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 participant... (read more)

My first reaction to this video is that it's pretty crappy. Its main message is to insist on the following sequence as everyone's moral responsibility: once you say something that someone perceives as hurtful, you're morally obliged not to "question their feelings", but to perceive that you screwed up, to feel bad, to apologize, and change your behavior so this doesn't happen again. The video repeatedly insists that your own thoughts about whether what you've done was improper are irrelevant.

Now, it should be completely obvious that this sequence is not going to be used as prescribed by anyone including the author of the video. If you were to approach him and say, "In your video, you identified my position as that of a fartbag, repeatedly, and that was very hurtful to me", he's not going to say, "Oh, thanks for telling me that, I'm sorry I screwed up, I feel really bad and will never do this again". He is, in fact, going to use his own judgement about the appropriateness of his behavior to decide whether or not he should apologize.

Why, then, is there no mention of your own moral judgement in the video, and instead, you're repeatedly encouraged not to ... (read more)

An example, by way of "The Root of All Evil" by Richard Dawkins:

Science is about testing, comparing and corroborating this mass of evidence, and using it to update old theories of how things work. I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for a number of years. And one day an American visiting researcher came, and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these 15 years." And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong, and scientific truth had been advanced.

One thing that always confused me was forcing others to apologize. Starting from school, putting two kids who hate each other's guts, and demanding that they apologize to each other whether they mean it or not. What's the point? Who does this help? What does this achieve?

This is an important skill that it would be good for us to get better at! Thanks for sharing this thing that tries to help.

I don't think this is quite enough, though - it's advice on a very abstract level, without examples, and without advice on how to recognize occasions where apology is necessary. And it felt like being browbeaten and told I was bad, not like being given helpful advice.

Please someone else let me know if you learned how to implement a specific behavior from this, that you otherwise wouldn't have learned how to implement.

But thanks again f... (read more)

Here are some issues I'd like to see covered in the future:

• Sometimes person A does something that causes person B to feel pain, and it doesn't seem like person A did anything wrong. What kind of apology, if any, is appropriate?
• How do I tell when something really isn't my fault? What kind of harm-causing should I apologize for?
• What do I do if someone tries to leverage my apology to extract some kind of additional concession from me, or I expect that this might happen?
• Suppose I think someone should apologize to me for something. What should I do about it, if anything?