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Error comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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A corollary:
If someone asks you to do or say things a little differently, in order to not scare, upset, or worry them ... don't get offended.
A lot of people turn into "slogan-chanting zombies" when someone informs them that they've scared, upset, or worried someone, when they had no intention to do so. They react with protestations of innocence; with accusations that the unhappy person is "oversensitive", or that their plea is a cynical ploy for a political cult; with baseless cries of censorship; or with biting, dismissive mockery.
This is unfortunate ... and it's bad rationality, too.
If someone goes to the trouble of informing you that the way you're acting or speaking leaves them feeling unsafe, unhappy, or uncomfortable around you ... they are giving you information. If you are interested in not having those effects on others, getting offended and defensive when someone informs you of them is a very bad idea.
It's a fact of the world that some ways of expressing yourself will come across as threatening, triggering, or creepifying to others. This is not because those people want to feel threatened, triggered, or creepified, or even necessarily that they have unusual predilections to those epistemic and emotional reactions. It also doesn't mean that you meant to do those things, or even that they believe you meant to do them. After all, if I thought you wanted to upset me, I sure wouldn't bother telling you that you had done so; I'd just stay away from you.
We're living in a world full of humans, not impersonal data-processors, and getting along with those humans is a vital skill. It is useful to your goals to obtain accurate information about their emotional and epistemic states ("How do they feel? What do they believe?"), especially their feelings and beliefs toward you. "Bad news is good news" — if your words or actions are having negative effects on others, don't push people away for informing you of that fact ... or else they might stop telling you, or stop talking to you at all.
(Also, for any incipient-FAI readers in the audience: Having emotional states and caring about others' emotional states, is something that humans value. Even though they are inconvenient sometimes. Please do not rewrite us to not be offended at anything at all, nor to not care if we offend others.)
If you find yourself responding with cached thoughts or catch-phrases such as "Everything will offend someone", or "Some people just want to be offended", or "If we let ourselves care about offending those people, next thing they'll be taking away our freedom of speech" ... yeah, that's the defensiveness I'm talking about. Stifle it; it's weakening you.
Intentionally being offensive (e.g. in protest) is sometimes worthwhile; and sometimes you simply can't do certain vital tasks (e.g. teaching biology) without offending someone (e.g. creationists). But finding out that you have been accidentally offensive is nothing worth defending or rationalizing — it's something to say "oops, sorry!" and update about.
FYI, this pattern matches on "disagreeing with my complaint makes you part of the problem," at least to me, with all the problems that implies. The first two statements in particular are quite true, although insufficient in themselves to defeat your point.
For the record, I don't think that's how you meant it.
This, on the other hand, I wholly agree with. Getting offended in such a case is silly. I think it may arise from the perception that it grants others power over you if you have to change your behavior to suit them. I think the cure is to realize that you don't have to change anything -- but might choose to based on the extra information they were kind enough to give you.
I for one wish people would tell me about such impressions more often. I've alienated a few people in my time because I was doing something irritating, lacked the social skills to realize it, and was never informed. (and therefore could not correct the problem)
Interesting. I see what you mean, but I don't see a clearer way of pointing to a particular cached-thought reaction that I anticipate some readers having. Any ideas?
Honestly, I'm not sure. Your intent seemed to be to pre-empt certain arguments you believe to be bogus. Doing that without appearing to discredit dissent in itself, may be difficult.
"Catch-phrases such as...." implies that all similar arguments are presumed bogus, and "...yeah, that's the defensiveness" appears to discredit them based on the mindset of the arguer rather than the merit of the argument.
Listing specific arguments along with why each of them is wrong (edit:or insufficient to reach conclusion) probably would not have given me the same impression. I am thinking of some religious figure who, writing to argue for God's existence, gave a series of statements along the lines of "these are the objections to my argument that are known to me; I answer each of them thusly...." I think it might have been Aquinas. I remember being impressed by the honesty of the approach even though I don't believe in the conclusion.
(I am not sure who downvoted you or why. Responding to honest criticism with a request for suggestions seems laudable to me.)
On reflection, I think this statement specifically is my problem, and not because of what it's saying about the argument, but about the arguer. My reaction is something like "well, damn, now if I object I'll appear to be an unnecessarily defensive jerk, even if I'm right."
It feels like "God will send you to hell if you question his existence"; where that one exacts penalties for the act of figuring out if there really are penalties, yours socially censures the act of questioning the justification of censure. Such double binds always strike me as intellectually dishonest.
Again, I don't think you actually meant it that way; it just pattern matched on certain similar arguments (which I'll leave unstated to avoid a mindkiller subthread) by people who actually do mean it that way.
The problem with caching is just that sometimes the cache falls out of sync; you want to evaluate some complex problem f(x), and if you've previously evaluated some similar f(y) it's faster to evaluate "if (resembles_y(x)) then cached_f(y) else f(x)", but if resembles_y(x) isn't precise enough, then you've overgeneralized.
But the correction "Stifle it" doesn't seem to be pinpoint-precise either, does it? It's an overgeneralization that just generalizes to the opposite conclusion.
If you don't want people to overgeneralize, then you have to be specific - "in cases where A, B, or C hold, then you want to avoid giving offense; if D, E, or F hold then giving offense may have higher utility", etc - and just trying to begin nailing down this kind of precision is likely to require hundreds of comments, not just a couple sentences.