(Or talk about birdwatching or cooking or woodworking or whatever. “Real” things.)
-
-
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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”.
Show this thread -
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.”
Show this thread -
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*.
Show this thread -
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?
Show this thread -
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!)
Show this thread -
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?
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
You don’t have to be an unusually bad person to miss an unusually important opportunity.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.”
Show this thread -
It’s really really hard to express *the need for change* all by itself, without smuggling in shame/punishment.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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!
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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*.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
In “An Everyone Culture” they describe a company that has an onboarding process where you self-evaluate as either tending to be arrogant or underconfident, and you tell everybody this. There is no “making a good impression” here; everyone has a character flaw.
Show this thread -
I see this as trying to “get over the hump” early; so you don’t have to spend months or years foolishly trying to prove you have no character flaws and you’re the perfect hardworking emotionally balanced employee (so please don’t fire me.)
Show this thread -
I think something similar is going on in discourse about “white fragility” and such. White people tend to want to prove they’re innocent of racism — “don’t judge or punish me! I’m not bad!” Well, the alternate perspective is “maybe you’re good, maybe you’re bad, I don’t care;
Show this thread -
can we *please* work on the *actual problems people face related to race* and stop changing the subject to whether you’re a good or bad person?”
Show this thread -
“Ok, fine, you want me to judge you? Ok, you’re a bad person. I can see your flaws. *Now* can we stop posturing over whether you’re perfect or not and move on to what a bunch of imperfect people can do to solve the problem?”
Show this thread -
It can be a relief when your flaws are finally out in the open and the other person *isn’t* actually abandoning you or beating you up or whatever. “Yes, I can see you suck at this. Everyone can see it. No, I don’t hate you for that. What now?”
Show this thread -
You can get to the same place with loving acceptance instead of harshness, but I think that can be even harder. It works best IME when it’s coming from someone like a close friend or partner who is *credible* when they say they love you and they’re not trying to put you down.
Show this thread -
@oscredwin likes to tell me “I’m *never* arguing with you about “Sarah, pro or con?” I married you; I’m pro! If you killed someone, I’d help you hide the body!” And I know him, and this is true, and so we can go back to the *actual* issue.Show this thread -
Defensiveness and insecurity basically do harm by distracting attention and wasting time. Each individual instance doesn’t delay dealing with the issue that long, but they add up.
Show this thread -
It’s not that it’s “not okay” to have feelings about “feeling judged.” (“ok” isn’t a primordial thing anyway!) It’s that whatever someone was being “judgy” about might be an *actual issue that still matters* and changing the topic to feelings makes us forget the object level.
Show this thread -
(Or all that might be irrelevant! Sometimes people are being mean/gossipy/judgy just cause they wanna, and there is no object level problem. If you only pay attention to tone and not content, though, you’ll never know the difference.)
Show this thread - 39 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.