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Ben_LandauTaylor comments on Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Would it be fair to rephrase your question as "How can we make receiving constructive criticism feel good?"
If so, then I endorse the first technique you mentioned. (My mantra for this is "bad news is good news," which reminds me that now I can do something about the problem.) I intend to try the second technique.
I have a third tactic, which is to use my brain's virtue ethics module. I've convinced myself that good people appreciate receiving constructive criticism, so when it happens, I have an opportunity to demonstrate what a good and serious person I am. (This probably wouldn't work if I didn't surround myself with people who also think this is virtuous and who do, in fact, award me social points for being open to critique.)
Admonymous has some good advice on giving and receiving criticism. Also, use Admonymous. Mine is here.
Yes.
I have a strong intuition that making it feel good, or even just less bad, might take away some of its usefulness and make it less memorable. Actually, if it felt good instead of just less bad, wouldn't that incentivize you to make more mistakes?
There are individual differences in sensitivity to criticism, so your advice should be mainly aimed at people who are oversensitive in this regard.
If I feel bad about a piece of criticism, I automatically become defensive and incapable of learning from it (until I can distance myself from the bad feeling and thus become less defensive).
I doubt making mistakes on purpose would realistically be a problem, at least for me. Even if it did feel good, having done a great work and knowing that I'd done my best would still be even better.
I have this problem too, but the timespan is pretty short. I think receiving criticism in person has even a bigger problem, that is the critic senses I get hurt and tones it down too much. When directly asking for criticism I'm tempted to declare "I will look butthurt at first but keep going and later I'll be thankful for learning so much more." The best teachers I've had gave criticism regardless of my feelings.
There's an important difference between making intentional mistakes, and becoming careless. By incentivization of mistakes I meant the latter.
Ah, that does sound more plausible. If I'm in an environment where I can trust others to catch my mistakes, and I don't feel bad about those mistakes being pointed out, then I could definitely see myself getting more sloppy and relying on others to catch the mistakes instead of looking for them myself. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I have done that on a few occasions...
On the other hand, this might also make for a useful cure for perfectionism. It's not obvious that trying to catch every mistake yourself would be the optimal division of labor, assuming that you really are in an environment where you can trust on others to correct some of the mistakes. Of course, it could be a problem if you develop lazy habits and carry them over to an environment without that external assistance.
I agree that we could probably rely more on others to catch our mistakes in certain contexts where equal expertise can be assumed. The problem is, if you're writing an article or a book for example, you're usually the expert compared to your readership, so you can't really expect others to reliably correct your mistakes, and some of your mistakes get cluelessly adopted.
My usual version of this is "I don't like receiving criticism, and I don't promise to take it well, though I promise to make my best efforts to do so and I usually succeed. That said, still less do I like having earned criticism withheld from me, so my preference is to receive criticism where I've earned it. If you remind me of this, I will do my best to be grateful."
Well, one way to subvert this would be to also arrange to get praise for my successes, and make the praise-for-success noticably more rewarding than the criticism-for-failure. But if for some reason that's not possible, then sure.
Are you deliberately implying a normative statement about how sensitive a person ought to be to criticism here, or is it accidental?
True. Note that failing is massively easier than succeeding. You don't really have to plan for it. Perhaps the problem doesn't arise if you feel worse for making the mistake than you feel good about receiving criticism for it. However, I strongly suspect we mostly feel bad about our mistakes precisely because of the social context. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to feel good about my mistakes.
The normativity of such a statement depends on the values of the person in question. If those values are a known factor, I do believe there is an optimal range of sensitivity one should try to gauge.
Ah. So "people who are oversensitive," here, means people who are more sensitive to criticism than is optimal according to their own values? Fair enough... thanks for clarifying that.
Exactly. Admittedly there are a lot of people I would like to have different sensitivities to criticism than they have or even want to have, like psychopaths for example. Even that of course doesn't imply any universal normativity.