Twitter is especially bad for this because most tweets are commands or evaluative judgments. You just scroll through and get dozens of people telling you what to do and think.
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(Or talk about birdwatching or cooking or woodworking or whatever. “Real” things.)
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If we could get people to think about politics/psychology/society in the same way they think about parts of the physical world they’re curious about, it would be super powerful.
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“Judgment” that is “merely intellectual” — just an assessment or a prediction — is a *good* thing once you get away from all the performative/validating/invalidating baggage.
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Why? If an assessment of a person conveys useful information, you can use it to accomplish goals. Same as all knowledge.
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Of course, when you think about it that way, it’s obvious that often you don’t have enough info to assess people, or your true assessment is kind of boring and moderate.
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True judgments of people allow for relative magnitudes, not just adjectives. Once I was arguing with a friend that I was “not very good at math.” He disagreed. Once we pinned it down we both agreed that there are probably 5000-10,000 living Americans better at math than me.
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True judgments of people allow you to say “this person is better than average in such-and-such a respect, but still not good enough to achieve such-and-such a goal.” Not everything has to be a dichotomy.
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Actually evaluating people — such that you can accurately predict their future behavior — is hard and I’m not unusually good at it.
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What I do think I’m decent at is discerning *when I don’t care* what the truth about the person is. When I’m thinking about the cartoon of them in my head, rather the imperfectly known real person outside it. (Because
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You’re gonna have things you don’t care about! Or that you only talk about as a pretext to talk about your own feelings and agendas. Or that you only talk about as a joke or for social bonding fodder.
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But for every topic that you only talk about as a way of talking about something else, there will be people who literally care about the thing itself.
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Celebrities and news events are the obvious example; for some people they’re a conversational hook or meme; to a much smaller number of people they’re real life.
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A lot of gossipy “judgments” people make are just *not real* in this way. They’re designed to make a good story or hyperbolic one-upping move. You can’t use them to navigate reality; and translating the subtext into text is fiendishly hard.
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Insecurity and shame makes it hard to talk about “hey, you shouldn’t have done that thing” without getting derailed by whether the criticism is “insulting” or “judgmental”.
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In particular, conveying “it is especially important that you change” sounds exactly like “you are especially bad as a person” or “you should be especially harshly punished.”
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This sucks because often the biggest, highest priority positive impact on the world would come from a change in the behavior of a person who’s *already doing a lot of good*.
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Let’s say it’s the 19th century and you’re trying to convince doctors to wash their hands. These are people who have dedicated their lives to healing the sick! They’re cleaner than most people! How dare you accuse them of killing patients! Are you saying they should be hanged?
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How do you convey *urgency* (you really have to wash your hands! People are dying!) without cruelty (I really don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself or make anyone hate you; just wash your hands!)
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Even harder mode: what if the issue isn’t so much present harms as the *absence* of potential benefits? How can you hold people accountable for missed opportunities— the houses not built, the cures not discovered, the technologies not invented?
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Any way you try to express this, you’ll often be “blaming” the people who are already *doing the most to contribute* for not doing even more.
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You don’t have to be an unusually bad person to miss an unusually important opportunity.
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In fact, you don’t have to be an unusually bad person to commit an atrocity either. Genocides are committed by *normal* people who would never do a socially deviant thing like rob a bank.
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Our intuitions for “a really bad person” are about “who could we all agree to punish”, not at all about “who is causally responsible for great harm or missed opportunity for great good.”
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It’s really really hard to express *the need for change* all by itself, without smuggling in shame/punishment.
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Also super hard: saying “this needs to change and I have no idea how to do that.” People will read it as you judging them for not having solved the whole problem already.
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I used to feel super defensive about people talking about “systemic problems.” Pro tip: if you’re conservative or libertarian, mentally replace “systemic problem” with “incentive problem.” You might find you agree there is one!
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The overall pattern is that even if your goal is just to say “there’s a problem, let’s try to solve it”, you run the risk of either making people feel judged, or being so understated you aren’t listened to at all.
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Urgency without cruelty totally exists; think of pulling a child back from running in the street and shouting “No!” You don’t want to hurt the kid, you’re 100% uninterested in labeling him “bad”, you just *need him to stop right now*.
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I’ve noticed a thing where *once you get over the hump* of defensive posturing around “are you saying I suck as a person? Of course I don’t suck!” and establish that *we’re not talking about that*, feedback and problem solving immediately gets more productive.
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One way that gets resolved is by crisis. You fucked up, your fuckup has been exposed, and now we all have to work together to fix it; suddenly the communication around how to fix it becomes more productive, and you wish you could have been talking this candidly all along.
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