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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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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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.
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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.)
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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;
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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?”
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“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?”
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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?”
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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(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.)
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*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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This is in Finite and Infinite Games too. People mostly don’t want to go in directions that might have surprising or undefined outcomes.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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But, like, the creation of quantum physics theory would be an example of people going “well we *could* model it that way, but it would take us to some weird places” and then *not stopping* and going to the weird places.
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And quantum physics (and the Bomb) is both an example of a great human achievement and a top candidate for the thing that will ultimately destroy human life. So...beware I guess?
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EA is a great example of this. When a bunch of idealistic people try to ascertain how to do the most good, they come up with weird shit. “Actually no charities are good.” “Destroy the rainforests.” “Wirehead chickens.” “AI safety.” It’s never, like, “give to United Way.”
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Different people of course have different values for what’s good, but once you start trying to *optimize* them you leave the mainstream fast. Ecologists think in terms of saving ecosystems, not cute polar bears. Development economists think about institutions and infrastructure.
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You either get “arcane, abstract, boring” (legal details! administrative policy! spreadsheets and models!) or you get “bizarre supervillain shit” (gene drives! carbon capture! brain uploads!)
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Honest inquiry rarely leads to “just do a nice normal thing that you probably felt like you ought to do before but you never got around to.”
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If you just want your “inquiry” to reinforce what you already think, you had better put a lot of guardrails on it so it doesn’t spit out weird shit. Being scope sensitive at all leads to weird proposals.
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This doesn’t just apply to ethical questions. The way to literally make the most money is not gonna be the same as “do the most prestigious and glamorous thing that everyone associates with rich people.”
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The way to answer a scientific question is not gonna be the same as “do what proves to the world you’re the smartest and have mastered the trickiest techniques.”
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