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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't believe that you believe this. (See? Wasn't that annoying?)
Actually, it was helpful. Rereading my comment I noticed it sounds like I'm trying to say that on the whole the boyfriends' behavior is positive; whereas, I meant to imply that it's mostly negative, but occasionally has redeeming features.
He probably did find it annoying, though I can't imagine that comment working the way you intended. His main justification for "biting the bullet" is going to be that biases could hinder a useful analysis. In this case, useful analysis is the thing that lets a person pause and think "this person isn't just against me., he's trying to tell me something". Since you didn't provide a useful analysis of why he didn't actually believe that, you managed to annoy him without actually demonstrating that annoyance is a valid response.
The disregard of annoyance as a valid response can be attributed to people at LW being encouraged to ignore their own emotions in situations like above, based on the idea that most misunderstandings are based on emotional biases that cloud proper thinking.
Disagree. When Eugine reads the first sentence of what I said above, he's going to be annoyed whether or not I follow up the sentence with an explanation. It was an annoying sentence.
It is good to try not to be affected by the emotional valence of statements, but it is also good to recognize that your statements have emotional valences (and that you can control these). We should optimize for making [helpful comments] and making [comments that give other people the opportunity to test their ability to resist letting emotional biases cloud their judgment] separately.
So it was an explanation-by-demonstration.
I annoy my partner with this sort of thing regularly. Perhaps I should stop. On the other hand, there have been several times in my life when other people (therapists, relatives, friends) more accurately assessed my behavior than I did at the time. Just because this behavior is annoying doesn't mean that the person doing it is incorrect. I don't buy the "How could you possibly know me better than I know myself" argument.
Agreed. But just because it might be correct doesn't mean it isn't annoying (which is the point I'm trying to make).
My tentative take is that it's less annoying if you have specific evidence rather than a general principle that people can't really be like that. Or possibly if you say something like, "I'm surprised-- what do you have in mind?".