It’s true that sensitivity norms can have subtle effects on a conversation, but nastiness norms can too. If you look at the study cited in the “hold off on proposing solutions” essay, you can see a case where politicizing a topic restricts the space of ideas that are explored. (I think this is actually a more natural takeaway from the study than “hold off on proposing solutions”.) Nasty conversations also often see evaporative cooling effects where you are eventually just left with hardliners on each side. In general, I think nasty conversations tend to leave any line of reasoning that doesn’t clearly support the position of one side or the other under-explored. (This is a pretty big flaw in my opinion, because I think divided opinions are usually an indicator of genuinely mixed evidence. If the evidence is mixed, the correct hypothesis is probably one that finds a way to reconcile almost all of it.) Furthermore I would predict that arguments in nasty conversations are less creative and generally just less well thought through.
Here’s another argument. Imagine 18239018038528017428 showed you their draft comment minus the very last sentence. Then they showed you the last sentence “The world would be concretely better off if the author, and anyone like him, killed themselves.” Would you tell them to add it in or not? If not, I suspect there’s status quo bias, or something like it, in operation here.
Anyway, I think there better ways to address the issue you describe than going full vitriol. For example, I once worked at a company that had a culture of employees ribbing each other, and sometimes we would rib each other about things other employees were doing wrong that would be awkward if they were brought up in a serious manner. I think that worked pretty well.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the more they engage with this individual, the better; especially since the natural tendency will be to go in the opposite direction, circle the wagons, and dismiss the critic as a low-status outsider—a behavior pattern that doesn’t need more practice, IMHO.
I just want to point out that Duncan did in fact put a tremendous amount of time in to engaging with this critic (more time than he put in to engaging with any other commenter in this thread, by my estimate).
My other comment should hopefully clarify things, as least with regard to politicization in particular.
To spell out the implications a bit more: the problem with political discourse, the reason it kills minds, is not that it gets heated; rather, it freezes people’s mental categories in ways that prevent them from making ontological updates or paradigm shifts of any kind. In effect, people switch from using physical cognition to think about arguments (modus ponens, etc.), to using social cognition instead (who wins, who loses, etc.). (Most people, of course, never use anything but social cognition in arguments; politics makes even “nerds” or “intellectuals” behave like typical humans.)
It is in fact possible for “heated” or even “nasty” discourse to be very information-rich; this makes sense if you realize that what counts as “nasty” depends on social norms. If you encounter discourse from a different social context (even, for example, simply because the speaker has misunderstood the social context and its norms!) you may read it as “nasty”, despite the fact that the author was specifically intending to communicate content.
Now, of course I don’t consider 18239018038528017428′s comment to be optimally worded—but then, I wouldn’t, because I didn’t write it. This is the important thing to understand: there is value to be had in getting detailed input on the mental states of people unlike oneself.
I agree that Duncan deserves positive reinforcement for engaging with this critic to the extent he did. But I think it was actually good for him epistemically to do so, not just as a demonstration of his willingness-to-bend-over-backwards, and thus, good social nature.
I’m also curious to hear what made you update.
It’s true that sensitivity norms can have subtle effects on a conversation, but nastiness norms can too. If you look at the study cited in the “hold off on proposing solutions” essay, you can see a case where politicizing a topic restricts the space of ideas that are explored. (I think this is actually a more natural takeaway from the study than “hold off on proposing solutions”.) Nasty conversations also often see evaporative cooling effects where you are eventually just left with hardliners on each side. In general, I think nasty conversations tend to leave any line of reasoning that doesn’t clearly support the position of one side or the other under-explored. (This is a pretty big flaw in my opinion, because I think divided opinions are usually an indicator of genuinely mixed evidence. If the evidence is mixed, the correct hypothesis is probably one that finds a way to reconcile almost all of it.) Furthermore I would predict that arguments in nasty conversations are less creative and generally just less well thought through.
Here’s another argument. Imagine 18239018038528017428 showed you their draft comment minus the very last sentence. Then they showed you the last sentence “The world would be concretely better off if the author, and anyone like him, killed themselves.” Would you tell them to add it in or not? If not, I suspect there’s status quo bias, or something like it, in operation here.
Anyway, I think there better ways to address the issue you describe than going full vitriol. For example, I once worked at a company that had a culture of employees ribbing each other, and sometimes we would rib each other about things other employees were doing wrong that would be awkward if they were brought up in a serious manner. I think that worked pretty well.
I just want to point out that Duncan did in fact put a tremendous amount of time in to engaging with this critic (more time than he put in to engaging with any other commenter in this thread, by my estimate).
My other comment should hopefully clarify things, as least with regard to politicization in particular.
To spell out the implications a bit more: the problem with political discourse, the reason it kills minds, is not that it gets heated; rather, it freezes people’s mental categories in ways that prevent them from making ontological updates or paradigm shifts of any kind. In effect, people switch from using physical cognition to think about arguments (modus ponens, etc.), to using social cognition instead (who wins, who loses, etc.). (Most people, of course, never use anything but social cognition in arguments; politics makes even “nerds” or “intellectuals” behave like typical humans.)
It is in fact possible for “heated” or even “nasty” discourse to be very information-rich; this makes sense if you realize that what counts as “nasty” depends on social norms. If you encounter discourse from a different social context (even, for example, simply because the speaker has misunderstood the social context and its norms!) you may read it as “nasty”, despite the fact that the author was specifically intending to communicate content.
Now, of course I don’t consider 18239018038528017428′s comment to be optimally worded—but then, I wouldn’t, because I didn’t write it. This is the important thing to understand: there is value to be had in getting detailed input on the mental states of people unlike oneself.
I agree that Duncan deserves positive reinforcement for engaging with this critic to the extent he did. But I think it was actually good for him epistemically to do so, not just as a demonstration of his willingness-to-bend-over-backwards, and thus, good social nature.