Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it
Yes; apology is an underrated consequentialist tool among nerds.
Some of the social function of apology can be understood game theoretically: Apology explicitly disavows a past action, allowing the one to whom the apology was made to leverage that confession in future: If someone apologises for something then does it again, then response can escalate because we have evidence that they are doing it even knowing that it's 'wrong'. The person who apologised knows this, and often the implicit threat of escalation if they do the same thing checks their future behaviour. Therefore apology is (possibly among other things) a signal, where the cost to apologising is the greater susceptibility to escalation in future cases.
Apology falls into a class--along with other things such as forgiving misdeeds, forgetting misdeeds, retribution, punishing an agent against its will, compensation for misdeeds--of things that would make no sense among sufficiently advanced and cooperative rationalists. Some things in that class (e.g. forgiveness) might already have been transcended by LW, and others (e.g. apology) are probably not possible to transcend even on LW, because the knowledge of other participants (e.g. confidence of their cooperativeness) required to transcend apology is probably too high for an online community of this size.
I would guess that the Bay Area rationalist set and its associates--which as far as I can tell is by far the most advanced community in the world in terms of how consummately instrumental x-rationality is forged into their swords--apologizes way, way, way more than the average LW'er, just like they talk about/express their feelings way more than people on LW typically do, and win because they're willing to confront that prospect of 'being vulnerable'.
HPMoR status:
Two mistakes in thinking that my past self made a lot and others might also:
(1) Refusing to apologize if another party was 'more wrong'. Even if you're 99.9% right/innocent/blameless, you still have to make a choice between apologizing and not apologizing to the other person. If you refuse to apologize, things will probably get worse, because the other person thinks you're more wrong than you think you are, and they will see you not apologizing as defecting. If you apologize in a smart way, you can give an apology (which shouldn't make a difference but has the actual consequence where the other person is more probable to also apologise) without tying yourself down with too broad a commitment on your future behaviour, and without lying that you thought something was a mistake that wasn't.
(2) Using the fact that, in the limit as rationality and cooperation become arbitrarily great, apology is meaningless, as a rationalization for not apologising, when in fact you just feel embarrassed/are generally untrained and therefore not fit enough to apologise, and you're therefore avoiding the exertion of doing so.
I want to point out the difference between completely fake apologies for things one does not think were mistakes, and apologising for things that were mistakes even if the other person's mistakes were much greater. The former is less often the smart thing to do, and the latter is a lot more often than one might think. Once you get fairly strong, you can sometimes even win free points by apologising in front of a big group of people for something that everyone but the other disputant think is completely outweighed by the other disputant's actions.
E.g. 'I'm sorry I used such an abrupt tone in asking you to desist from stealing my food; it probably put you on the defensive.' If you really mean it (and you should, because you're almost certainly not a perfect communicator and there were probably things you could have done better), then often onlookers will think you're awesome and think the other person sucks for 'making you' apologise when you'd 'done nothing wrong'. Sometimes even the other disputant will be so disarmed by your unwavering 'politeness' that they will realise the ridiculousness of the situation and realise that you're being genuine and that they made a mistake, whereas when they thought you were a hostile opponent, it was much easier for them to rationalise that mistake.
Notice than in that example, your apology has not even constrained your future actions; everyone was so distracted by the ridiculousness of you apologising when you were innocent and the contrast it made between yourself and your opponent, that nobody will think to escalate against you in future the next time somebody steals your food.
That's why it's so important to know how to lose--so that you can win! Just like how the best things you could do to decrease your personal risk from fights are things like practising conflict defusion techniques, learning how to walk away from conflict, being less tempestuous, being situationally aware, or even just learning how to play dead/fake a seizure/panic attack, rather than something that just looks like winning, like practising flashy kicks.
Why would this be true? If the other disputant was so clearly in the wrong, wouldn't it be obvious that that's what you're trying to do, thus voiding the effect?