Error comments on Don't Get Offended - Less Wrong

32 Post author: katydee 07 March 2013 02:11AM

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Comment author: jooyous 07 March 2013 07:09:06AM *  14 points [-]

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?

  1. Notice that you are in an offended mental state, which generally feels like being hurt, angry and the victim of an attack. It feels like the person was trying to hurt you, or should have known what they did was going to hurt you.
  2. Make a mental note not to do anything important or make any decisions until you get out of this state, and then start working on getting out of it. Personally, I find it helpful to go over the facts of what happened, but if this makes the feeling worse then you may instead want to distract yourself, do breathing exercises to calm down, cry*, etc. Whatever works for you.
  3. Go over the facts of what happened precisely.
    • Do you really have evidence that the person was trying to hurt you? Would the thing be hurtful to someone else? If the answer is yes, then you should probably speak up that they have done a hurtful thing in a firm but respectful way. Generate social pressure that doing hurtful things isn't cool and you're not going to let them slide. If they get defensive or refuse, disengage.
    • Do you have evidence that they should have known that what they did was going to hurt you? It may turn out that they had no way of knowing that was hurtful to you and you should tell them! Otherwise, a reminder or reiteration is probably sufficient.
  4. Otherwise, think about precisely why the thing that happened is hurtful to you? Would you want to do the freedom to do the same thing, even if you knew that it was possibly going to be hurtful to someone?
    • If you find asymmetrical answers, then either you need to stop doing the thing, or you need to acknowledge that the hurt you're feeling isn't something that someone did to you, but something that occurred indirectly, which means the hurt feeling is yours to work through yourself. The good thing about this means that the person doesn't hate you or anything!
    • It might turn out that the people did X and you've determined why it's hurtful to you, but you also have no idea why they might have done it because X is something you never do, then skip to the next step.
  5. After you've figured out why something is hurtful, it helps to think of the situation in terms of requests. What can the other parties involved do to make you feel better? I generally find that then things that come out of an offended state are attempts to make the offender feel bad, which is not productive it all -- it's just going to put them into the state where they want to make you feel even worse! Therefore, if you aren't in a mental state in which you can generate productive requests, then you have more calming down/processing to do.
  6. Consider how the other parties involved are likely to respond to your requests and try to find a method/situation of conveying them to the other parties in a way that maximizes the chances of the other parties being able/willing to fulfill them. Sometimes none of the expectations are high enough, so maybe don't bother actually requesting the thing? It is still helpful to know what you would need in a situation.

* Note: Some people react weirdly to the crying (and I don't know why).

Comment author: Error 07 March 2013 02:52:16PM 0 points [-]

Upvoted for procedure, but there's something this doesn't cover: How to deal with an offended mental state when the offender is malevolent and disengagement under 3.a is impossible. That would be useful to know. For bonus points, answer from an epistemic rather than instrumental rationality perspective.

I've dealt with sociopaths recently -- or, if not sociopaths, at least Babyeaters. My usual offense strategy is very similar to yours and had no decision path for the situation. The gap is kind of on my mind.

Comment author: jooyous 07 March 2013 06:01:03PM *  10 points [-]

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 accused me of because I have this detailed argument about why it's wrong," and they'd be like "I said that? Whatever, I'm sorry." Even when there are chat logs! (Whaa?!)

So now I've gotten better at recognizing that in people, and once I can sorta tell that they've checked out, then I can expect to get no closure on the event by continuing to listen to more of what they're saying because they don't mean it and won't remember most of it anyway.

Otherwise, if they're malevolently trying to hurt you in a systematic way, I think it helps to distinguish between what hurts more: is it the fact that they're trying to hurt you at all or is it the method by which they go about it? Because if it's the latter, then you could feed them ammunition that makes them model you wrong. Tell them you really care about stuff that you actually don't care about?

Comment author: Error 07 March 2013 06:22:05PM 4 points [-]

I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don't mean what they say.

I know exactly what you mean, and can add a point: The people who don't mean what they say assume that you don't mean it, either. It is a personal policy of mine to say exactly what I mean, and only what I mean, whenever possible. Yet I routinely run into people who will take something I said, extrapolate or delete from it until it resembles what they "thought I meant," and then answer that. Then judge me on it.

Needless to say, the mismatch is both harmful to communication and incredibly frustrating. I have a suspicion they're making heuristic guesses that are acceptably correct when dealing with other verbally-inaccurate people, but fail when dealing with someone going out of their way to be precise.

I admit I don't really have evidence for that hypothesis.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 March 2013 07:35:01PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Error 07 March 2013 09:26:08PM *  3 points [-]

I've occasionally done that in text, now that you mention it. My in-person verbal comprehension has such a high latency that I can't really do it there. (by the time I've worked it out the conversation has moved on) Pre-caching expected misinterpretations may help, if I can anticipate them accurately enough.

Comment author: jooyous 07 March 2013 09:54:31PM 2 points [-]

The people who don't mean what they say assume that you don't mean it, either.

When it isn't incredibly frustrating like you described, this works to my advantage because I generally mean it whenever I say something awful. And they assume I was just venting or whatever. =P

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 March 2013 11:25:19PM 9 points [-]

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."

Comment author: Dre 07 March 2013 05:24:27PM 1 point [-]

My strategy in situations like that is to try to get rid of all respect for the person. If to be offended you have to care, at least on some level, about what the person thinks then demoting them from "agent" to "complicated part of the environment" should reduce your reaction to them. You don't get offended when your computer gives you weird error messages.

Now this itself would probably be offensive to the person (just about the ultimate in thinking of them as low status), so it might not work as well when you have to interact with then often enough for them to notice. But especially for infrequent interactions and one time interactions I find this to be a good way to get through potentially offensive situations.

Comment author: DiamondSoul 12 March 2013 04:12:17AM 0 points [-]

Oddly enough, I get much angrier at my computer for not working than I ever do at other humans. Though I wouldn't say I often get "offended" by either. I wonder how common this is?

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