Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can’t be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn’t the case though.
I don’t believe Said is having very contingent bad interactions with tons of commenters and the mod team, but rather that this is a result of a principled commitment to a certain kind of forum commenting behavior that involves things like any commenter being able to demand answers to questions at the risk of the post-author’s status, holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case, and other things discussed in the OP, that in combination are extremely good at sucking energy out of people with little intellectual productivity as a result. My guess is that if we played the history of LW 2.0 over like 10 more times making lots of changes to lots of variables that seem promising or relevant to you, the outcome would’ve eventually been the same basically each time.
To take your proposal, I think it’s likely that Said has literally written a disdainful comment about NVC — yep, I looked a little, Said writes “It has been my experience that NVC is used exclusively as a means of making status plays”, and here is a longer thread of Said strongly criticizing an aspect of NVC — so your first proposal will not only not succeed, but in fact be aggressively rejected and treated with hostility.
Yeah, I hear ya. I don’t see any low hanging fruit here such as attempting to apply NVC. What I mean is that I think there are solutions out there that we haven’t discovered yet. And not in the distant sense of “have nanobots rewire Said’s brain”; I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I notice that you’re reaching for it too.
It’s promising that despite Said’s criticisms of NVC, and that you’re doing exactly what you described as the thing “something like” NVC, it’s going quite well so far. That’s a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn’t matter if Said’s stance is “NVC is about status plays” because you aren’t doing status plays, and it shows.
I don’t believe Said is having very contingent bad interactions with tons of commenters and the mod team, but rather that this is a result of a principled commitment to a certain kind of forum commenting behavior that involves things like any commenter being able to demand answers to questions at the risk of the post-author’s status, holding extreme disdain and disrespect for interlocutors while being committed to never saying anything explicitly or even denying that it is the case, and other things discussed in the OP, that in combination are extremely good at sucking energy out of people with little intellectual productivity as a result. My guess is that if we played the history of LW 2.0 over like 10 more times making lots of changes to lots of variables that seem promising or relevant to you, the outcome would’ve eventually been the same basically each time.
To take your proposal, I think it’s likely that Said has literally written a disdainful comment about NVC — yep, I looked a little, Said writes “It has been my experience that NVC is used exclusively as a means of making status plays”, and here is a longer thread of Said strongly criticizing an aspect of NVC — so your first proposal will not only not succeed, but in fact be aggressively rejected and treated with hostility.
Yeah, I hear ya. I don’t see any low hanging fruit here such as attempting to apply NVC. What I mean is that I think there are solutions out there that we haven’t discovered yet. And not in the distant sense of “have nanobots rewire Said’s brain”; I suspect that The Art really does contain solutions that aren’t super distant or high-tech.
I notice that you’re reaching for it too.
It’s promising that despite Said’s criticisms of NVC, and that you’re doing exactly what you described as the thing “something like” NVC, it’s going quite well so far. That’s a harder test, but when you get the principles right, things work regardless. It doesn’t matter if Said’s stance is “NVC is about status plays” because you aren’t doing status plays, and it shows.
Respect.