On another reading of your post (as agent-pragmatic), I see sensible advice for any individual thinker in the abstract. Yes, if it's possible to cultivate a general disposition not to be offended, that might be a good idea, in the same way as cultivating an immunity to arsenic might be a good idea if you live in an Agatha Christie novel.
I think the difference between the two is that if you say "Don't get offended!" without disclaiming the community-normative implications, you're imputing blameworthiness to those who are (perhaps maliciously) offended.
To be fair, you did actually disavow those implications.
So telling someone not to get offended is kind of like telling them to stop getting in the way of moving fists. Potentially a sign of moral myopia.
Yes, telling people not to get offended is like telling them to stop getting in the way of moving fists. And on a case by case basis, it generally is bad to blame people for what other people are doing to them. But on a long term basis, if you find yourself constantly on the recieving end of moving fists, you might want to seriously consider learning to dodge better. Similarly, if you find yourself constantly getting offended to the point that your epistemic rationality becomes impaired, you should seriously consider practicing ways to better manage your emotions.
Don't get hurt. Pain is natural and very easy to experience, but it interferes with your capacity for rational thought, and that's clearly suboptimal!
I'm also reminded of, IIRC, Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed containing the directive to not allow oneself to become angry, because anger distorts clear thinking, but also observes that sometimes it is necessary to display anger so as to effect desirable change in the world.
I've been trying in the back of my mind to summarize something about this discussion since it started, and I think I have something useful:
A lot of people will hear "don't get offended" as "don't care about what people say or do; avoid being hurt or upset by becoming numb, cynical, or hyper-relativist." This is the sense in which, for instance, Internet trolls mock people for being offended by casual use of racial or sexual slurs.
But self-modifying to not care about what people say or do means throwing out some part of your value system; giving up on it — and specifically, giving up on the part of your values that says I prefer to live in a world where people are kinder to each other.
A different take on it, though, is "keep your value system; keep valuing kindness — but notice when your reactions to unkindness are effective at discouraging unkindness and when they are not." If, in a particular situation, blowing up at someone off for using racial slurs is likely to accomplish the desired result — communicating that you actually give a shit about people of other races and aren't OK with asshole behavior towards them — then blow up at them. For that matter, if blowing up at them can rally other people to say that asshole behavior is not OK, that'll be worth it to. But notice when offense works and when it doesn't — and don't burn up your own neurotransmitters giving too many fucks when it isn't going to help.
But self-modifying to not care about what people say or do means throwing out some part of your value system; giving up on it — and specifically, giving up on the part of your values that says I prefer to live in a world where people are kinder to each other.
The preference is not given up. What is given up is attachment to reality being a different than what it is. You give up the notion "if <thing I don't prefer is the case in the universe> then ". That leaves you free to be happy, content and socially alert and competent while you go ahead and pursue the things you want.
I've read a few gun bloggers' comments that having a gun available to them made them -less- likely to consider violence, less likely to treat insults seriously; they had implicit knowledge that whatever slurs or insults came their way, that's all that it would amount to. They couldn't be bullied, and offense was removed from the equation.
For them, a gun was a stoic focus.
I've seen others for whom martial arts provided a similar stoic focus.
For a lot of people in a lot of situations, taking offense is in fact an offensive maneuver, of the train of thought that "The best defense is a good offense." It's an opportunity to demonstrate that they will defend themselves. Remove the perceived need for that, and things get considerably simpler. People are at their most easily offended when they feel the most vulnerable.
Thus, I suggest anybody who is easily offended consider and address their sense of vulnerability first. It's entirely possible the offense taken is at a perceived threat, rather than the words themselves.
It seems that it would be easier to keep one's identity small the less one deviates from the norms.
Literally screaming racial slurs in a person's face is an offensive act. Acting cool may be one good defensive strategy, but other strategies are not unwarranted.
Maybe I'm having a problem with 'offended' as a mental state as opposed to something like 'angry'. 'Angry' seems more of a mental state or feeling within yourself, while 'offended' seems less of a feeling but more a description of an act that you are attributing to the other person.
I read this post more as "Don't get angry" than as "Don't get offended" or "Don't feel attacked"
As jooyous noted, one of the most important skills is to be able to notice when you are offended, or otherwise emotionally hampered. This is not at all trivial, as you can see from the discussion threads here, where people who are clearly emotionally compromised behave as if they were acting rationally. (Yes, I am guilty of this, too.) I am not sure how to develop this skill of noticing being offended while being offended, but surely there is a training for it. Maybe something as simple as a checklist to go through before commenting would be a start. Checklists are generally a good idea.
There's an emotional state, and there's disagreement about terminal values.
How should I communicate disagreement about terminal values? How should I behave to try to change the terminal values that society as a whole implements / tolerates?
I don't believe those were terminal values. If someone changes their position from pro-segregation to anti-segregation, I would expect that in their previous model, segregation seemed better, but later they updated their model, and under the new model, segregation seemed worse. Better and worse in making everyone happy, for example.
Some people sincerely believed that segregation brings better results for everyone. Whether they were right or wrong, segregation was just a means of achieving some other value.
EDIT: I think we should be careful about assuming that our opponents have different terminal values. More likely, they have a different model of reality.
Yes!
I think this is hugely important. I want to add to it though: even as a manipulation it's usually pretty silly. What can you really accomplish that you'll feel good about afterwards? The main thing it accomplishes is to get people to stop throwing uncomfortable potential truths at you. Like any other knee-jerk emotional reaction, it tends to be pretty short sighted.
There's a good substitute too. I try really hard to avoid taking offense, and in the very rare cases where offense seems potentially useful, I've gotten good results by merely pointing out ...
While true-- quickly responding in an offended fashion can be a strong signal of your commitment to group identity and values[1]-- that doesn't really relate to what this post is talking about. This post is talking about the best way to acquire correct beliefs, not the best way to manipulate people. And while getting offended can be a very effective way to manipulate people-- and hence a tactic that is unfortunately often reinforced-- it is usually actively detrimental for acquiring correct beliefs.
Getting offended gives you a reputation that tends to s...
Very nice, I see your point, this is a skill that benefits (actually allows) most cognitive processes (or would make you a fantastic chess player).
I would like you to elaborate more on this idea:
Humans are gregarious, in ancient times it was our greatest asset against most predators, (ironically it made us the most terrifying) therefore it was (is) of utmost importance to be part of the tribe. Apparently we are genetically programmed to follow this tribal behavior.
Many times when I witness human interaction I see “power play” (I am sorry to say this but th...
Gee, well it's not like you're contributing to that problem.
You might as well bow out before busting out the ad homs.
so it's just got to be genes, right
Eugine_Nier never said it was "just" the genes, on the contrary. If you were making the claim that genes are not involved, the onus is on you to show so. Asking for evidence isn't an argument from ignorance. It would be astounding if there were genetic variations leading to endless variations in everything except cognition. The default assumption (even with no cognition-specific data) is &q...
I didn't say that only hard science is worth considering. In fact, the "hard science" / "soft science" distinction functions to marginalize subjects like history, sociology, and anthropology.
What I said was that that rigorous science is worth taking seriously. With the implication that there's a fair amount of normative pressure for certain fields to sacrifice rigor in order to produce the "correct" results. Particularly in popularization, both evo. psych and anthropology are at terrible risk for this sort of bias.
Social sci...
This post and some of the comments seem to me to have got the wrong end of the stick. Sometimes offense is used as a rhetorical trick, in which case notions of 'high status response' and 'manipulation' are appropriate. However it normally occurs when one person - from callousness or ignorance - says or does something that does not accord another person's the respect and dignity they are entitled to.
When someone says something offensive to you - they're racist, homophobic, sexist - it seems like you should be offended by that. To a large extent your reactio...
at LW our goal is to raise the sanity waterline.
Yes, it is.
How about also considering the costs, benefits, and comparative advantages when dealing with various topics? One does not get extra points for doing things the hard way. Instead of dealing with some topics directly, it would be better to discuss more meta, e.g. to teach people about the necessity of doing experiments and evaluating data statistically. This will prepare the way for people who will later try to deal with the problem more directly.
Now it may seem that when I see people doing a mistake, and I don't immediately jump there and correct them, it is as if I lied by omission. But there are thousands of mistakes humans make, any my resources are limited, so I will end ignoring some mistakes either way.
Make sure you pick your battles because you believe you can win them and the gains will be worth it. Instead of picking the most difficult battle there is, simply because choosing the most difficult battle feels high-status... until you lose it.
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods.
An intrinsic relation between race and social behavior is in the realm of possibility, but there are highly relevant social factors to take into account here even when you've adjusted for economic status. In low income black neighborhoods, law enforcement tends to adopt a much more adversarial relationship with the population than in white neighborhoods, such that black people are much more likely to be arrested and convicted relative to their actual crime rates, and are subject to frequent stops and searches on extremely tenuous bases. Speaking for myself, I suspect I'd have much less respect for the law if I grew up in an environment that reinforced the impression that law enforcement was out to get me from the start.
Most downvoted, yes, but on the positive side I'd instead suggest looking at your comments one or two sigma east of average and no higher: they're likely to be more reproducible. If they're anything like mine, your most highly upvoted posts are probably high risk/high reward type comments -- jokes, cultural criticism, pithy Deep Wisdom -- and it'll probably be a lot harder to identify and cultivate what made them successful.
What was the name of that rule where you commit yourself to not getting offended?
I've always practiced it, though not always as perfectly as I've wanted (when I do slip up, it's never during an argument though; my stoicism muscle is fully alert at those points in time). An annoying aspect of it is when other people get offended - my emotions are my own problem, why won't they deal with theirs; do I have to play babysitter with their thought process? You can't force someone to become a stoic, but you can probably convince them that their reaction is hurting them and show them that it's desirable for them to ignore offense. To that end, I'm thankful for this post, upvoted.
I agree. Now I'm off to link this to Tumblr's social justice movement (except not really).
Also, I think you meant "Besides, the signalling value of offense should be no excuse for not knowing how not to be offended." So many negatives in that sentence!
Also related (specifically, getting offended by people who are acting, gasp, irrationally): The problem with too many rational memes
See especially the comments. There are some good strategies in there for dealing with offense in this specific context, some of which may generalize.
I agree with the general point but I don't think it's best to contrast getting offended with staying calm. The way I imagine offense happens is that we classify somebody's actions or beliefs as harmful to us or our group and that makes us annoyed, we then automatically decide that the best way of fixing the situation is to destroy the other person's ability to cause us harm and if we lack any other option of doing that we default to politics as our means of attack.
And then that switch gets flipped in our heads that puts us in a mode of thinking more adapte...
He is trying to make a point about genes being involved, more than the environment, in some specific phenomenon,
I'm trying to make the point that we don't know which is more involved.
I think one key in not being offended is being secure in your own person and position. If you're not actually worried that someone or their remarks may actually hurt or damage you, then it's easy to remain objective and not take offense.
In the Old Testament it says, "Great peace have they which love Thy law, and nothing shall offend them." I'd like to think that I'm secure in my position relating to the very Creator of the universe. So, to the degree that I am truly secure in that position, what can anyone really do or say to upset me?
There are plenty of technical senses of "ethical" other than the LW one.
Would you car to explain which one you meant.
I'd rather have to try and not be as upset by certain things than have to account for everyone else's diverse baggage. A norm where people are expected to do the first thing instead of the second seems better because if more people had thick skin, less people would be upset. Like if I make a joke that's hilarious to five people and annoying to the sixth it's a net positive unless that guy is really REALLY hurt, right? But under usual norms, if I say "relax it was a joke" I'm the insensitive asshole. But it WAS just a joke. And look, I'm totally c...
How about putting forward some real evidence of racial (qua DNA, not qua cultural-goroup-as-defined-in-the-US) causes before complaining about a conspiracy to suppress it.
Do you have evidence that it's not genetic? Most of the evidence I've seen for this claim has been laughably bad.
Two typical examples are: attempting to argue that since race as received doesn't correspond 100% precisely with any genetic definition, race is a pure social construct. The other is siting environmental differences that could just as easily be caused by the differences th...
Various groups of people have huge geographical differences for millenia, there is a variability among individuals of the same population, the nutrition and health contributes to height... and yet, despite all of this, the averages of various populations are within some height interval.
To add to this, while there have been, and continue to be, pretty significant height differences between populations, those differences tend to decrease sharply when the nutrition levels and lifestyles of those populations become more similar. For instance, while a hundred years ago, Americans tended to tower over the Japanese (American soldier second from the left, Japanese soldier far right,) with an average height difference of about six or seven inches, the average height difference today is only about two and a half inches. Even that remaining difference is likely to be at least partly due to a difference in nutrition and activity (the average Japanese person still has a significantly different diet than the average American, and schools demand much higher levels of physical activity of their students, although many adults become highly sedentary after high school graduation.) Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any source for the average height of Japanese Americans today, which would help narrow down how much of the remaining gap is likely to be due to lifestyle.
The problem is that (according to Kahneman and Tverksy) losses are felt more strongly than gains. So it requires a good deal of effort to not be offended.
Does anyone know how to get offended? I have never experienced the emotion and am interested to know what it feels like.
Related to: Politics is the Mind-Killer, Keep Your Identity Small
Followed By: How to Not Get Offended
One oft-underestimated threat to epistemic rationality is getting offended. While getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like. In fact, getting offended usually makes it harder to figure out what the world looks like, since it means you won't be evaluating evidence very well. In Politics is the Mind-Killer, Eliezer writes that "people who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue." Don't let yourself become one of those zombies-- all of your skills, training, and useful habits can be shut down when your brain kicks into offended mode!
One might point out that getting offended is a two-way street and that it might be more appropriate to make a post called "Don't Be Offensive." That feels like a just thing to say-- as if you are targeting the aggressor rather than the victim. And on a certain level, it's true-- you shouldn't try to offend people, and if you do in the course of a normal conversation it's probably your fault. But you can't always rely on others around you being able to avoid doing this. After all, what's offensive to one person may not be so to another, and they may end up offending you by mistake. And even in those unpleasant cases when you are interacting with people who are deliberately trying to offend you, isn't staying calm desirable anyway?
The other problem I have with the concept of being offended as victimization is that, when you find yourself getting offended, you may be a victim, but you're being victimized by yourself. Again, that's not to say that offending people on purpose is acceptable-- it obviously isn't. But you're the one who gets to decide whether or not to be offended by something. If you find yourself getting offended to things as an automatic reaction, you should seriously evaluate why that is your response.
There is nothing inherent in a set of words that makes them offensive or inoffensive-- your reaction is an internal, personal process. I've seen some people stay cool in the face of others literally screaming racial slurs in their faces and I've seen other people get offended by the slightest implication or slip of the tongue. What type of reaction you have is largely up to you, and if you don't like your current reactions you can train better ones-- this is a core principle of the extremely useful philosophy known as Stoicism.
Of course, one (perhaps Robin Hanson) might also point out that getting offended can be socially useful. While true-- quickly responding in an offended fashion can be a strong signal of your commitment to group identity and values[1]-- that doesn't really relate to what this post is talking about. This post is talking about the best way to acquire correct beliefs, not the best way to manipulate people. And while getting offended can be a very effective way to manipulate people-- and hence a tactic that is unfortunately often reinforced-- it is usually actively detrimental for acquiring correct beliefs. Besides, the signalling value of offense should be no excuse for not knowing how not to be offended. After all, if you find it socially necessary to pretend that you are offended, doing so is not exactly difficult.
Personally, I have found that the cognitive effort required to build a habit of not getting offended pays immense dividends. Getting offended tends to shut down other mental processes and constrain you in ways that are often undesirable. In many situations, misunderstandings and arguments can be diminished or avoided completely if one is unwilling to become offended and practiced in the art of avoiding offense. Further, some of those situations are ones in which thinking clearly is very important indeed! All in all, while getting offended does often feel good (in a certain crude way), it is a reaction that I have no regrets about relinquishing.
[1] In Keep Your Identity Small, Paul Graham rightly points out that one way to prevent yourself from getting offended is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
