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David_Gerard comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's probably the best possible start. "Am I being a dick?"
Taboo "being a dick".
In terms of how human minds have evolved to interact with other humans, I think it can usefully be treated as a primitive. Are you actually claiming not to understand what it means, or is this an exercise?
Different people have different ideas about what constitutes "being a dick" and I was wondering what you mean by it.
I do in fact mean running it past your inbuilt "actually, am I being a dick?" evaluator, as a start. (I'm assuming most people have something that does that job.)
This in no way guarantees anyone else will agree you're not being a dick, as you note, but I find this method useful in practice for screening off my bursts of dickishness - when I remember to apply it - and so I offer it as a simple thing that may work. I find it also makes my responses calmer in a heated argument.
I'm still not sure which inbuilt evaluator you're talking about.
If you are about to say or write a response to something, does "wait, am I actually being a dick here?" before you do so mean anything? Something like "I'm right of course, but can I be right without also coming across as a dick?"
Assume I'm not familiar with the meaning of the word. If I remember correctly where I was growing up 'dick' was little more than a generic insult, also I'm not a native English speaker.
Ah, OK. Does Don't be a dick get the idea across a bit?
Ok, looking at the articles much of it talks about how being a dick is not related to being right or being polite and how bad it is to be a dick. As far as talking about what being a dick actually is here is all the article says:
(..)
(..)
Ok, ignoring the line about how attempting to get your views across constitutes being a dick, the idea appears to be a combination of not acting/arguing in good faith and using techniques that are low on Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement.
Is this about right?
Also, I suspect the whole "don't be a dick" thing seems like an attempt to create a virtue ethics from scratch by people who never learned traditional virtue ethics.
DataPacRat is asking about going beyond not being a dick.
I haven't followed DPR's posts enough to have an opinion about whether it would be good for them to add more friendliness, but a community norm of saying more about what you like about what you've read is probably a good idea.