I think this is assuming that the people looking at the evidence can be trusted to make a fair and impartial assessment of it and not jump to any unjustified conclusions?
Not so much "assuming" as "working to make sure".
For example, imagine some cookies go missing from the cookie jar, and you immediately jump to the unjustified conclusion that it's *me* that took the cookies. Maybe because you already dislike me for being too messy of a roommate or something. This doesn't force me to respond defensively, and I still have the option of responding with genuine curiosity "Wait, what? What leads you to think it was me?".
What's your response? Not "I have security camera footage proving it". Maybe "It's just the kind of thing you'd do. You're the one here who doesn't respect rules". But I can keep chasing this down, so long as I'm curious: "I don't follow. Why is this something you think I'd do? What rules?". Maybe from there to "Wait, you thought that was a *rule*, not a *request* to be less messy?", which gets quite a bit harder for you to hold onto if indeed there never was any rule. Maybe "Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty? Do you think you have reason to believe I'm dishonest?".
So long as I'm genuinely trying to understand your perspective and not trying to make you look stupid and not credible, it's hard to avoid getting into why you believe what you believe, and learning whether your initial conclusions were fair, impartial, and justified. Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.
But it's very often the case that people don't have reason to feel that secure, and have cause to believe that at least part of their audience will jump to conclusions, have all kinds of hostile motives, be inclined to treat one party's word as intrinsically more trustworthy than the other's, not have the time or interest to really think it through, etc..
Yes, this is often the case, and it does make navigating these things securely quite difficult at times. This complicates things, but I don't think it changes the conclusion at all.
I think the first thing to note here is that the bar isn't "Is there zero chance of secure response failing to exonerate me?" but "Is the secure response less likely to exonerate me?". Because you can't ever guarantee zero chance of anything, and the question you actually have to decide on is "Which is my better option here?".
And when you judge by that bar, defensive insecurity doesn't come out looking too hot. Because none of those additional difficulties go away just because you flinch defensively. If you proclaim "I didn't do it! Don't believe him!" to a hostile audience, for example, that's not going to automatically cause your audience's hostile motives to melt away and think "Ah, he didn't do it!". In addition to all their other ammunition, now they have "See, he's getting defensive about it. Guilty conscience!".
Beyond that, we'd have to get into what's driving this hostility and these unfair jumps to conclusions -- because it's something. Returning to the cookie jar hypothetical, maybe if I would have been more clearly open to your upset about the mess, it never would have gotten to where you were accusing me of taking cookies from the cookie jar in the first place.
It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
Quoting my previous conclusion here, I don't think you can actually expect people to notice and fully cohere their belief structures, in general. It's really hard, and a lot of work, so the default expectation is that there will be quite a lot of ultimately unfounded insecurity driving defensiveness over true innocence.
At the same time, the end of the road of reflection is still security and openness about the evidence when truly innocent and well intentioned. And that matters both because it's the trail sign to follow when we find ourselves innocent and insecure, and because it's the trail to help others down when we suspect they are.
Defensiveness isn't proof that someone isn't confidence in their innocence, because as you say, "it’s enough for them to be afraid that others might believe them guilty". At the same time, what justifies that fear?
Say you bump into someone in public and they act like you're a jerk for it. You could react defensively and say "I'm not a jerk, YOU are a jerk you jerk!". Or you could just say "I'm sorry about that. Are you okay? I screwed up by looking the other way because I heard someone call my name, and I hadn't seen you there. I guess I need to stop before looking in the future, even if the path looks clear."
The latter isn't "defensive" and also does nothing to defend against the accusations directly. But by owning up to everything you can find that you did wrong, you're demonstrating that you're not a jerk. And in the process of doing that, it necessarily comes out that "everything you did wrong" isn't much, and that the other fool walked in front of you without looking himself. So now he looks like a jerk, and you look innocent. Which obviously was what was going to happen, since we knew from the start that you're not a jerk so of course that's what the evidence is going to point to. The difference is between "Don't listen to that! The evidence will mislead you!" and "The totality evidence can't make me look bad unless I am bad, so lets look at the evidence".
When someone is showing you a fear that looking at the evidence will leave you thinking they're bad, this implies a belief that they are indeed bad -- at least by your interpretation, which is obviously the one that matters to you.
This belief isn't necessarily reflectively coherent, and people often flinch out of insecurity even when their beliefs would predictably cohere to "innocent", but it's also not crazy to see someone implying that you might think they're guilty if you were to look at the evidence, and take this as (imperfect) evidence of guilt. Because the only way that fear can be reflectively stable is if they are guilty. It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren't super distant or high-tech.
I notice that you're reaching for it too.
It's promising that despite Said's criticisms of NVC, and that you're doing exactly what you described as the thing "something like" NVC, it's going quite well so far. That's a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn't matter if Said's stance is "NVC is about status plays" because you aren't doing status plays, and it shows.
Respect.
I've done this. I was kinda sorta trying out polyphasic sleeping, but the real driver was that I wanted to learn how to fall asleep because I was pretty bad at it. It turned out to be very very interesting and useful.
The single biggest thing I learned from that experience is what it feels like to be "asleep". My thoughts would slow to a stop during the 20 minute naps, but I'd often retain awareness the whole time. I'd lose my sense of time because there was just nothing happening to count as the tick of a clock. At first I thought "I didn't fall asleep" because there was no gap in consciousness, but after a couple days doing quite well on "no sleep" I realized that my model of sleep wasn't adding up. At a LW meetup one time I had heard an experienced meditator describe having the same experience while asleep and I couldn't imagine it at the time, so it was neat to experience it first hand.
The interesting thing about this is that having the thought "Ugh, I'm still not asleep" isn't actually proof that the thought is correct. If you take "I'm aware of my surroundings" to be proof of being awake, then you can actually wake yourself up by falsely concluding that you're awake. This cuts through a lot of self-fulfilling insomnia, because instead of stressing about not being asleep yet, it's "I don't really know if I'm asleep, and there isn't really a hard line anyway" and "Worrying about this is actually the action of waking up, so that'd be dumb, lol". So you can just lie there without generating additional thoughts about how you're not asleep yet, and that can be a big help.
The other thing that it gave me is an explicit understanding of what falling asleep is. I'm just letting my thoughts spool down. Instead of opening 1.2 new tabs per tab on your mental browser and dealing with a tab explosion, open 0.8. That doesn't mean it's easy if you're excited and have much to think about, but also, sometimes there are things worth getting excited about and thinking about instead of sleeping. Facing this question directly at least gives you a handle on the problem and a way to pull on the lever towards sleep, when there's reason to motivate it.
If you have difficulties falling asleep and the slack to burn a week doing this, it might be a good investment. But I don't think it's necessary in order to put in deliberate practice falling asleep. You do it every night anyway, so every night you can track what's keeping your mind racing. You can notice if it's driven by anxieties that turn out to be false, or by not making an explicit decision about what's worth thinking about when, or what. You can notice which emotions, if any, start to bubble up once you stop distracting yourself, and whether that might be a driver for these incessant thoughts.
And when things are sorted out, just practice lying down noticing that you don't have to think anymore. No need to worry about not sleeping. The exciting projects can wait for tomorrow. For now, you can just rest. You don't have to do anything. And notice how nice that can feel :P
Also, melatonin. I'm not sure how much credit to give to melatonin vs learning better how to sleep, but my sleep latency used to be close to an hour or more and now my Oura ring says I average ten minutes and there's basically zero struggle anymore.
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We can be, if you want. And I certainly wouldn't blame you for wanting to bail after the way I teased you in the last comment.
I do want to emphasize that I am sincere in telling you that I hope it doesn't eat at you too much, and that I hoped for the conversation to get somewhere interesting.
If you turn out to be a remarkably good sport about the teasing, and want to show me that you can represent how you were coming off to me, I'm still open to that conversation. And it would be a lot more respectful, because it would mean addressing the reason I couldn't take your previous comment seriously.
No expectations, of course. Sincere best wishes either way, and I hope you forgive me for the tease.
Before I respond to your other points, let me pause and ask if I have convinced you that our situation is actually pretty asymmetrical, at least in regards to these examples? If not, I'm disinclined to invest more time.
Oh, the situation is definitely asymmetrical. In more ways than you realize.
However, the important part of my comment was this:
The question is, do you see how silly this looks, from my perspective? Do you see how much this looks like you're missing the self awareness that is necessary in order to have a hope of noticing when you're inhabiting a mistaken worldview, which pats itself on the back prematurely?
Because if you do, then perhaps we can laugh about our situation together, and go about figuring out how to break this asymmetry. But if you don't, or if you try to insist "No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]", the symmetry is already broken.
If you can't say "Shoot, I didn't realize that", or "Heh, yeah I see how it definitely looks more symmetrical than I was giving credit for (even though we both know there are important dissymmetries, and disagree on what they are)", and instead are going to spend a lot of words insisting "No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]"... after I just did you the favor of highlighting how revealing that would be... then again, the symmetry is already broken in the way that shows which one of us is blind to our limitations.
There's another asymmetry though, which has eluded you:
Despite threatening to write me off, you still take me seriously enough to write a long comment trying to convince me that you're right, and expect me to engage with it. Since you failed to answer the part that matters, I can't even take you seriously enough to read it. Ironically, this would have been predictable to you if not for your stance on prediction errors, Lol.
Also, with a prediction error like that, you're probably not having as much fun as I am, which is a shame. I'm genuinely sorry it turned out the way it did, as I was hoping we'd get somewhere interesting with this. I hope you can resolve your error before it eats at you too much, and that you can keep a sense of humor about things :)
1You're extending yourself an awful lot of charity here.
For example, you accuse me of failing to respond to some of your points, and claim that this is evidence of cognitive dissonance, yet you begin this comment with:
I didn't respond to this because I didn't see it as posing any difficulty for my model, and didn't realize that you did.
Are you really unable to anticipate that this is very close to what I would have said, if you had asked me why I didn't respond to those things? The only reason that wouldn't be my exact answer is that I'd first point out that I did respond to those things, by pointing out that your arguments were based on a misunderstanding of my model! This doesn't seem like a hard one to get right, if you were extending half the charity to me that you extend yourself, you know? (should I be angry with you for this, by the way?)
As to your claim that it doesn't pose difficulty to your model, and attempts to relocate goal posts, here are your exact words:
I think the person who stops feeling anger has performed an incomplete reduction that doesn't add up to normality.
This is wrong. It is completely normal to not feel anger, and retaliate, when you have accurate models instead of clinging to inaccurate models, and I gave an example of this. Your attempt to pick the nit between "incapacitation" vs "dissuasion" is very suspect as well, but also irrelevant because dissuasion was also a goal (and effect) of my retaliation that night. I could give other examples too, which are even more clearly dissuasion not incapacitation, but I think the point is pretty clear.
And no, even with the relocated goalposts your explanation fails. That was a system 1 decision, and there's no time for thinking slow when you're in the midst of something like that.
You have claimed that there's evidence in your other writing, but have refused to prioritize it so that I can find your best evidence as quickly as possible.
No, I made it very clear. If you have a fraction of the interest it would take to read the post and digest the contents, you would spend the ten seconds needed to pull up the post. This is not a serious objection.
Again, it's totally understandable if you don't want to take the time to read it. It's a serious time and effort investment to sit down and not only read but make sense of the contents, so if your response were to be "Hey man, I got a job and a life, and I can't afford to spend the time especially given that I can't trust it'll change my mind", that would be completely reasonable.
But to act like "Nope, it doesn't count because you can't expect me to take 10 seconds to find it, and therefore must be trying to hide it" is.... well, can you see how that might come across?
>So "Yes, I'm talking about our models of how the world should work", and also that is necessarily the same as our models of how the world does work -- even if we also have meta models which identify the predictable errors in our object level models and try to contain them.
This seems like it's just a simple direct contradiction. You're saying that model X and model Y are literally the same thing, but also that we keep track of the differences between them. There couldn't be any differences to track if they were actually the same thing.
So if I tell you that the bottle of distilled water with "Drinking water" scribbled over the label contains the same thing as the bottle of distilled water that has "coolant" scribbled on it... and that the difference is only in the label... would you understand that? Would that register to you as a coherent possibility?
I'm sorry, but I'm having a hard time understanding which part of this is weird to you. Are you really claiming that you can't see how to make sense of this?
>At the same time, I'm curious if you've thought about how it looks from my perspective.
There are some parts of your model that I think I probably roughly understand, [...] But I do think I've pointed out:
You're missing the point of my question. Of course you think you've pointed that stuff out. I'm not asking if you believe you're justified in your own beliefs.
There are a lot of symmetries here. You said some thing's that [you claim] I didn't respond to. I said some things which [I claim] you didn't respond to. Some of the things I say strike you as either missing the point or not directly responding to what you say. A lot of the things that you've said strike me in the same way. Some of the my responses [you claim] look like cognitive dissonance to you. Some of your responses [I claim] look that way to me. I'm sure you think it's different because your side really is right, and my side really is wrong. And of course, I feel the same way. This is all completely normal for disagreements that run more than a step or two deep.
But then you go on to act like you don't notice the symmetry, as if your own perspective objectively validates your own side. You start to posture stuff like "You haven't posted any evidence [that I recognize]" and "I'm gonna write you off, if you don't persuade me", with no hint to the possibility that there's another side to this coin.
The question is, do you see how silly this looks, from my perspective? Do you see how much this looks like you're missing the self awareness that is necessary in order to have a hope of noticing when you're inhabiting a mistaken worldview, which pats itself on the back prematurely?
Because if you do, then perhaps we can laugh about our situation together, and go about figuring out how to break this asymmetry. But if you don't, or if you try to insist "No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]", the symmetry is already broken.
I think we're talking past each other a bit.
I agree that the thing you're arguing against has the challenges that you're pointing at, in contexts like those. I'm suggesting something different.
One where you're not doing the whole "Oh no! Don't look at the evidence, because if you do you might think I'm bad!" thing -- or, more realistically, not doing the "Don't listen to him he's lying!"/"No, you're wrong, I'm innocent!" type thing. Not flinching from the evidence, but rather being present with it and doing something without pushing it away.
There are a lot of different things one could do securely, but here I'm pointing at one in particular which is relevant when people think you're actually guilty -- even if they're not being particularly fair when accusing you of stealing cookies or whatever.
Let's go through your hypothetical line by line, giving names for easy reference:
This line as stated is a bit ambiguous. Is the speaker here purely confused and curious, or are they also kinda conveying "Because if so, that's kinda stupid, right?"?
If it's the latter, or looks like it might be the latter, then it makes sense that your next line might follow.
Frank has clearly communicated that he sees Bob as making an unfair argument, rather than being genuinely curious, and that he feels condescended to and unfairly treated by Bob.
If Bob isn't driven to defensiveness out of insecurity, and he actually cares about Frank's point of view here, he might say something like:
This response helps to disambiguate the first response, and to show that it really was a sincere attempt to understand Frank's perspective here.
In contrast, if Bob had said the other line, it would also have helped disambiguate, albeit in a different direction:
In this context, where this line is coming instead of actually addressing Franks concerns, it shows pretty compellingly that Bob doesn't find Franks perspective worthy of addressing. It also shows that even when Bob knows that Frank is going to take it as an insult to his intelligence, he wants to do more of that. So, confirming that "You realize how dumb that is, right?" interpretation.
Neither are insecure responses, but one is much more respectful and the other is much more provocative.
So let's look at what makes these situations so difficult. These people are clearly very sensitive to implication that you might be "above them", and simultaneously can't handle concepts like 'evidence'. But like... are you not above people who can't handle concepts like 'evidence', in some important way? In your mind are you really on equal footing, if we're being completely honest here? I certainly couldn't blame you for having that view of things, if you do. At the same time, can you see why maybe it's reasonable for them to feel talked down to if you do what you'd describe as "Calmly explain that we should look at the evidence"?
It can be extremely difficult to navigate these situations without pissing people off when the people in question are simultaneously very sensitive to hints of condescension and also seemingly unable to grasp the basics. So when you say things like "Wait, you thought that was a rule?" they're going to hear that as "Wait, you're that dumb!?" and respond with hostility like "What the hell kind of nitpick is that?". And honestly, they might not even be entirely wrong to read it that way.
One way to respond to this is to double down on "Well, their rules are stupid, and I am above them, so I can be secure in the fact that they can't hurt me". And if you're right, then that's probably better than subjecting yourself to their stupid rules in the first place. But if you aren't, then they're going to be quite motivated to hold you accountable for your hubris - as they should!
So I totally agree that this kind of secure response invites these kinds of problems. And that's why I was suggesting the other direction, for cases like this.
As in, actually respect their judgement. Even if they don't use the same language as you, there are going to be reasons they believe things. Even if you think you know that they're wrong and why they go wrong, you can choose to find out instead. To ask what they think because you want to understand where they're coming from, rather than as a ploy to highlight how stupid they are. If they take it that way, you can listen, take them seriously enough to check for any legitimacy that their interpretation might have, whether maybe you were actually a little more judgy than you meant to be, and get back on track telling them honestly that you don't see them as dumb, you just don't understand their perspective yet.
This is the opposite direction of "using big words to distract", and the only time you're trying to get on trial for something else is when you honestly believe that's their real gripe with you. So it's not an attempt to distract but an offering to submit to their judgement more than they were even asking for. And if that doesn't come across at first pass, you can clarify that too: "Okay, so it is the cookie you're most mad at me for? I know you're mad for legitimate reason, I just want to make sure I'm addressing what's most important to you first". Rather than the security coming from "Lol, I'm so above you I'm untouchable (try me!)", it's coming from "You wouldn't stay mad at me unless I'm doing something wrong, so I don't have to defend myself. I trust you".
When doing this, you're not pleading guilty to anything you're not guilty of, nor are you pushing away their perspectives to focus on promoting the idea that you're innocent. Because you're genuinely interested in their perspective, and you're actually respecting them, they're going to tend to feel more respected than when you tell they're wrong/dishonest/whatever without even considering and acknowledging their perspective first.
It's going to be difficult to pull off if you're secretly thinking "Man, these are the lies I have to tell to get along with these dummies", but when it's genuine it shines through. Not immediately, necessarily, for the same reason that an abused dog doesn't instantly trust its new owner. It takes a significant amount of evidence to overcome rationally formed priors of abuse/condescension/etc, so if you judge things after the second back and forth it won't look great. In this one, the dog is kinda biting her, and the woman was expecting to get bit for real. If you only watch the first few back and forths, it's easy to walk away judging it as "Man, that lady wouldn't leave the dog alone"/"The dog didn't like that"/"That wasn't working". Watch a bit longer though, and you'll see that the evidence was being tracked all along. Certainly to better outcomes than if she defensively scolded the dog for snapping at her unfairly.
It's true that this tends to break the social scripts regardless, but in a good way that side steps rather than engages in conflict. For example, one time my wife accidentally cut in a drive through line, and the guy she cut in front of got super pissed and started yelling at her. When her response was just "Oh, I'm sorry I didn't see you. Want me to back out so you can have your spot in line back?", he immediately had his foot in his mouth in recognition of "Fuck, I'm the asshole here, for not considering the possibility of an innocent mistake" -- which I think is pretty safe to say wasn't part of the script he was running in his head. Technically that one is kinda admitting guilt, but only admitting what was true, which was only an innocent mistake not "deserving to get yelled at" (hence the foot in mouth), and iirc not even one he thought was worth backing out to correct after she acknowledged it.
Does that make more sense, or do you have more pushback?