How would this situation play out in a world like dath ilan? A world where The Art has progressed to something much more formidable.
Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can’t be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn’t the case though. My hunch is that there is a lot of soldier mindsetting going on and that once The Art figures out the right Jedi mind tricks to jolt people out of that mindset and into something more scout-like, these sorts of conflicts will often be resolvable. From The Scout Mindset:
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
I’m not sure what those Jedi mind tricks would look like of course, but I’ll hypothesize that they’d look something like what is recommended in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Specifically, starting off making sure each side feels that they are understood before moving on to any attempts at argument. Or maybe people in the field of conflict resolution have some answers.
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.
This outcome makes me a little sad. I have a sense that more is possible.
How would this situation play out in a world like dath ilan? A world where The Art has progressed to something much more formidable.
Is there some fundamental incompatibility here that can’t be bridged? Possibly. I have a hunch that this isn’t the case though. My hunch is that there is a lot of soldier mindsetting going on and that once The Art figures out the right Jedi mind tricks to jolt people out of that mindset and into something more scout-like, these sorts of conflicts will often be resolvable. From The Scout Mindset:
I’m not sure what those Jedi mind tricks would look like of course, but I’ll hypothesize that they’d look something like what is recommended in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Specifically, starting off making sure each side feels that they are understood before moving on to any attempts at argument. Or maybe people in the field of conflict resolution have some answers.
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.