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Oligopsony comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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Getting offended is a way of discouraging antisocial behavior, perhaps even the primary way. Because this is a public good, it is probably underprovided. (And yet you go on to recommend against it! Frankly, I'm shocked.)
Getting offended for one's own sake, alternatively, is probably a Pavlovian learned behavior because criticism feels bad. Being able to distinguish between different causes of offense seems like a useful skill, due to the costs of being offended that you point out.
More generally, one can better callibrate one's offense-giving by training to be offended at antisocial actions iff your offense actually has the deterrent effect. There is little utility in being offended by someone who is not in front of your face. There is also little utility in disapproving of people do not care for your approval. Inasmuch as people care about being disapproved of even when they are not looking, however, you may wish to cultivate offense even then.
I believe that it is both possible and desirable to discourage antisocial behavior without becoming (or even acting) offended. Further, in many cases "calling people out" serves to derail conversations into a nonproductive or semiproductive state where the offense (or lack thereof) becomes the focus of the conversation. This seems necessary only in the most extreme cases.
Personally, I find that allowing such things to pass and then talking them over with the offender after the fact seems a better method of handling things. "Praise in public, criticize in private."
I realize this is possible, but is it actually effective ? Entire social movements have been built on the basis of acting offended; and some of them, f.ex. the Civil Rights movement, have been spectacularly successful (comparatively speaking). Of course, one could argue that their success wasn't worth the cost...
This seems like a pretty big oversimplification.
(Counterexample: Any act of civil disobedience under risk of violence seems to be ill-characterized as "acting offended".)
... I think this may lead to a theory of acausal insult.
Personally, it's my strategy to insult anyone who could have contributed to my being born, but didn't.
That's kind of the opposite approach to the one most people take vis-a-vis the set of people who may or may not have copulated with their mother.
If someone other than my father had copulated with my mother sometime in late 1986, a person other than me would have been born.