[LINK] An internet source of offended people misunderstanding each other.
I was planning to post this at some point, but now it's relevant as an interesting example of people perceiving the same event differently when they're offended. Now, we can observe the effects of offendedness on people's cognition! A Bad Case of the Dates is one of those internet humor sites that curate stories of weird behavior on dates. Some of the stories read like the person is suffering a psychotic break, but some of them just read like inexplicable weirdness.
Except now they're posting rebuttals! Which means you can read both peoples' perceptions of the events!
I didn't read that many, but here are some observations from reading a few pairs:
- Offended people are good at keeping track of what general topic is being talked about but not what is said about or how it is being discussed.
- Offended people easily distort things like time, the number of times something repetitive happened, etc.
- Offended people write about their own actions as if they are doing everything they can to keep the situation peaceful, while describing the other person's actions as hostile and escalating. Is this because offended people think they are keeping their offendedness perfectly hidden, while in reality the other person can see it?
- Offended people seem to read more additional offensiveness from the actions of the other person without sufficient evidence. They stop taking the person's words at face value and start reading more into connotation.
Overall, I used to think this site was pretty funny because some of the stories are really weird. But after reading this section, I just can't quite read it anymore because now I can roughly extrapolate all the distortions that the person is putting onto the non-rebutted stories. And the whole thing seems tragic now because it seems like these people go in with good intentions and then something really tiny just flips a switch in their brain and they turn defensive and stop communicating/cooperating and instead start cherrypicking their experience for false evidence that the other person is an inexplicably evil.
(And, of course, given that this is the internet, I realize that all of these could be completely fictional even though they claim that they're not.)
EDIT: I guess I'd say that definitely the stories are over-dramatized, which is rewarded by the website, so I wouldn't claim that these are real data. But I do think they are useful cautionary tales of not framing your narratives as "one time I met a crazy person who acted weird and crazy" and instead "one time I met a person who acted in a way that looked weird to me because I don't know / didn't realize something. Maybe they had this set of plausible reasons." More practice for making and testing hypotheses!
Balanced approaches to hanging with phyglike figures of awesomeness!
EDIT: Oops! Excuse my language. What I really meant to talk about was phyg.
This started out as a comment responding to this article about overcompensating for worshippy behavior by not showing admiration for anyone.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I participate in a number of internet communities that sprout up around a central person and I definitely feel the pull toward fangirling (such as this community! I admit it!), but other times I think I overcompensate and don't fangirl enough when the person is actually pretty cool. I also have a tiny brother (13) and he's operating in that phyg mentality right now: the moment you tell him that you don't *really* want to watch videos by his favorite Youtuber because you (gasp!) don't find them very funny, he takes it as a personal attack and starts arguing away every single flaw you bring up. (Ray William Johnson is perfect in every way!!) So I've been trying to come up with a good procedure for reacting to people you admire without under/overcompensating for the drive to worship these celebrities.
Here are some stuff I've tried to do
- Try to avoid accidentally caching the name of the community into your identity -- this will make criticism of the central celebrity feel less like a personal attack. I try not to be an 'X fan' or a Whovian or a part of anyone's Nation. I'm just a person that occasionally consumes media X. Or regularly consumes media X. Or sometimes gets addicted to media X. Media X is something I do and community X is something I participate in. That is where I stand with respect to media X and the rest of the world.
- Once you start trying to be aware of identity issues, you can spot which celebrities actively avoid being the center of a community of people who identify with them and which celebrities do things to intentionally suck you in. I don't think that's a good enough reason to conclude they're a phyg leader because there's a pretty big gap between fans who want your autograph and a mindless drone army, but I feel like it's useful to be aware of.
- Then, once you're just a person who consumes media X with some frequency, you can try to formulate precisely why you like media X, along with any flaws you feel like media X has, and then make a list. You can remind yourself that celebrity X lives in a pretty small blob of thingspace by reminding yourself of all the things that aren't on your list. For example, I can think Obama is a 'reasonably competent' president. I sure as hell don't know how to be a president! But I have very little evidence to think that he is also a nice person. Or fun to hang out with. Or good at sports/math/music/science/ethics. Or that he's going to save the world. This lets you safely go around saying that you admire these properties of media X, which is not a fangirly thing to say at all.
- Once you make the list, you can sorta feel the halo effect happen! It's a lot harder to reject some of those than others! One thought experiment is good-looking actors/celebrities that you like in movies that are also being smart or doing something good for the world. (I really want to think JGL is also a nice person. But all I know is he was good in that one movie ...)
- The list also lets you put your likes in context with respect to value. For example, I appreciate that the SourceFed team admitted when they didn't know certain facts during the presidential election. But that's *less* valuable than someone who does have facts and sources, though definitely better than someone shamelessly making stuff up.
The original article asks:
So rather than guess any further, I'm going to turn this over to my readers. I'm hoping in particular that someone used to feel this way—shutting down an impulse to praise someone else highly, or feeling that it was cultish to praise someone else highly—and then had some kind of epiphany after which it felt, not allowed, but rather, quite normal.
Until I started going through this process with the media I consume, I did feel pretty sketchy expressing admiration for things. Now I feel like I have pretty good upper and lower bounds on my admiration for things, so I feel oriented when people try to either accuse me of being a fangirl or accuse the things I like of sucking. I'm permitted to like stuff that sucks in some dimensions or doesn't address others! Not everything I like has to be flawless!
But this leads me to another question. Is there more stuff to be done?! This only works as well as individual people can poke around in their own brains and be honest with themselves. Is there a way to push back at internet mini-celebrities and get them to actively resist becoming a phyg? That is, should something be done about (2)? Or is this an individual 'responsibility' and not really a community issue? Or is it part of the bigger push to teach application of rationality to everything and therefore not something to focus on?
Who is the audience of my journal?
I posted this question as a comment* on this Luminosity article, but I guess that was the wrong place for it and I still really want to know what people think. The article says:
It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.
I agree! I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts and looking at them.
Here is my problem: I think I may have been over-trained by high school to write for an audience. So, if I'm keeping a journal of my thoughts to look back on later, who is my audience?
If I'm writing as if I'm writing for myself, then my writing won't make any sense to other people. Like, I'll write "but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment for the whole evening." This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won't be able to follow the causal links. Instead, I can write in a way that another person would understand, and explain everything that wouldn't make sense to someone who isn't me. But then who am I writing for? At this point in the process, I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don't personally need an explanation for in a document that I assume other people aren't going to see and might not even care about if they did. (Like people with personal blogs! They explain things! Why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?
But also, writing for yourself with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing brings up security issues? If I'm writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts that I want to document about my friend, I'm going to write "Joe" because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven't talked to him about directly. Which means I need to censor names. But at soon as I start censoring names, then I'm already no longer writing for myself, but for an audience that I'm trying to hide information from. This sounds like a problem because then I'm no longer recording everything and also trying to avoid adding details that give people away. But, overall, I'm writing for an audience again, which brings up all those other audience-related issues I mentioned earlier.
Help! How should I write things?
*Should I delete the old comment?
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