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jooyous comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (590)
I agree with your second paragraph completely, and I would be averse to comments whose only content was "niceness". I'm on LW for intellectual discussions, not for feel-goodism and self-esteem boosts.
I think it's worth distinguishing niceness from respect here. I define niceness to be actions done with the intention of making someone feel good about him/herself. Respect, on the other hand, is an appreciation for another person's viewpoint and intelligence. Respect is saying "We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner."
When I began this comment with "I agree with your second paragraph", I wasn't saying it to be nice. I wasn't trying to give fubarobfusco warm fuzzy happiness-feelings. I was saying it because I respect fubarobfusco's thoughts on this matter, to the point where I wanted to comment and add my own elaborations to the discussion.
There's not much purpose to engaging in an intellectual discussion with someone who doesn't respect your ideas. If they're not even going to listen to what you have to say, or consider that you might be correct, then what's the point? So I think respect is integral to intellectual discussions, and therefore it's worthwhile to demonstrate it verbally in comments. But I consider this completely separate from complimenting people for the sake of being nice.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn't respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
(For what it's worth, I'm female, albeit a rather distant outlier. I'd emphatically prefer that "niceness" not become a community norm. For me, it takes a lot of mental effort to be nice to people (because I have to focus on my internal model of their feelings, as well as on the discussion at hand), and I get annoyed when people are gratuitously nice to me. This post makes me wonder if I'm unusual among LW females in holding this opinion.)
Your comment has me wondering whether some folks expect niceness and respect to correlate. I've noticed some social contexts where fake niceness seems to be expected to cloak lack of respect. I wouldn't be surprised if some people around here are embittered from experiences with that.
No kidding.
(And I'm having difficulty responding to the rest of this without using unhelpful words such as "normals" or "mundanes", so I'll leave it at that.)
The human brain is fallible. That includes assertions made about internal experiences - such assertions may be wrong. If person A has reason X to believe that the result of person B's introspection is wrong, which is the more respectful course of action?
How about a third option:
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
A non-gender example:
Atheist: Pentecostal, my model predicted that people would go home from church feeling bored, guilty, or self-righteous, because former church people I know talk about those experiences, and church people who are active in politics seem to be big on guilt and self-righteousness. But your experience sounds like church is a fun party, that you go home from feeling giddy and high. I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your religious experiences!
Indeed I agree that it is possible, and probably desirable, to phrase the argument less bluntly than I did. However, it seems to me that submitter B is arguing against making such arguments at all, not arguing to make them in a more polite fashion.
Furthermore, here of all places, "If you (think you) posses evidence that I do not, show it and update me!" should be a background assumption, not something that needs to be put as a disclaimer on any potentially-controversial statement.
I rather doubt that submitter B would have had a problem with, "Really? Why? I ask because from out here it seems like you're a thinker."
Certainly the cited reasons for the actual statement being objectionable do not apply to this modified form.
She writes:
Which I read to mean that she is not opposed to them expressing confusion or saying something like "Huh, you always seemed more like a pure thinker to me." (as opposed to "No way. You're totally a thinker.") It seems precisely how the statement is phrased and how the discussion is conducted that is at issue here.
My communicating my differing perception to the other person in Option 1 is my invitation to have them update me.
Going through the song and dance of your third option is not required with some people, making them more efficient partners at finding the truth. I find people who require constant ego stroking in this manner, or who give it, literally tiresome in an intellectual endeavor.
It seems to me that flat contradiction without any communication of being open to being convinced is a strongly suboptimal invitation to update the speaker. This is especially so in cases of strongly asymmetric information (either direction).
'Song and dance' appears to me to be a dysphemism (perhaps unintentional) for 'communicating what you mean' as opposed to 'indicating something in the general vein and hoping the receiver figures out what you meant'.
Edited to add: option A is much more reasonable than I credited it, so while I'll stand by my first paragraph above, it's not particularly relevant to the post above. And yes, option 3 could be streamlined.
It works just fine with a lot of people.
For me, you can take that I'm open to being convinced as the null hypothesis. Most civilized people are. Aren't you?
Thank you! I've been looking for that word forever.
Not really, because 'communicating what you mean' was not what I meant. I was referring to kabuki dance of your ritualized formula for disagreement to stroke a person's ego so that he doesn't feel a threat to his status by my disagreeing with him.
I don't think the fellow is really confused about whether I'm open to being convinced of the error of my ways. If I say "I think you're wrong because of X", does not the human impulse to reciprocity sanction and invite him to respond in kind?
Does that fellow really need it explained to him that if I disagree with him on when the bus is coming, that he is free and invited to disagree with me right back? I don't think so.
He: The bus is coming at 3:00.
Me: No, it's coming at 3:10; that's when I caught it yesterday.
He: But yesterday was Friday. Saturday has a different schedule.
That seems like an everyday, ordinary human conversation to me, that no one should get all excited or offended about.
I strongly suspect that tone and body language are a key component in whether the statement "that's not right" is interpreted as "I disagree, let's talk about it" or "shut up and think what I think".
I further suspect that a tendency to interpret ambiguous or missing subtext in a negative or overly critical way correlates strongly with being "thin-skinned". This is partly based on having both of these characteristics myself. A potential counter-argument here is that it is not "rational" or useful to always assume the worst in personal interactions if you have evidence to follow instead (Have people generally meant the worst things possible when I have been unsure in the past?), but the important thing to remember here is that we are not dealing with people who have had time to be trained in that way. A martial arts master does not go all out against a beginner knowing that they will one day be able to handle it.
It would be unwise to alienate a group of potential rationalists if there is a relatively simple way to avoid it. If it would cripple the discourse or otherwise be quite detrimental to implement any sort of fix, then I would not advocate that course of action. However, I believe that to not be the case.
At this time, I would like to agree with RichardKennaway's observation that Plasmon's option A was quite different from the situation posited by Submitter B, and further agree with his hypothesis that even option A is some sort of improvement (largely due to the word "may").
My conclusion is that a few changes of word choices would be a low-cost, medium-reward first step in the right direction. This would include using words such as "may", particularly in the context of someone's perceived domain of expertise or cherished belief. Also, explicitly starting an evidence based conversation while voicing your disagreement.
Example: I disagree with your statement that "Most civilized people are [open to being convinced]". As (anecdotal) evidence, I submit the large number of Americans who are closemindedly religious.
If one considers sufficiently impersonal topics like bus schedules? Yes, for the most part.
Microcultures with strong elements of authority will have a much harder time with this assumption, even in horizontal interactions. I would not call all of these uncivilized, though I'm not a fan of them.
It's not complicated to frame a conversation as a search for truth as opposed to a vs. argument. Many people go overboard in this. I agree that this is obnoxious. I maintain that a flat contradiction is in many cases insufficient, especially in those cases where the matter at hand is contentious or personal, or there is any degree of hostility or unease between the conversants.
Option A wasn't a flat contradiction only. In fact, the original person wrote it up in a more pussy footing way than I would.
Flat contradiction would be "you're wrong". I agree that's not an invitation to further discussion.
My usual comment would be of the form: "That's wrong. Blah di blah isn't blah di blee, it's hooty hooty."
It's "you're wrong" plus some evidence on which I based my disagreement. Would that be unclear to you personally, that you're welcome to disagree and cite evidence for your disagreement in turn?
Maybe we could try an example so that we're talking about something concrete. I just don't think it's a mystery. I think that a great many people get very touchy when it comes to being disagreed with. I'm of another species that likes to be disagreed with, because then we have a contradiction to resolve, and that's fun and potentially productive.
I'm sorry: for reasons I do not understand, I misunderstood what you were referring to with 'option A'. Your response made perfect sense and mine did not.
Well, except that you would not be actually stating an invitation or request for more information. You would be assuming that the other person will interpret contradiction as an invitation for further discussion rather than as a dismissal, insult, threat, or other sort of speech act.
(Humans use language for a lot of other purposes besides the merely indicative, after all.)
If you say, "I'm having a party on Saturday," some people in some situations will take this to mean that you are thereby inviting them to come to the party. Others will think that you are merely stating a fact about your own social life. Still others will think that you are excluding them, just as if you had added, "... and you're not invited, you disgusting worm!"
Some people hear an invitation. Some hear a statement of fact. Some hear an exclusionary insult.
If you want to make it clear that you are inviting them, you say, "I'm having a party on Saturday, would you like to come?" or "... and you're invited!"
This is not bullshit song-and-dance ego-stroking. It is clear communication, and in particular a way to address people's differing priors about what your communication could mean. It probably depends on recognizing that people have different priors, and that they arrived at those priors legitimately.
(For that matter, if expressing curiosity about other people's experiences is an effective way to get data from them, then rationalists should practice doing it a lot until it is automatic and cheap System 1 behavior!)
Yes. In this context, and most contexts, that's my null hypothesis. Isn't it yours? People are here to discuss, and not dismiss, insult, or threaten.
Do you think I'm here to dismiss, insult, or threaten people? Do you think a large percentage of people here are? Do you think that anyone who says "you're wrong" is? That strikes me as a bizarre and thoroughly inaccurate prior. Or I certainly believe and hope it is.
Am I wrong? Is it just foolish innocence on my part to think that people are here to discuss, and not stomp on other people to social climb or satisfy sadistic impulses? It wouldn't be the first time. In other contexts, yeah, there's a lot of that going on. And it admittedly took me a long time to figure that out. But I don't see it here. The trouble is, if it were, most of the people who know aren't going to tell you.
You're talking intentions, they're talking effects. This leads to you defecting by accident.
Talking about intentions is to blurt out something stupidly? I'm not following your point.
I was referring more to the comment thread, which is filled with detailed writing in support of sending blunt communication while ignoring that such behaviour ends up losing in practice. If you haven't actually read that article and its comment thread, you really should.
Not really, no. People use language for a hell of a lot of other things besides making statements of fact at each other. I expect that in any given speech act, a speaker may be doing a lot of things: stating facts, affirming or challenging a social relation with the listener, causing the listener to have expectations about the speaker's future actions (promises, threats, plans, etc.), and so on. And that a lot of these things may be going on unconsciously.
If someone tells you that the way you speak gives the impression that you are arrogantly dismissing them, you could respond by merely instructing them (in the very same tone that they were talking about) that you do not intend to arrogantly dismiss them. However, doing that is not likely to be very convincing!
Yes, people use language in many ways.
But I should have been more specific.
In your prior for Less Wrong discussions, when someone responds to a statement of yours by saying that you're wrong, and cites evidence for his claim, what are the probabilities you place on the following potential motivations for his reply - he wants to discuss the point, he is threatening you, he is dismissing you, he is insulting you, other?
Sorry, I should have been more specific — I can tell because you're asking a question that would only make sense in a different context. My probabilities about whether you intend to be threatening are are not at issue here.
At issue in this thread is that some portion of the audience are not sticking around — and are forming negative conclusions about LW — because the words here come across as hostile, unfriendly, cold, and so on. This is a danger to LW's goals.
This is a matter of instrumental rationality, not only epistemic rationality. We want to accomplish something with words, not merely possess accurate beliefs in our own solipsistic internal monologues. So we have to ask, are our uses of words accomplishing the goals that we care about?
If you emit sentences that are consistently misinterpreted, and you are informed of this, you have a few options of what to do. You could conclude ① that your audience is listening wrong, and needs to correct their assumptions about you before they will be able to understand you; or ② that you are speaking wrong, and you need to correct your assumptions about your audience before they will be able to understand you.
If you care about getting your meaning across, which of these conclusions is more likely to give you the ability to accomplish that goal? Either one is consistent with the evidence; but which conclusion strengthens you, and which weakens you?
You can't reach into your audience's minds and force them to interpret your words differently.
You can't force them to stick around and listen to you correct their assumptions, either.
You can change the way you speak.
Concluding that you are misinterpreted because your audience is listening wrong, or is coming into the conversation with crazy priors, weakens you. Thinking that way would make you incapable of fixing the situation; less able to accomplish goals by speaking. Concluding that you are misinterpreted because you have misspoken, or failed to understand where your audience is coming from, gives you the power to fix the situation and accomplish goals. This strengthens you.
After the discussion, I think I've got a more concise option that achieves this end.
Option 4:
I disagree, because blah blah blah.
Concise, and makes it about my differing perceptions and evaluations. Better than my original "you're wrong, because blah blah." I doubt that this entirely satisfies the nice camp, but I think it's a baby step in their direction.
I think it's actually a fairly large step, but I'm probably a moderate on niceness.
I think you are framing the question in order to presuppose a conclusion. This is an error that is just as endemic on LessWrong as it is everywhere else.
The first alternative is designed to look nice, respectful, and false, and the second to look nasty, disrespectful, and true. The bottom line is "Niceness is dishonesty", and the example was invented to support it.
Compare this with an example from the original post:
This does not fall into either of those categories. It looks like this:
Which is what person A would say if they spoke honestly while thinking "meh, person B can't handle the truth, I'll just shut up and say nothing." Person A appears to be running an internal monologue that goes: "I know the truth. You do not know the truth. I have reasons for my beliefs, therefore I am right. Therefore your reasons for your beliefs must be wrong. Therefore you should take correction from me. If you don't, you're even more wrong. You can't handle the truth. I can handle the truth. Therefore I am right. (continue on auto-repeat)"
That, at least, is what I see, when I see those two alternatives.
The real problem here is what person A is actually thinking, and the invisibility of that process to themselves. For it is written:
As long as A is running that monologue, how to express themselves is going to look to them like a conflict between "niceness" and "truth". And however they express themselves, that monologue is likely to come through to B, because it will leak out all over.
I was not arguing about the specific example given in the OP, where he (the person with whom submitter B was arguing) was apparently unable or unwilling to provide evidence for his assertion that she was mistaken about herself. You, and submitter B, may be entirely correct about the person she was arguing with.
Perhaps I am overestimating the sanity of this place, but I do hope (and expect) that if similar arguments occur on this forum, evidence will (should) be put forward. In this place dedicated, among other things, to awareness of the many failure modes of the human brain, to how you (yes you. And I, too) may be totally wrong about so many things, in this place, the hypothesis "I may be mistaken about myself; I should listen to the other person's evidence on this matter" is not a hypothesis that should be ignored. (note how submitter B does not consider this hypothesis in her example, and indeed she may have been correct to not consider it, but as stated I'm arguing in general here).
The homeopath who has treated thousands of patients, should listen to the high-school chemistry student who has evidence that homeopathy doesn't work. The physics crackpot who has worked on their theory of everything for decades should listen to the student of physics who points out that it fails to predict the results of an experiment. And the human, who has spent all their life as a human in a human body, should listen to the student of psychology, who may know many things about themselves that they are yet ignorant of.
In brief, Tu quoque.
As an A, I'll tell you what my deluded perceptions are of my internal dialogue. If I say "you're wrong, because blah blah", that's because I am presuming you can handle the truth, otherwise I wouldn't bother offering my comment, as indicated by the original poster.
That's what you do when you think the person can't handle the truth - you shrug and move on.
I think I've identified two Person A values relevant to this discussion:
Expressing honest disagreement is a sign of respect.
Crafting that disagreement to manage feelings is a sign of disrespect.
Two different species - those who manipulate things, and those who manipulate people. They don't get along too well. There's probably a third that does both, but I don't think they're large in number.