= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
timtyler comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (588)
Getting offended gives you a reputation that tends to stop people being rude to you and treating you badly. You punish perpetrators by ditching them. They are less likely to abuse you in the future - and so are onlookers. Being the victim of verbal abuse doesn't help much with acquiring correct beliefs either.
Responding firmly and effectively to actual attacks may preserve status and discourage others from abusing or taking advantage of you. Being emotionally upset is not an important part of that response.
In fact, responding excessively or inappropriately to perceived but unintended attacks loses you some respect and can discourage others from involving you in social activities or cooperative tasks. We may respect a badass, but we don't like an arsehole.
Getting angry is easy because we have neural circuitry dedicated to it, whereas thinking clearly under stress is difficult. It's commonplace, however absurd, to rationalise a failure to think clearly under stress as a wise social signalling strategy :)
I endorse not responding excessively or inappropriately to attacks, and I endorse responding firmly and effectively to attacks.
I agree that if my emotions are preventing me from doing these things, that's worth correcting. And I agree that this is a common problem.
The solution is not necessarily (or typically, in my experience) to not have the emotion in the first place.
Agreed and voted up. Of course, you don't get a choice about whether to have an emotion, at the base level.
Not sure "offended" is a primary emotion though. It seems to me (by introspection) to be bundled together with a lot of culture-dependent and habitual behaviours, associations and memes, all of which are sub-optimal for any given situation, and could do with being brought under conscious control before being allowed to influence my actions.
I get a choice about whether and how I experience emotions, in the same sense as I get a choice as to whether and how I run marathons. That is, I can't decide right now to run a marathon, or to not feel anger, but I can make choices that will reliably eventually get me there. What I'm saying isn't that the latter is impossible, but rather that I don't endorse doing it.
I agree that offense is bundled together with and mediated by lots of culture-dependent and habitual stuff. I would say the same about a lot of emotional patterns. And yes, some (though not all) of that stuff is suboptimal for any given situation.
And yes, the ability to choose how I act even when emotional or otherwise experiencing influences on my behavior is valuable.
I agree that offense is not a primary emotion, if I understand what you mean by the term.
I don't think that's true. I've seen lots of cases of manipulation where being emotionally upset was the whole focus. Genuine distress evokes sympathy from onlookers and persecutors alike.
Attempting to evoke sympathy by displaying distress is another kind of response I suppose. But its success depends entirely on the reactions of your onlookers and persecutors: they may be amused and encouraged, for example. And even where successful, its success still doesn't depend on actual internal loss of emotional equilibrium.
Whereas being aware of and in charge of your emotions in a stressful situation is always a winning strategy.
Just as for an aggressive offended response, a manipulative whiny offended response can still lose you respect and social advantage if it is misjudged. And you are more likely to misjudge it if you are acting in a poorly controlled way out of emotional upset, rather than in a conscious attempt to communicate clearly.
BTW, I don't particularly rate the argument that because you've seen people easily manipulated by displays of distress, it's an advantage to be genuinely distressed by things. Obviously it stops being an advantage for the manipulator if the onlookers are able to control their own distress at seeing someone else apparently upset.
But I think we're wandering away from the topic a little. Being offended isn't the same as being distressed, except for pathological narcissists.
In theory people could try faking emotional reactions, hoping for a similar effect. In practice, they run into the cheat-detection mechanisms in other people's brains. If they get found out, there's a risk of getting a reputation for "faking it". In many cases, its easier and simpler to be genuinely offended, upset - or whatever.
Easier, simpler, still not a great idea, for all the reasons I gave above.
That only applies among adults, and possibly not even all of them.