So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? And maybe you add "I'm completely fine with anything!" to ensure you're really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.
This error reminds me of people on a dating app who kill the conversation by texting something like "How's your week going?"
When texting on a dating app, if you want to keep the conversation flowing nicely instead of getting awkward/strained responses or nothing, I believe the key is to anticipate that a couple seconds of low-effort processing on the recipient's part will allow them to start typing their response to your message.
"How's your week going?" is highly cognitively straining. Responding to it requires remembering and selecting info about one's week (or one's feelings about one's week), and then filtering or modifying the selection so as to make one sound like an interesting conversationalist rather than an undifferentiated bore, while also worrying that one's selection about how to answer doesn't implicitly reveal them as being too eager to brag, or complain, or obsess about a particular topic.
You can be "conversationally generous" by intentionally pre-computing some of their cognitive work, i.e. narrowing the search space. For instance:
"I'm gonna try cooking myself 3 eggs/day for lunch so I don't go crazy on DoorDash. How would you cook them if you were me?"
With a text like this (ideally adjusted to your actual life context), they don't have to start by narrowing down a huge space of possible responses. They can immediately just ask themselves how they'd go about cooking an egg. And they also have some context of "where the conversation is going": it's about your own lifestyle. So it's not just two people interviewing each other, it has this natural motion/momentum.
Using this computational kindness technique is admittedly kind of contrived on your end, but on their end, it just feels effortless and serendipitous. For naturally contrived nerds like myself looking for a way to convert IQ points into social skills, it's a good trade.
The computational kindness principle in these conversations works much like the rule of improv that says you're supposed to introduce specific elements to the scene ("My little brown poodle is digging for his bone") rather than prompting your scene partners to do the cognitive work ("What's that over there?").
Oh and all this is not just a random piece of advice, it's yet another Specificity Power.
4Hmm, I think people have occasionally asked me "how's your week going" on dating apps and I've liked it overall - I'm pretty sure I'd prefer it over your suggested alternative! No doubt to a large extent because I suck at cooking and wouldn't know what to say. Whereas a more open-ended question feels better: I can just ramble a bunch of things that happen to be on my mind and then go "how about yourself?" and then it's enough for either of our rambles to contain just one thing that the other party might find interesting.
It feels like your proposed question is a high-variance startegy: if you happen to find a question that the other person finds easy and interesting to answer, then the conversation can go really well. But if they don't like the direction you're offering, then it'd have been better to say something that would have given them more control over the direction.
Context is a huge factor in all these communications tips. The scenario I'm optimizing for is when you're texting someone who has a lot of options, and you think it's high expected value to get them to invest in a date with you, but the most likely way that won't happen is if they hesitate to reply to you and tap away to something else. That's not always the actual scenario though.
Imagine you're the recipient, and the person who's texting you met your minimum standard to match with, but is still a-priori probably not worth your time and effort going on a date with, because their expected attractiveness+compatibility score is too low, though you haven't investigated enough to be confident yet. (This is a common epistemic state of e.g. a woman with attractive pics on a dating app that has more male users.)
Maybe the first match who asks you "how's your week going" feels like a nice opportunity to ramble how you feel, and a nice sign that someone out there cares. But if that happens enough on an app, and the average date-worthiness of the people that it happens with is low, then the next person who sends it doesn't make you want to ramble anymore. Because you know from experience that rambling into a momentumless conversation will just lead it to stagnate in its next momentumless point.
It's nice when people care about you, but it quickly gets not so nice when a bunch of people with questionable date-appeal are trying to trade a cheap care signal for your scarce attention and dating resources.
If the person sending you the message has already distinguished themselves to you as "dateworthy", e.g. by having one of the best pics and/or profile in your judgment, then "How's your week going" will be a perfectly adequate message from them; in some cases maybe even an optimal message. You can just build rapport and check for basic red flags, then set up a date.
But if you're not sold on the other person being dateworthy, and they start out from a lower-leverage position in the sense that they initially consider you more dateworthy than you consider them, then they better send a message that somehow adds value to you, to help them climb the dateworthiness gap.
But again, context is always the biggest factor, and context has a lot of detail. E.g. if you don't consider someone dateworthy, but you're in a scenario where someone just making conversation with you is adding value to you (e.g. not a ton of matches demanding your attention using the same unoriginal rapport-building gambit), then "How's it going" can work great.
This is actually the default context if you're brave enough to approach strangers you want to date in meatspace. The stranger can be much more physically attractive or higher initially-perceived dating market value than you. Yet just implicitly signaling your social confidence through boldness, body language, and friendly/fun way of speaking and acting, raises your dateworthiness significantly, and the real-world-interaction modality doesn't have much competition these days, so the content of the conversation that leads up to a date can be super normal smalltalk like "How's it going".
1Bonus points in a dating context: by being specific and authentic you drive away people who won't be compatible. In the egg example, even if the second party knows nothing about the topic, they can continue the conversation with "I can barely boil water, so I always take a frozen meal in to work" or "I don't like eggs, but I keep pb&j at my desk" or just swipe left and move on to the next match.
Can confirm, I also didn't have good experience with open-ended questions on dating apps. I get more responses with binary choice questions that invite elaboration, e.g. "Are you living here or just visiting?" and "How was your Friday night, did you go out or stay in?".
Outside of dating, another example that comes to my mind are questions like "What's your favorite movie?". I now avoid the "what's your favorite" questions because they require the respondent to assess their entire life history and make a revealing choice as if I'm giving them a personality test – not everyone is prepared and vulnerable enough to do that. It's also impossible to decline to answer without coming along as impolite ("I'm not telling you") or unsophisticated ("I don't really have a favorite").
Instead, I ask "Did you watch any interesting movies recently?", and sometimes add a justification for the question that lowers the stakes ("I'm looking for something new to watch"). This allows the respondent to either answer something their memory readily gives them right away, or simply answer "Not really", in which case I might reply with something I've seen recently and recommend it.
Yeah nice. A statement like "I'm looking for something new to watch" lowers the stakes by making the interaction more like what friends talk about rather than about an interview for a life partner, increasing the probability that they'll respond rather than pausing for a second and ending up tapping away.
You can do even more than just lowering the stakes if you inject a sense that you're subconsciously using the next couple conversation moves to draw out evidence about the conversation partner, because you're naturally perceptive and have various standards and ideas about people you like to date, and you like to get a sense of who the other person is.
If done well, this builds a curious sense that the question is a bit more than just making formulaic conversation, but somehow has momentum to it. The best motivation for someone to keep talking to you on a dating app is if they feel they're being seen by a savvy evaluator who will reflect back a valuable perspective about them. The person talking to you can then be subconsciously thinking about how attractive/interesting/unique/etc they are (an engaging experience). Also, everyone wants to feel like they're maximizing their potential by finding someone to date who's in the upper range of their "league", and there are ways to engage in conversation that are more consistent with that ideal.
IMO the best type of conversation to have after a few opening back&forths, is to get them talking about something they find engaging, which is generally also something that reflects them in a good light, which makes it fun and engaging for them while also putting you in a position to give a type of casual "feedback", ultimately leading up to a statement of interest which shows them why you're not just another random match but rather someone they have more reason to meet and not flake on. Your movie question could be a good start toward discovering something like that, but probably not an example of that unless they're a big movie person.
I'd try to look at their profile to clues of something they do in their life where they make an effort that someone ought to notice and appreciate, and get em talking about that.
Those are just some thoughts I have about how to distinguish yourself in the middle part of the conversation between opening interest and asking them on a date.
I notice that this is a standard pattern I use and had forgotten how non-obvious it is, since you do have to imagine yourself in someone else's perspective. If you're a man dating women on dating apps, you also have to imagine a very different perspective than your own - women tend to have many more options of significantly lower average quality. It's unlikely you'd imagine yourself giving up on a conversation because it required mild effort to continue, since you have less of them in the first place and invest more effort in each one.
The level above that one, by the way, is going from being "easy to respond to" to "actively intriguing", where your messages contain some sort of hook that is not only an easy conversation-continuer, but actually wants them to either find out more (because you're interesting) or keep talking (because the topic is interesting)
Worth noting is I don't have enough samples of this strategy to know how good it is. However, it is also worth noting is I don't have enough samples because I wound up saturated on new relationships a couple weeks shortly after starting this strategy, so for a small n it was definitely quite useful.
When my brother was trying to meet girls on social media sites about twenty years ago, after going through early PUA stuff and throwing out some of the nonsense, this was his the message decided to use as his cold opening:
Why did the apple like the banana?
Yeah, it's a dad joke; the punchline is "Because it has appeal!" It worked, though; there were enough girls that were curious enough about the punchline to respond to a message from a stranger in order to hear it.
People often act like this, and they tend to assume they're doing the other person a favor by being so open and flexible. After all, this way the other person will have to make no trade-offs and can spend their time exactly as they please. The problem with this however is that it's computationally unkind: it offloads all the effort
Computational kindness by this definition is equivalent to Emotional Labor, no?
CK, as used here, seems more transactional and situation specific. Emotional Labor is usually referring to a pattern over time, including things like checking for unknown unknowns, and "making sure X gets done" Both ideas are playing in similar space.
I really liked this post! I will probably link to it in the future.
Edit: Just came to my mind that these are things I tend to think of under the heading "considerateness" rather than kindness, but it's something I really appreciate in people either way (and the concepts are definitely linked).
Just came to my mind that these are things I tend to think of under the heading "considerateness" rather than kindness
Guess I'd agree. Maybe I was anchored a bit here by the existing term of computational kindness. :)
Curated. I like the variety of the examples, really highlights how there are multiple angles from which you might fail to be kind. Though failure is a harsh term. I'm often tempted to levels of labels on things, where I do think the attempts made ("we'll do whatever you want", "kick me out whenever") are still kindnesses and better than not doing those things. It's just we can aspire to even greater levels of kindness.
I'm curious how much the response one wants to make in response to this is in that in individual interactions, move beyond cached notions of what's kind behavior and actually boot up more detailed models of the other person and their experience as opposed to recomputing what's actually kind across various common scenarios that can be more heuristically and cheaply applied. As usual, perhaps some of both!
Forget where I read it, but this Idea seems similar. When responding to a request, being upfront about your boundaries or constraints feels intense but can be helpful for both parties. If Bob asks Alice to help him move, and Alice responds "sure thing" that leaves the interaction open to miscommunication. But if instead Alice says, " yeah! I am available 1pm to 5pm and my neck has been bothering me so no heavy lifting for me!" Although that's seems like less of a kind response Bob now doesn't have to guess at Alice's constraints and can comfortably move forward without feeling the need to tiptoe around how long and to what degree Alice can help.
I am guilty of both offering opt-ins and fake exits, and also being one of those people that don't want to rock the boat by taking an opt-in or a fake exit. Thanks for this article, as it's highlighted a double standard in me. I knew already that I have a tendency towards cognitive unloading, but this gives very clear examples of situations I might want to have a pre-prepared position for that's not contradictory.
This is an extremely relatable post, in both ways. I often find myself on the other side of the these interactions too and not knowing how to label and describe my awareness of what's happening without coming across as Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
1Thanks for writing this post, I really liked it!
Due to the high upvotes, I figure it has a decent chance to feature in the LW Review for 2024, so I figured I'd make some typo & edit suggestions. Feel free to ignore.
An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably in those closer to lesswrong, is -> An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably is well received in those closer to LessWrong, is [I feel like an "is" is missing in the middle, but this edit makes the sentence a bit awkward due to the "lesswrong, is" follow-up]
in exchange for the utility you get out of it yourself -> in exchange for the utility you yourself get out of smoking
The idea is that when when people make some decision -> The idea is that when
whenpeople make some decisioninstead of deciding for the other option. -> instead of deciding on the other option.
even though that would not be expected thing to do. -> even though that would not be the expected thing to do.
opt-in style questions -> opt-in-style questions
Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and make any such should-claims. -> Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and not meant to make any such should-claims.
imagine a friend from a different country is visiting and will stay with you for a while. You're exchanging some text messages beforehand in order to figure out how to spend your time together. You want to show your friend the city, and you want to be very accommodating and make sure all their preferences will be met. So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? And maybe you add "I'm completely fine with anything!" to ensure you're really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.
An additional angle on situations like this: Your friend may be hoping to choose something that's positively enjoyable for you. Saying "I'm completely fine with anything" may not meet that bar, and doesn't give any hints as to what would. To illustrate directly, compare "There are ten restaurants nearby and I'm fine with any of them" vs "There are ten restaurants nearby, I've been to them all and I love them all". I think there are people who would respond to the second with "Great, I'll look them up and pick my favorite" and would find the first frustrating (and may respond by probing, "Well, are there any that you particularly like?" [And if you really don't care about food, then their hope to find a restaurant you enjoy is destined for frustration.]).
In this case there's also the aspect that, since you live there (likely for some years) and they're from another country, you likely know a lot more about the local offerings than they do (not guaranteed—perhaps you're an ascetic who doesn't explore such things and they're a tourist who has researched your town—but likely), so in a division-of-labor sense it's likely appropriate for you to volunteer info first.
That second aspect is indeed about the pure computational problem. The first aspect is a combination of the computation/search problem and an emotional negotiation element.
Instead of flatly offloading responsibility the "throw me out whenever" way, invite the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together, by e.g. raising the question of when you should leave and then figuring out together what factors this depends on and how you want to make that decision
This fails the sniff test of "bad moods as a fragility test for social norms". You critique Ask Culture for responsibility offloading, but ignore its upside-- much greater computational kindness than "inviting the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together". The primary characteristic of a bad mood (I'm using this term for "normal" bad moods like hungover, tired, caffeine crash) is lowered computational capacity.
I wonder if Responsibility Offloading and Computational Kindness can be thought of as a position/velocity tradeoff; i.e, that one can not perfectly have the one without losing the other.
Yeah, that was my first reaction to that section as well.
Most people are not remotely open to having an unsolicited in-depth discussion of their politeness algorithm at the end of a hangout.
On the other hand, "What time do you want me to leave? Maybe 8pm?" works fine in my experience, for reasons the post covers well.
There seems to be one particular situation that gets on my nerves and fits into this category. It goes something like these two ways: 1) at the end of an event, everyone is asked unexpectedly to make a short speech about the success of the event, or 2) in the middle of the event, everyone is abruptly expected to produce some creative output. Number two is, of course, worse, and can make the whole event a complete hell for half the participants. Number one is just annoying. Perhaps it would be better to ask if anyone has anything to add at the end, so that we can hear from the few people who really have something to add? Usually, however, this is resolved by practically everyone saying meaningless trivia in a couple of sentences. Even though many people can feel okay with their own triviality, others feel embarrassed that they had nothing meaningful or witty to say and that they therefore wasted people's time.
What I needed to learn was that it is also perfectly ok to set a boundary and decline such a request with a smile and in a non-disruptive way: "Thanks, but I'll pass. Over to, <name of the person sitting beside you>, next."
I would add 3) at the start of an event, everyone is asked to state their hopes and expectations about the event. While it's certainly useful to reflect on these things, I (embarassingly?) often in such situations don't even have any concrete hopes or expectations and am rather in "let's see what happens" mode. I still think it's fair to ask this question, as it can provide very benefitial feedback for the organizer, but they should at least be aware that a) this can be quite stressful for some participants, and b) many of the responses may be "made up" on the fly, rather than statements backed by a sufficient level of reflection. Of course just being honest there and saying "I don't have any expectations yet and just thought the title of the event sounded interesting" is probably the best option, but I think 10-years-ago-me would probably not have been confident enough to say that, and instead made up some vague plausible sounding claims that had a higher chance of signaling "I've got my shit together and definitely thought deeply about why I'm attending this event beforehand".
but this would be what I'd call a "fake exit option"
Here's how the simulation played out in my head as I was reading this:
- I really wanted to halt the volunteering-chain before it came to the newbie.
- I didn't manage to complete that intention before it was too late.
- I wanted to correct my mistake and complete it anyway, by trying to offer the "exit option".
What I didn't notice immediately was that thought 3 was ~entirely invoked by heuristics from fake kindness that I haven't yet filtered out. Thank you for pointing it out. I may or may not have catched it if this played out IRL.
This is why social situations should have an obligatory 10-second pause between every speech-act, so I can process what's actually going on before I make a doofy. xd
⧉: My motivations for writing this comment was:
➀ to affiliate myself with this awesome post,
➁ to say "hey I'm just like u; I care to differentiate twixt real & fake kindness!"
➂ to add my support/weight to the core of this post, and say "this matters!"
1
1I've got to admit, I look at most of these and say "you're treating the social discomfort as something immutable to be routed around, rather than something to be fixed by establishing different norms". Forgive me, but it strikes me (especially in this kind of community with high aspie proportion) that it's probably easier to tutor the... insufficiently-assertive... in how to stand up for themselves in Ask Culture than it is to tutor the aspies in how to not set everything on fire in Guess Culture.
Por que no los dos? It's a minority of people who have the ability and inclination to learn how to conform to a different mileu than thier natural state.
I think it's a fair point. To maybe clarify a bit though, while potentially strawmanning your point a bit, my intention with the post was not so much to claim "the solution to all social problems is that sufficiently-assertive people should understand the weaknesses of insufficiently-assertive people and make sure to behave in ways that don't cause them any discomfort", but rather I wanted to try to shed some light on situations that for a long time I found confusing and frustrating, without being fully aware of what caused that perceived friction. So I certainly agree that one solution to these situations can be to "tutor the insufficiently-assertive". But still, such people will always exist in this world, and if you're, say, a community builder who frequently interacts with new people, then it can still be valuable to be aware of these traps.
So what can we do about it? I think there's several options:
One approach here, which I don't think falls into the three listed, is to start by implicitly offering a concession and give everyone a chance to accept or refuse it. For example, "Where can I go to smoke?" might work well in your example, since it is implicitly offering to go somewhere else to do so; if everyone agrees, "You don't have to go anywhere," you can assume they are really unbothered or at least not weighting their own dislike enough to feel you have wronged them.
Thanks for this post! As someone who at times tends to be a bit socially slow and not super assertive, this definitely helps me to point a finger on what might have caused past, slightly unpleasant situations. I feel like this is something that can be taken into consideration quite well when preparing (private) events.
I liked the term Computational Kindness a lot! Thanks.
BTW, in the example you give for it and analogous situations it is, in addition, totally inefficient: you know your environment, what is worth visiting/doing and so on, so it is relatively easy to pick the day's program. The visitor, who doesn't know this environment will have a much harder time finding it out. So, it not only "offloads all the effort of coming up with ideas and making decisions to the other person", it greatly increases this effort. I think it is important to note this as well.
Good point. I guess one could come up with examples that have less of this inefficiency but still are "computationally unkind". Although in the end, there's probably some correlation between these concepts anyway. So thanks for adding that. 👌
Indeed! I think I remember having read that a while ago. A different phrasing I like to use is "Do you have a favorite movie?", because many people actually do and then are happy to share it, and if they don't, they naturally fall back on something like "No, but I recently watched X and it was great" or so.
What you say doesn't matter as much as what the other person hears. If I were the other person, I would probably wonder why you would add epicycles, and kindness would be just one possible explanation.
Fair point. Maybe if I knew you personally I would take you to be the kind of person that doesn't need such careful communication, and hence I would not act in that way. But even besides that, one could make the point that your wondering about my communication style is still a better outcome than somebody else being put into an uncomfortable situation against their will.
I should also note I generally have less confidence in my proposed mitigation strategies than in the phenomena themselves.
I kind of agree. And I probably do like a more confrontational approach than you do. (A tangent. I have deliberately put strangers into situations that were really uncomfortable for everybody, within the boundaries of 1) law and 2) common sense. Nobody was there for honest discourse. I was there for the thrill, they were there for the money. It was interesting, though, how we all still respected some lines in the sand without having to name them, like "give a warning for the first offence" or "go for the camera and not for the eyes".)
I am not quite sure about the writing/examples in computational kindness and responsibility offloading, but I think I feel the general idea.
For computational kindness, I think it is just really the difference in how people prefer to communicate, or making plans it seems, with the example on trip planning. I, for example, personally prefer being offered with their true thoughts - if they are okay with just really anything, or not. Anything is fine as long as that is what they really think or prefer (side talk: I generally think communicating real preferences will be the most efficient). I do not mind planning the trip myself in ways that I wanted. There is not really a right or wrong style. If the host person offered "anything is okay", but the receiver do not like planning, they could also simply say "Any recommendations? I like xxx or xxx generally." Communication goes both ways. The reason I think we should not say one way is better than another is, if the friend really wants to plan themselves, and then the host person planned a bunch, the receiver may also feel bad to reject the planned activities. Maybe what you really want to see, is that the host person cares enough to put some efforts into planning (just guessing)? And seems the relationship in this example between these two people are relatively close or require showing some efforts?
For responsibility offloading, I think some of these examples are not quite similar or parallel situations, but I generally get the proposal: "do not push other people in a pushy manner and should offer the clear option to say no" as opposed to a fake ask. In my opinion a fake ask is not true kindness - it is fake, so it is not really in any way kind. But at the same time, I've trained myself into taking the question literally - okay, if you asked, then it means you expect my answer to go both ways, then I will say no if I am thinking no. In the case the question is genuine - great! in the case it is not, too bad, the smoker should've be consistent with their words.
Most of these seems to be communication style differences, that just require another communication to sort out if the two parties need to communicate frequently.
Thank you for this great and well thought article on a topic of "kindness" that interests me in connection with the big puzzle: "how do people understand what people are meaning with their words?" In my observation, the process of understanding is not yet fully understood, except where understanding takes place without language.
In all the situations of ambiguity you describe, we again encounter the problem of language, that even clear and unambiguous sentences can be understood differently. And this is even possible in situations in which the context is shared by the speaker and the listener. In fact, even apparent sentences can be particularly difficult to understand if it remains unclear why they are being said.
Interestingly, this is always immediately the case when people have unfriendly feelings towards each other — the evidence for this is provided daily in heaps on social media (where the vast majority of "debates" revolve around the meaning of words and sentences that the other side supposedly misunderstands).
This leads to a surprising hypothesis: people can only understand each other in conversations when their minds are friendly towards the person they are talking to. Kindness means: I understand or want to understand what is happening inside you.
Suppose you understand this and really want to be friendly. In that case, every embarrassing situation is “easy” (in fact: nothing comes easy in human communication) to resolve:
1) Start a dialog: If there is the slightest embarrassment or uncertainty about a motive, always ask: "Do I understand you correctly that ... ?"
2) "Please" is reciprocal friendliness in advance and an underestimated factor for successful sociality.
3) Communicate your own feelings when there is an embarrassing moment. Allow your conversation partner to recognize how you feel.
4) Smile. It is no coincidence that we live in the era of "smileys", the substitute signs for facial expressions and gestures. Smiling is a key signal for the willingness to understand the person you are talking to because you have no bad or rejecting feelings towards her. Unfortunately, men tend to lack expression. In the clips (Tik-Tok, YouTube, etc.), however, we see how smiley faces are increasingly being imitated in real facial expressions. This seems cartoonish and silly, but can be explained by the concern that the words spoken alone could be misunderstood without further signals for "intention detecting".
In my eyes, however, humans much to easily fall into the loop of misunderstanding. There is no such thing as non-ambiguity. And when hidden feelings are involved, embarrassment is difficult to avoid. It even happens to lovers.
The common solution to the problem of first timers is to make the first time explicitly free.
This is also applicable to clubs with fixed buy in costs but unknown (to the newbie) benefits and works well whenever the cost is realtively small (as it should be if it is optional). If they don't like the price they won't come again.
‘Computational unkindness’ seems to intersect quite heavily with the idea of emotional labour, in particular that example about taking responsibility for planning a trip. I think this has already been quite heavily discussed in feminist circles as I guess many women on average might tend to be less assertive in the types of situations you described. I’m struggling to think of any real distinction between the two ideas actually.
Your money-donating example is a difficult one. Ideally, it would be better to anticipate this sort of thing ahead of time and intentionally create an environment where it's ok to say "no".
The facilitator could say something like: "this is intended as an exercise in group decision making, if you want to donate some of your own money as well to make this something you're more invested in, you are welcome to do that, but it's not something I expect everyone to be doing. We will welcome your input even if you're not putting money into the exercise this time." They could even say "I'm not adding anything myself today" to reinforce the message, and provide an ally, as in Asch's conformity experiments.
I find that most of these situations could be diffused by forward planning and expectation setting, though admittedly this is a mental load on the person who does the forward planning. Over time it becomes more natural and a person can build up conversational habits which follow these principles though.
Re computational unkindness, optimizing solely for what one person wants is easy. The complexity mostly arises from the picker trying to satisfy others' implicit preferences that they pretend not to have for the sake of being "flexible".
Complexity also arises when you have weak preferences, and think that others' preferences might be stronger than yours. So you're more "flexible" relatively, but there's no good way of calibrating the strength of their preferences without repeated interactions.
prices are one of the best mechanisms for communicating the strength of preferences, but perhaps among friends you want a separate made-up currency with a more equal distribution. Daniel Reeves just bites the bullet and uses dollars though: https://messymatters.com/tv/
Social messaging is fine balancing act: people like to offload responsibility and effort, especially if it doesn't come at the cost of status. And, to be honest, you don't know if your question would impose upon the other (in terms of cognitive load, social pressure or responsibility), so you it is smart to start your social bid low and see if the other wants to raise the price. Sometimes they work, creating a feedback loop similar to how superstitions evolve: if it is minimal effort and sometimes it is effective, better continue using it.
As a child, I despised a lot of these practices, to me it felt like people were lying all the time, or at least, hiding their true motivations or concerns. I tended to simply call out these adults on their bullshit. If somebody said "I'm fine with everything", I simply proposed something that I know that person is not fine with but that is absurd enough to indicate that I'm not being serious. As a child you can still get away with such behaviour, but many adults find it highly annoying. However, I still employ it among friends who I know don't judge me on that interaction or at least lace it with humor to make it socially acceptable.
However, I think such messaging can often turn into a social communication into a prisoner's dilemma type situation, where each party puts in the minimum succesfull effort resulting in a situation unsatisfactory to either party. I'm just not sure how (and if) we are able to recognize when a situation is a prisoner's dillema and when not. "How was your week?" is often a very welcoming question to me, but not for others.
Leaving things unspoken and relying on generally accepted principles can increase communication efficiency enormously, a lot of communication isn't a prisoner's dilemma type exchange after all, but it will run into issues occasionally, especially if the communicator do not share a set of unspoken rules.
Having grown up in Dutch culture, I was unusually direct (rude) for even a Dutch person, so travelling in Iran where things are absurdly polite at times was very interesting for me, for example. However, a society like Iran requires quite an amount of cognitive load for even simple issues.
Examples one and two are normal situations and people should know how to respond to them. The general principle is that when given an open ended question, don't aim to answer it in full, but make a small contribution and let the conversation flow.
Computational unkindness:
"What do you want to do? I'm completely fine with anything!"
"I've heard about X, I'd love to visit that place!", or "I don't know. What's a good place to hang out?"
Responsibility Offloading 1:
B: "By the way - feel free to throw me out any time! I've got tomorrow off, so am flexible, but just let me know when you've had enough of me"
A: "Hmm... I usually go to bed at 11pm."
Responsibility Offloading 2:
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Yes, I do mind people in a 10m radius of me smoking!"
Ok that was a joke. But you can still convey irritation and offoffload the responsibility at the same time. Say "Sure..." with discomfort in the intonation.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a lot like conflating kindness with coddling and then presenting that as a sort of moral injunction against asshatery.
Nobody wants to be shy, insecure and socially anxious. These are not attributes that anybody sets out to cultivate in themselves. I think they are properly seen as vices worth overcoming. And the more we push the idea that well-adjusted, polite society communicate in such a way as to remove friction for peoples' purely detrimental neuroses, the less incentive there is for people to recalibrate towards confidence, assertiveness and a deep sense of the right to exist as much as anyone else. In other words, the more we enable pathological social anxieties.
The answer to this is obviously not to embrace obliviousness and lionize tactless communication, but this current paradigm of talking about shyness, insecurity and social anxiety as though they are intractable or essential personality traits that we should all learn to appreciate reeks of misguided affirmation culture propaganda to me.
This comment is probably too severe, but I've seen a lot of this sort of sentiment floating around lately and it strikes me as unnecessarily fatalistic. We need to work with those who have somehow landed in a place where they experience unnecessary social anxieties so that they cam eventually grow out of it, not coddle them. There are times that I feel being good to somebody is mutually exclusive with being kind to them.
I don't think you can cure other people's shyness, insecurity, and social anxiety by being less nice to them.
I appreciate your perspective, and I would agree there's something to it. I would at first vaguely claim that it depends a lot on the individual situation whether it's wise to be wary of people's insecurities and go out of one's way to not do any harm, or to challenge (or just ignore) these insecurities instead. One thing I've mentioned in the post is the situation of a community builder interacting with new people, e.g. during EA or lesswrong meetups. For such scenarios I would still defend the view that it's a good choice to be very careful not to throw people into uncomfortable situations. Not only because that's instrumentally suboptimal, but also because you're in a position of authority and have some responsibility not to e.g. push people to do something against their will.
However, when you're dealing with people you know well, or even with strangers but on eye level, then there's much more wiggle room, and you can definitely make the case that it's the better policy to not broadly avoid uncomfortable situations for others.
Our common agreement is that it's imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.
This worries me because I'm not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper issues and potential consequences for ignoring them. At the same time it's tricky to argue against the sort of framing you, and others, have presented without seeming to advocate for simple 'buck up, Chuck' style tough love, which is not my position either.
I feel that there must be a good number of silent readers who share my trepidation, but recognize the topic as too thorny to seem worth getting into.
Good Article! I have a suggestion for you - please add a link to the original post in your emails, so it's easy to like and comment on. I am subscribed to your emails (of this blog), but the email only contains a link to your home page with all posts, NOT the specific post you shared in the email.
There's a particular kind of widespread human behavior that is kind on the surface, but upon closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. This post is about four such patterns.
Computational Kindness
One of the most useful ideas I got out of Algorithms to Live By is that of computational kindness. I was quite surprised to only find a single mention of the term on lesswrong. So now there's two.
Computational kindness is the antidote to a common situation: imagine a friend from a different country is visiting and will stay with you for a while. You're exchanging some text messages beforehand in order to figure out how to spend your time together. You want to show your friend the city, and you want to be very accommodating and make sure all their preferences will be met. So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? And maybe you add "I'm completely fine with anything!" to ensure you're really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.
People often act like this, and they tend to assume they're doing the other person a favor by being so open and flexible. After all, this way the other person will have to make no trade-offs and can spend their time exactly as they please. The problem with this however is that it's computationally unkind: it offloads all the effort of coming up with ideas and making decisions to the other person. So while it is kind on one level (respecting their object level preferences), it's unkind on another (effort, and respecting their possible meta level preferences about the planning process). And particularly if the friend's preferences about what exactly to do are not that strong, it now gives them a difficult and uncertain task for very little payoff.
So what's the computationally kind way of approaching this situation? You could name a (not too long) list of concrete proposals of how you could spend your time. If you know the person really well, you could suggest a full-fledged plan. If you don't know them that well, you could ask a few clarifying questions about their general preferences and then come up with a plan. And on top of this (rather than instead of it) you can make sure to point out that you're open to anything and are happy to change plans in any way. This way, the other person can decide themselves how much cognitive effort to invest. They can just say "yes" to your proposal, or can suggest some adjustments, or even come up with an entirely new plan if they really want to go that far.
Responsibility Offloading[1]
A somewhat similar pattern to computational kindness is that of offloading responsibility. Imagine Alice and Bob, two friends who are just getting to know each other better, are hanging out at Alice's place. It's getting late, but they're having a fun time. Bob is unsure about whether and when Alice wants him to leave, but he's fine with staying much longer. So he playfully says "By the way - feel free to throw me out any time! I've got tomorrow off, so am flexible, but just let me know when you've had enough of me".
Sometimes this is indeed a good move. Particularly when Bob knows that Alice is an assertive person who doesn't shy away from stating her preferences. But there are cases where this puts a big burden on Alice. Imagine Alice is generally rather insecure and indecisive. She now has to feel solely responsible for terminating the hangout. This is now something on her plate that she has to think about and decide, and communicate to Bob eventually in a non-offensive way. There are Alices out there who would be rather stressed out by this, and who would prefer Bob to carry that responsibility, or to have the two of them figure it out together. And there are Bobs out there who have no idea that some Alices may feel that way, and these Bobs may think that saying "Throw me out any time!" is the kind thing to say, blind to the drawbacks this comes with.
A related situation I've encountered quite a few times is this: I'm hanging out with some people, and one of them pulls out a pack of cigarettes and casually asks into the round "do you mind if I smoke?". My honest answer in such situations is that I mind a lot and have a really strong preference for people in a 10m radius around me not to smoke. But when I'm put on the spot to now basically decide whether the other person can do the thing they happen to want to do, or to put in my veto and hence prevent them from doing so, I'm much more inclined to go with the socially so much easier option of saying "I don't mind", at which point they're happily out of the equation because it's now fully my responsibility to deal with being in a situation I don't want to be in, and I can't even blame them for it.
I assume some people would now counter that it really is my problem if I'm too shy/careful/afraid/whatever to just say what I want to anyone anytime. Ask culture would be strongly in favor of the cigarette question, and probably of responsibility offloading in general, as technically this makes sense, is very explicit, avoids ambiguity and creates common knowledge within a group of people about where a certain responsibility lies. These are certainly real advantages! But it's also the case that this type of responsibility offloading tends to come at a cost for people with certain personalities, or people of (self-perceived) lower status in a given setting.
So what can we do about it? I think there's several options:
Opt-In vs Opt-Out
The distinction between opt-in and opt-out is quite well known from nudging and choice architecture. The idea is that when people make some decision, e.g. have to set a checkbox in a form, many of them will stick to the default (whatever it is) instead of deciding on the other option. This phenomenon is usually discussed in policy contexts or group decision-making, but it's also present in close-up social settings.
Imagine that Arthur and Beth are both attending an event that is a bit further away. Arthur is planning to go there by car and invites Beth to join him. After their return, Beth expresses her gratitude and asks one of two questions:
These two phrasings are pretty close to opt-in (1) and opt-out (2). The first question suggests that the default is that Beth was taken along for free, but if Arthur prefers to be compensated then Beth would be willing to pay him for the ride. The second question takes as a given that Beth will pay for the ride, and simply tries to clarify what amount would be reasonable.
In this case, the second option is much kinder to Arthur. In case Arthur does want compensation, he can very easily state the number. In case he doesn't, he can still say "Oh no, I'm happy to take you for free!", which gives him some kindness credit.
The first question on the other hand implies that the normal response for Arthur would be to not require any money from Beth. So if he says "no it's fine", he doesn't get any money, nor any social credit for being nice, because he's just doing what's normal and apparently expected. And if he does want some compensation, this implies he's stingy and unkind. One could go as far as saying Beth here claims the kindness credit to herself, by offering payment even though that would not be the expected thing to do.
Note that this says nothing about Beth's actual intentions. I'm sure people with the best intentions frequently ask opt-in-style questions in such cases even though they really would be perfectly fine with compensating the other person. But it's still important to be aware of the implications of the phrasing one chooses, and that it may affect the other person's response.
The Fake Exit Option[1]
Here's a situation I found myself in at an event of my EA local group a few months back: I was facilitating a giving game[2] with ~6 other people. Originally I was planning to provide the funding for it myself, but it turned out that a few of the present people were happy to add some money to the donation pool spontaneously. This then organically turned to one person after another stating if / how much money they would like to add. One of the attendees was pretty new to the group, and when it was their turn, I noticed that this was really not an ideal situation: it's certainly possible they experienced some pressure to follow the apparent standard of adding some money to the pool, and probably an amount similar to what the other people went with, even if they may have actually felt rather uncertain about it, or generally would have preferred to not spontaneously have any unplanned expenses that evening. Of course nobody would have minded at all if they had simply said "no I'd rather not add money to the pool" (in a way I would have even preferred that), but they had no way of knowing that for sure. So before I had really processed the whole situation, that new person had already agreed to provide a not so trivial amount of money.
Now, at that point, I could have said something like the following: "Ah, wait a second. It's really amazing that you're willing to add some money as well! But I notice that the situation maybe wasn't ideal and you maybe felt a bit pressured into it, because all the other people were giving money as well. I just really want to point out that it's completely fine for you to keep your money, it's no problem at all!" - but this would be what I'd call a "fake exit option": I'm technically offering this person the option to revise their decision now. But I'd argue that the vast majority of people, even those who did make the decision out of pressure and who may already regret said decision, would not change their decision at that point. And the reason is simply that changing your mind after such a statement would seem really embarrassing. You would basically acknowledge that "yes, I did make that original decision only because I felt some pressure to conform, and actually I wanted something else, but I was too scared to reveal my true preferences. But now that I have your permission to decide in a different way, I will do so". I would argue that the type of person who would be willing to admit such a thing is precisely the kind of person who would not succumb to the initial pressure to begin with.
So at first the person made a decision under pressure and maybe decided differently than they would upon reflection. But by then pointing this out and asking if they really want to make that decision, you in a way force them into committing to their original decision even more, and publicly and explicitly so. On the surface, asking them for confirmation this way and allowing them to change their mind seems like the kind thing to do. But in practice you just make the person own their initial decision, while once again shifting the responsibility for this whole situation fully to them.
So what can we do? What would a "real" exit option look like? It's hard to say, and very much depends on the concrete situation and people involved. Ideally you would think ahead far enough to avoid ending up in such situations to begin with. If it does happen anyway, some sensible things might be:
Isn't This Just Overcomplicating Things?
This post certainly has a bit of a "you shouldn't do all these things" vibe. But maybe taking so many ifs and buts into account just makes you a hopeless overthinker who never spontaneously communicates anything because there's always some risk that what you say or ask may make people uncomfortable.
The degree to which one should[3] keep such risks in mind surely varies a lot. It depends on questions such as whether you want to be "kind" to the people you interact with, on your role in different interactions, and on your own predisposition to occasionally experience the downside of such behaviors from others. If for instance you've often been inadvertently pressured into decisions and didn't feel comfortable to stand up for your preferences, then you're probably more aware of this issue in your own communication. But a lot of people, a lot of the time, don't consciously notice these patterns, so we keep bumping into them blindly, which is not a great situation to be in[4].
As I didn't find any established term for the concept, I made one up.
"Giving game" means that we had a certain amount of money available to donate, and wanted to collectively decide which charitable organizations to donate this money to. This was one half of an evening event, so took something like 1-2 hours.
Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and not meant to make any such should-claims. Rather it is about describing some not so obvious complexities of social interactions in order to make them easier to recognize, and thereby prevent (if so desired).
Particularly for those of us who are involved in any kind of community building.