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 @oscredwin calls me out on that!)
-
-
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 -
*Not* being defensive or full of “motivated cognition” or relitigating the same fights over and over can be scary in a new way because you’re covering brand new territory. It’s like a TV show that covers too much plot per episode; you worry they’ll run out of plot!
Show this thread -
If you’re *not* pattern-marching each other’s positions to dumber, less nuanced ones, the two of you will rapidly start to diverge from the rest of society; you’ll become high-context, illegible, hard for most people who don’t know you to understand.
Show this thread -
I’m not really sure what to do about that one. I’ve always had a sense that it’s nicer/more cooperative to be easy to understand. After all, we all were newbies once at anything we’re expert in today. It feels *weird* to have thoughts I don’t expect to be able to explain.
Show this thread -
If you ask yourself “is this conversation producing information?” (Like, literally Shannon information) you’d be surprised how much optimization is going on all the time to *avoid* producing too much information.
Show this thread -
This is in Finite and Infinite Games too. People mostly don’t want to go in directions that might have surprising or undefined outcomes.
Show this thread -
Anxiety about “are you judging me?” is one of many, many tactics to bring attention back to a familiar social game so it won’t go off into some uncharted wilderness.
Show this thread -
You know “wilderness” is nearby when it feels — not acutely bad, but “are you sure we should be doing this? this is getting kind of bizarre. this would have some weird implications.”
Show this thread -
I don’t know what happens if you try leaning *into* the directions that take you to new places, rather than away from them; if you don’t try to slow down the “plot clock.” Maybe the inhibition is there for good reason! Here There Be Dragons.
Show this thread - 31 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.