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ahbwramc comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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Ok, thanks for clarifying, this is helpful.
Where I went wrong is in having the model "most people aren't like me, but a few are. The people who aren't like me might not be able to, but the people who are like me can."
I didn't have social difficulties with the people who I saw as different from me. I had social difficulty with the people who I saw as similar to me, because my implicit premise was in the direction "they can easily turn off their concern for relative status," which was almost never true. So the set of people who I saw as "like me" became smaller and smaller, and I became more and more isolated, until ~6 months ago, when I finally started to figure out what was had happened.
Ok, so when it comes to you: Where I was coming from was "doesn't everyone want to be free of feelings of jealousy and resentment?" It didn't occur to me that it's something that you might not want. Is it something that you like having even though it sometimes hurts you?
For the sake of argument, suppose that I know things that would greatly improve LWers' lives if they knew them, that they can't learn anywhere else. In this hypothetical, if the situation became widely known, it would result in me being very high status, because lots of people would pay attention to what I said, and lots of people would want to be around me. In this hypothetical, I don't see how I could communicate the important information without signaling very high status.
Of course you and everyone else might have good reason to doubt whether the information that I want to share would in fact greatly improve LWers' lives.
But my focus here is on the meta-level: I perceive a non-contingency about the situation, where even if I did have extremely valuable information to share that I couldn't share without signaling high status, people would still react negatively to me trying to share it. My subjective sense is that to the extent that people doubt the value of what I have to share, this comes primarily from a predetermined bottom line of the type "if what he's saying were true, then he would get really high status: it's so arrogant of him to say things that would make him high status if true, so what he's saying must not be true."
Do you have suggestions for how I could go about things differently in a way that would be less triggering, while remaining in sync with my goal of communicating valuable information? A key point that might be relevant is that I don't actually care about getting credit – for example, I would be completely fine with Scott Alexander blogging about what I want to write about, people learning that way, and people associating it with him him rather than me.
I have no particular suggestions for you, but it's clear that it's at least possible to convey valuable information to LW without giving off a status-grabbing impression, because plenty of people have done it (eg lukeprog, Yvain, etc)
Certainly, they've done a very good job, and I commend them for it. But people who are so talented as them at communicating are rare.
Fair.
So, random anecdote time: I remember when I was younger my sister would often say things that would upset my parents; usually this ended up causing some kind of confrontation/fight. And whenever she would say these upsetting things, the second the words left her mouth I would cringe, because it was extremely obvious to me that what she had said was very much the wrong thing to say - I could tell it would only make my parents madder. And I was never quite sure (and am still not sure) whether she also recognized that what she was saying would only worsen the situation (but she still couldn't resist saying it because she was angry or whatever) or whether she was just blind to how her words would make my parents feel. So my question to you would be: can you predict when your LW comments will get a negative reaction? Do you think "yeah, this will probably get negative karma but I'm going to say it anyway"? Or are you surprised when you get downvoted?
(Not to say that it's irrational to post something you expect to be downvoted, of course, whereas it would be sort of irrational for my sister to say something in a fit of anger that she knew would only make things worse. I'm just trying to get a sense of how you're modelling LWer's)
I can predict it now. I was oblivious at the time when I started posting on LW under my pseudonym multifoliaterose in 2010, but I learned to pattern match: e.g. I was not surprised by the pushback on my reference to MLK, or by the heated response to this comment.
The issue isn't that I don't know when something that I'll say will make people angry, it's that I don't know how I can communicate it in a way that won't.
Have you used the Try Harder? Specifically, I see responses where people say "this sentence is arrogant" and you will respond with "ah, I meant to say X," which is better worded and does not come across as arrogant.
Now, sometimes they have specific information--"the comparison to Y is what makes it arrogant"--and the improvement uses that information. But if you asked yourself "What is the minimal claim I want to make here?" you might be able to drop the dross just by dropping everything unnecessary.
Thanks, this is a very good point.