You flipping out in response to text comments, despite having the luxury of time and privacy to compose your responses doesn’t bode well for how you’d react to a member screaming in your face about how you hoodwinked them into an abusive arrangement.
You may feel that handoflixue is strawmanning you, assuming bad faith, etc, but the person screaming in your face could do much much worse, even if you did everything right! If you can’t handle this level of criticism gracefully, you’re not fit to lead anything like your proposal.
You can connect those dots, but I do not. In particular, I’m less flipping out at handoflixue in particular, and more loudly signaling strong rejection of what they’re doing. In other words, it’s much, much, much more about “everyone else” at this point than it is about handoflixue, who I made a policy level decision not to cooperate with many comments back. I reject the implicit assumption in your post that “always be quiet/calm/nice/polite back” is actually a good rule—in real life, Gandhi only wins against an enemy who’s willing to update, and however much handoflixue has indeed rolled back their tone, they haven’t even tried to stop strawmanning and jumping to conclusions.
You can certainly disagree with me about whether these policies I’m following are net good or optimized in ways you’d endorse, and that’s entirely cool—the point is not to please everyone, but to be 1) principled, 2) consistent, and 3) transparent. Nobody who would enter this experiment (i.e. be intrinsically interested AND make it past all the filters) will end up behaving as poorly as handoflixue. That’s kind of the whole point of filters—to prevent people who embrace and endorse unacceptable-according-to-the-subgroup behavior.
I think you’re being wildly optimistic about your vetting procedures. I don’t think you can reliably predict how people will react in high-stress situations with your filters.
in real life, Gandhi only wins against an enemy who’s willing to update
Well too bad, because your hypothetical screaming roommate isn’t willing to update, and they’re screaming in your face at 2am anyway. Can you defuse the situation? Or will you end up with, at best, a messy eviction that’s traumatizing for all parties involved?
I ask, on a meta level: was this question rhetorical?
Because I suspect there’s literally no answer I could give that would satisfy you (but I hold that suspicion lightly, and will believe you if you tell me I’m wrong).
The thing is, any true and honest answer to “how will you defuse that situation?” is something like 20% principles and 80% context/subtlety/reactions in the moment.
The answer to your question is yes, I can defuse the situation, and the confidence in the yes comes from the fact that I have defused such situations before—when other people caused them. I’ve also defused such situations when caused by me, but outside of the context of fights within a romantic relationship (which I claim is a special case, and where I also played the role of defuser more than the role of exploder when I couldn’t just head things off at the pass in the first place), the last time I caused such a situation was about sixteen years ago. I learned how to not cause them.
And no, I can’t give you a blow-by-blow that will sound convincing, because again, it’s all context. And in other places in this post, where I listed general principles and heuristics, people who were already predisposed to be hostile pointed out that, from their perspective, it sounded a lot like empty platitudes.
So I’m curious what the point of the question was, and if it was to honestly ask, I’m curious what sort of answer would actually satisfy you.
I’ll take silence to mean “it was a rhetorical question.”
But my more general point is that I think you’re wildly overconfident in your ability to manage difficult social situations because I think very few people could successfully navigate the issues that will arise if this goes wrong, and you haven’t given me enough reason to think that you’re extraordinarily good. What little I know of you (this comments section) points towards you being a fairly regular person that gets upset when people pummel you with unfair criticism and reacts in fairly regular ways. I am not convinced that is good enough to undertake a dangerous and BINDING venture.
Since I think it would take an extraordinary person to pull off a soft landing if this goes catastrophically wrong, it would take rather extraordinary evidence to convince me that you are such a person. The sort of answer that would satisfy me is of the sort that involves a good number of other people testifying that they know based on experience that you would be able to handle the worst-case scenarios.
You’re welcome to have your prior of “I think very few people could navigate these kinds of social issues” cause you to bet, in each specific case, that the answer is “no;” default skepticism is clearly the logical strategy there.
But I don’t know where you got the impression that I was trying to update your opinion/satisfy you, or even providing evidence that potentially could. Like, sure, if you conceptualize all of this as “Duncan trying to impress the general public and get them to endorse him personally,” then this is a pretty poor showing—but that wasn’t what this post was for. It’s not one of the targets and never was.
I was seeking as many concrete, object-level criticisms and ideas as I could find, and that’s it. I get that you’re not convinced of me personally, but I was never trying to convince you in the first place; you thinking I’m overconfident or not is pretty noisy evidence and not worth optimizing for. (Further, I posit that attempting to be convincing via internet comments would be a fool’s errand anyway.)
The simple fact is, I am indeed one of those very few people. I can point to three or four other people who are better just in my own small social circle, but they’re busy doing other things and can’t take the time to start a house. You’ll note that there are a few people openly testifying as to my ability in these comments, and also that the biggest testimony is “deciding to join in,” of which twenty did on an experimental weekend and around ten are planning to, long haul.
You flipping out in response to text comments, despite having the luxury of time and privacy to compose your responses doesn’t bode well for how you’d react to a member screaming in your face about how you hoodwinked them into an abusive arrangement.
You may feel that handoflixue is strawmanning you, assuming bad faith, etc, but the person screaming in your face could do much much worse, even if you did everything right! If you can’t handle this level of criticism gracefully, you’re not fit to lead anything like your proposal.
You can connect those dots, but I do not. In particular, I’m less flipping out at handoflixue in particular, and more loudly signaling strong rejection of what they’re doing. In other words, it’s much, much, much more about “everyone else” at this point than it is about handoflixue, who I made a policy level decision not to cooperate with many comments back. I reject the implicit assumption in your post that “always be quiet/calm/nice/polite back” is actually a good rule—in real life, Gandhi only wins against an enemy who’s willing to update, and however much handoflixue has indeed rolled back their tone, they haven’t even tried to stop strawmanning and jumping to conclusions.
You can certainly disagree with me about whether these policies I’m following are net good or optimized in ways you’d endorse, and that’s entirely cool—the point is not to please everyone, but to be 1) principled, 2) consistent, and 3) transparent. Nobody who would enter this experiment (i.e. be intrinsically interested AND make it past all the filters) will end up behaving as poorly as handoflixue. That’s kind of the whole point of filters—to prevent people who embrace and endorse unacceptable-according-to-the-subgroup behavior.
So you’re screaming at people to virtue signal?
I think you’re being wildly optimistic about your vetting procedures. I don’t think you can reliably predict how people will react in high-stress situations with your filters.
Well too bad, because your hypothetical screaming roommate isn’t willing to update, and they’re screaming in your face at 2am anyway. Can you defuse the situation? Or will you end up with, at best, a messy eviction that’s traumatizing for all parties involved?
I ask, on a meta level: was this question rhetorical?
Because I suspect there’s literally no answer I could give that would satisfy you (but I hold that suspicion lightly, and will believe you if you tell me I’m wrong).
The thing is, any true and honest answer to “how will you defuse that situation?” is something like 20% principles and 80% context/subtlety/reactions in the moment.
The answer to your question is yes, I can defuse the situation, and the confidence in the yes comes from the fact that I have defused such situations before—when other people caused them. I’ve also defused such situations when caused by me, but outside of the context of fights within a romantic relationship (which I claim is a special case, and where I also played the role of defuser more than the role of exploder when I couldn’t just head things off at the pass in the first place), the last time I caused such a situation was about sixteen years ago. I learned how to not cause them.
And no, I can’t give you a blow-by-blow that will sound convincing, because again, it’s all context. And in other places in this post, where I listed general principles and heuristics, people who were already predisposed to be hostile pointed out that, from their perspective, it sounded a lot like empty platitudes.
So I’m curious what the point of the question was, and if it was to honestly ask, I’m curious what sort of answer would actually satisfy you.
I’ll take silence to mean “it was a rhetorical question.”
Yes, that particular question was rhetorical.
But my more general point is that I think you’re wildly overconfident in your ability to manage difficult social situations because I think very few people could successfully navigate the issues that will arise if this goes wrong, and you haven’t given me enough reason to think that you’re extraordinarily good. What little I know of you (this comments section) points towards you being a fairly regular person that gets upset when people pummel you with unfair criticism and reacts in fairly regular ways. I am not convinced that is good enough to undertake a dangerous and BINDING venture.
Since I think it would take an extraordinary person to pull off a soft landing if this goes catastrophically wrong, it would take rather extraordinary evidence to convince me that you are such a person. The sort of answer that would satisfy me is of the sort that involves a good number of other people testifying that they know based on experience that you would be able to handle the worst-case scenarios.
You’re welcome to have your prior of “I think very few people could navigate these kinds of social issues” cause you to bet, in each specific case, that the answer is “no;” default skepticism is clearly the logical strategy there.
But I don’t know where you got the impression that I was trying to update your opinion/satisfy you, or even providing evidence that potentially could. Like, sure, if you conceptualize all of this as “Duncan trying to impress the general public and get them to endorse him personally,” then this is a pretty poor showing—but that wasn’t what this post was for. It’s not one of the targets and never was.
I was seeking as many concrete, object-level criticisms and ideas as I could find, and that’s it. I get that you’re not convinced of me personally, but I was never trying to convince you in the first place; you thinking I’m overconfident or not is pretty noisy evidence and not worth optimizing for. (Further, I posit that attempting to be convincing via internet comments would be a fool’s errand anyway.)
The simple fact is, I am indeed one of those very few people. I can point to three or four other people who are better just in my own small social circle, but they’re busy doing other things and can’t take the time to start a house. You’ll note that there are a few people openly testifying as to my ability in these comments, and also that the biggest testimony is “deciding to join in,” of which twenty did on an experimental weekend and around ten are planning to, long haul.