All of Relsqui's Comments + Replies

Absolutely. That doesn't contradict what I said in the slightest.

Fair point. I'm not sure either; I think I'm relying on a given individual who is e.g. intersex either a) knowing that, and being able to make a better-educated guess about their chromosomes than any heuristic I offer, or b) not knowing that, which I'm willing to assume correlates well to having genitals that either do look like a penis or don't.

Also, rereading that explanation, I'm annoyed at how I worded it. It's okay, but my trans*-inclusive vocabulary has improved since then and I could do better. Hell, just "if unsure, select 'yes' if you were born with a penis" would have been sufficient.

Came out of activity hibernation to take this. Thanks for seeing a thing that needed doing and choosing to do it!

Problems with the gender field have already been discussed; the sexuality question has some of the same issues. "Gay" and "straight" don't really make sense for people with nonbinary gender, and many people interpret "bisexual" as referring to "both" genders (male and female), as opposed to a more inclusive "queer" or "pansexual." I do honestly appreciate how much effort you've put into making the survey as inclusive as it already is, though.

So how you do decide which options merit inclusion? Which snowflakes are special enough--or, I suppose, mundane enough? And what's the harm in counting how many snowflakes aren't, even if you don't ask them exactly what type they are?

If you put "other" - and this applies to any of the questions, not just this one - you're pretty much wasting your vote

I disagree; it might be important to identify oneself as something which is not one of the presented options, even if no one cares what other thing you are. For example ...

I was kind of surprised how many people can't settle on a specific gender, even though the aim of the question was more to figure out how many men versus women are on here

... I'm genderqueer, and when I take demographic surveys it's important to me that ... (read more)

You're correct; we asked for Y chromosomes rather than X chromosomes because it's way easier to have an extra X and not know it than to have a Y and not know it. So if we ask about Y, we can rough-sort into "probably XY" and "probably XX" groups and then look at the statistics for chromosomal deviations within those groups.

Oh, thoroughly agreed. That was an observation, not an advocation.

I only just noticed this reply, so we're even. ;) Thanks.

(On one occasion, when highly motivated to have a departing guest take leftovers home with her if and only if she actually wanted leftovers, but not knowing her default rules, I ended up saying "So, among your tribe, how many times do I have to repeat an offer to have it count as a genuine offer?")

I once saw a friend ask our host, upon leaving a party, if he would like her to leave the rest of the cake she brought, which we'd eaten some of but hadn't finished. She's very asky, he's very guessy. However, she knows this, and immediately followed up... (read more)

There are some things which it's impolite to say, in any words, because the sentiment is impolite--for example, "I don't want you to come to my party." Guess culture, applied well, allows you to avoid having to say those things or cause the attendant hurt feelings. (Guess culture applied poorly avoids the hurt feelings but puts you in the awkward position where they're at the party anyway because you felt compelled to invite them.) The same situation in ask culture requires you come out with it.

This may sound like a good thing in the long run--es... (read more)

FWIW, among my friends--whom I might describe as "polite askers" or "assertive guessers"--it's common to ask "does anybody want to split this with me?" That way, you're both asking for what you want (more of the thing) and making an offer in a guess-culture-compatible way. It's easy for other people to accept, because now by taking it they're not preventing you from having it. If no one does, you can be reasonably confident no one else actually wanted it.

A variant on the same thing is: "Would anyone else like this?" ... (read more)

Correction: it's a good excuse to eat TWICE as much pie.

thanking-for-thanking, long buildups to requests, apologising for things which are clearly not the other persons' fault

(Assuming you mean "not the apologizer's fault" in the last one.) I don't do these things, and I don't think they're necessary forms of courtesy, at least in a peer situation--customer service calls for jumping through hoops sometimes but I don't think that's what we're discussing.

How much have you considered the level of politeness you prefer to receive as opposed to the potentially interesting/fun problem of working out wh

Yeah, but the scale we're using isn't very precise. The variables you mention will move the threshold around, certainly, but not so much that shokwave can't at least give me a smallish range. We can limit it to modern, Western, and no significant status differences from each other.

Polite means a very different thing here (Australia) than it does in the US for example.

Yeah, I can tell. ;)

In actual practice I behave the way I described; I like to think that if this were drastically counterproductive for my goals, I would have noticed by now.

At any rate, the goal under discussion was informing the other person of the error in a way that didn't result in defensiveness or aggression.

Oh, interesting. I hadn't thought of it in those terms before but it does immediately make sense.

It's true about status, though. It works out okay in my current time and place, where I very rarely encounter people whose status is so drastically and publicly different from mine that it would call for significantly different behavior. Or at least, that's my perception; if I encountered one of your friends on the other side of a cash register, we'd apparently have different ideas about what our relative status was and what level of courtesy was called for. I wonder what leads to that difference.

Hmm. I think you're onto something, but that doesn't quite fit for me. Off the top of my head, I think I do something more like this:

I run the words I'm considering saying through my mental simulation of the person I'm talking to--which is going to have "like me" or "like normal" as defaults where I lack details--and check for snags like "does not acknowledge hearer's agency/competence" or "implies hearer smells bad." If I find one, I'll either remove/change the problematic wording or add words to counterbalance them... (read more)

Hmm. Getting an answer forced me to figure out exactly why I was asking. ;) I guess the followup question is, where on that scale would you put the threshold for everyday, out-in-public polite conversation between neurotypical adults? That is, the expected level, below which someone would come across as rude.

Well, that's as much politeness as I was talking about, so I still think it's no worse than bluntness would have been.

Hmm--my goal is to inform the other person of the error. This does not require them to respond.

Agreed about standardization; knowing what to expect is useful in communication generally. My dad (former pilot) is fond of pointing out that this is how pilots and ATC people understand each other over crackly radios. There's only a small set of possible things they could be saying, and they know what to expect, so they only have to listen for whether the crackly voice matches what they're expecting.

even if that means taking twice as long to get to the point

I still find the time argument odd. The difference doesn't seem like that much to me, and the couple of seconds seem trivial weighed against the social currency you gain by taking them.

Anything softer would have been condescending.

Do you find this condescending?

"You seem to have misread his comment--he said 'bowing out now,' not 'for now.'"

If so, can you explain why? Whether you do or not, what significantly worse result would you expect from that response, as opposed to teasing him about it?

Oh, yes, I'll certainly agree with that. Even the examples in the original post were a little too fluffy for my taste, and I'm the one who's a stickler for courtesy. There's certainly a balance to be struck--enough, but no more--which I haven't emphasized enough for how important it is. Thanks for the reminder.

I wonder how much striking that balance is part of the skill of being useful and courteous at the same time.

For calibration purposes, where on that spectrum would you place the conversation we're having right now? :)

That's exactly it.

It's an interesting example of balancing the need for clear rules without having so much specificity that it's easy to game.

Yeah, that was one of the major goals in the channel rules. Both the long and the short versions are explicit that if you come up with a way to be a pain in the ass that we haven't already thought of, we'll still kick you, even though it's not already in the rules. :P If you're curious, the long version is here and the short version is here. I didn't compose all of them but I did write them. (That is, I didn't choose everything tha... (read more)

It's the prescriptive/descriptive divide.

Oh hey, so it is. Well observed. (This is not sarcasm; I actually hadn't noticed.)

ought ... error ... worse

The meaningfulness of these words relies on sharing the relevant parts of a value system, and we haven't come anywhere near establishing that that's the case. If you mean that it's definitely more useful for people to behave in the way you prefer, you have not yet convinced me of that.

There doesn't seem to be any point being purely descriptive about anything.

That depends on the goal, doesn't it? If y... (read more)

Mm, okay, let's put it another way than "good" then. Perhaps: "That's a desireable outcome and your method would work if we had the resources, but we don't."

Crocker's Rules are appealing. That's taking responsibility!

Can't you take exactly the same responsibility for your own actions without ever thinking of or mentioning some rules?

ETA: Man, it's frustrating to get downvoted for asking a question. If the question is stupid or the answer is obvious, fine, but I haven't learned anything unless you tell me why.

Buddhism has this idea too. Here's a nicely specific bit from one of the suttas, on how the criteria for "right speech" encompass much more than telling the truth:

In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial (or: not connected with the goal), unendearing and disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing and disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true

Something I have trouble remembering:

To someone for whom it is normal to choose words carefully and connote respect, it's obvious that this is the right way to go about things--it gets other people on your side, so you don't have to fight as much to get what you want or convince people of something. It's also more pleasant to be around, and is the way you wish to be treated.

To someone for whom it is normal to be as direct, clear, and efficient in language as possible, it's obvious that this is the right way to go about things--it's much more honest than in... (read more)

It isn't dishonest to say "this is a good idea, but it might be difficult for these reasons" rather than "your idea isn't feasible for these reasons" (unless of course you don't like the idea, in which case pick a different way of expressing politeness). The first one is stating the objection and also implying respect; the second one is stating the objection and also implying disrespect.

If you really wanted to state the objection without making any implication of respect at all, the nearest thing which comes to mind right now would be p... (read more)

Elaborating on nerzhin's comment, which I think is well stated: the tradeoff between clarity and politeness is not absolute. If politeness is non-habitual and thus difficult, it requires a lot of your energy and attention, and you have to give up some of the energy you could otherwise have spent being clear. This is much less the case when you're very practiced at speaking courteously, because that action becomes automatic; you can then use all your conscious focus on clarity.

It's much the same as the speed/accuracy tradeoff in, say, typing, or playing a m... (read more)

I agree with this; I found the metaphor choice sort of disconcerting. (Given that I agreed very much with the overall point, I didn't find it important enough to comment on, but I have a lower threshold for agreeing with someone else.)

This is not the answer to your question, but it might be relevant/interesting that communicating respectfully/politely by default is one of the stated rules of #xkcd. Obviously it doesn't actually happen every moment, and people aren't kicked for being rude once, but there is an atmosphere of not tolerating rudeness for its own sake. The ops are reluctant, but willing if it goes on long enough, to get rid of someone whose only crime is being incredibly unpleasant to interact with. This is in line with the community's goal of being pleasant and entertaining... (read more)

This is really interesting; thanks for adding it to the conversation. (I haven't chewed on it mentally enough to have an actual comment, but I wanted to elaborate on the upvote.)

Second, lack of politeness is a countersignalling method to indicate friendship and community by showing you are close enough to a person that politeness is unnecessary

As you say, that only works if everyone is already on board with this. What the OP is talking about is, effectively, the situation where you're saying "hey nigga wassup!" to someone you've just met or barely know. In order to use direct communication to signal closeness, you need to be sure that you're on the same page first.

It's not a status hit to you. It's a status hit to them. Feel free to make whatever noble choices you want about being willing to make yourself look stupid in a public forum, but you don't have the right to make that choice for someone else.

I've met people who get huffy about the suggestion that they preface their opinions with "in my opinion" or "I think that." For a long time I had trouble explaining what good came of doing so; the best I've got so far is "it distinguishes you from the people who think their opinions are facts." Does this make sense? Any suggestions for making it clearer?

Edit: I just found a couple more ways to explain this in my notes file. One is that "x is bad" invites the conversation "no it's not!" "yes it is!"... (read more)

Upvoted on spec; I tabbed out the essay to read later. (Commenting mostly as a reminder to myself.)

ETA: Okay, yes, upvote stands, that was good.

This is dead on; if I'd thought of it, I would have written it myself. ;) One thing you're missing, though, is an example of where it is okay to be blunter--with very close friends, with whom you already have an understanding of a certain amount of respect. This doesn't obviate the need for politeness, of course, but it does lower the threshold of importance at which it's okay to be blunt. If I'm in a hurry in a shop, I'll still be polite to the clerk, because they don't know me well enough to know that I'm impatient and stressed, rather than just a jerk. ... (read more)

A friend of mine described a creative writing class in which the students would read pieces on a workshop day and then have other students respond. The responses came in phases. First, anybody who wished to praise something about the piece had the opportunity to say that. When they were finished with that, anyone who wished to criticize something about the piece could do so. There was a third phase, but I don't remember what it was--specific recommendations, maybe.

This always seemed like a very sensible model to me. It prevents the reader from feeling jump... (read more)

It's the wrong understanding.

I think that when one finds oneself writing this sentence, it is time to take a step back and think pretty hard about what one is saying.

We're not talking about a mathematical fact that can be proven or disproven as correct; we're not taking about people having the "wrong understanding" of, say, how Bayes's Theorem works. What we are doing is describing a culture in which behaving in x way signals y, to wit, being blunt and direct signals rudeness. This is hard to stomach for people who are part of a subculture whe... (read more)

I think respectful behavior is a good default. It doesn't need to be as padded as the OP's example, but what I have done in the past on LW is give a quick response to the overall post (so as to not be totally ignoring it just to point out little things), and then say "oh, by the way, a couple of things you might want to fix: x and y."

You're fooling yourself if you think that polite criticism doesn't work better on you than rude criticism. You may prefer directness and honesty, but you're still human, and you've still got an ego.

Also, following the golden rule to the letter is an example of the typical mind fallacy--and it's particularly bizarre when you know you're atypical in that regard. The golden rule is best used as a default--a heuristic for how to treat people in general when you have no more specific data about how a particular person would prefer you to treat them. Can you ima... (read more)

What makes the direct statement more "effective"? It makes it more forceful, to be sure, for exactly the reason you state:

with indirect requests or criticism you run the risk of the recipient having a sense that your criticism is somehow optional, that since you're not stating it forcefully they must have a choice whether or not to make the change

That's exactly the point. They DO have a choice. The other person has agency, and it's their idea. When you state your criticism directly, implying they must do it the way you state, you're expressin... (read more)

This is the kind of thing I'd like to see more of on here; explaining how to use e.g. language to get along with people who are socially unlike you is hard and being able to do it is important. I laughed at this:

The most common criticism seems to be that adding fluff is a waste of time, insincere, and reduces signal:noise ratio.

... because as I was reading the post, I was hearing in my head every time I've heard that excuse from a friend. "It's just fluff, it shouldn't matter, it doesn't mean anything if you just say it automatically ..."

It d... (read more)

Upvoted for

"What a coincidence, every single one?"

but while I'm here,

I support this 'x is my invisible dragon' turn of phrase!

me too.

I've seen you delete comments that received objecting responses a few times now. Why do you do that?