I haven’t really interacted with Nate in the sorts of contexts getting discussed here. But one of Turntrout’s comments reminded me of some similar experiences I’ve had with other people that I wanted to write up.
I think there are three high level points:
“Relative Forcefulness-of-personality”is variable to be aware of.
“Suddenly having to defend boundaries you didn’t expect to have to” is a particular way that it can be difficult/scary interacting with someone more forceful than you. (Corollary: it’s scarier to interact with forceful people who do a lot of unpredictable things)
“Forcefully telling people how they think” can feel particularly violating, to somewho is less self-assured, because it can leave them doubting their sanity, and undermining their ability to figure out what they want.
I feel sold on “these are things to be aware of.” I don’t necessarily prescribe any particular takeaway with them.
I think rather than write a giant effort-comment I’m going to write pieces at a time. Fleshing out point #1 a bit:
People vary in how forceful a personality they are. I don’t think there’s a single “correct” amount of forcefulness to be, but whenever there’s a mismatch it can leave some people feeling steamrolled. This varies all the way down to “both people are very timid / guess-culture-y, but one is slightly more ask-culture-y” to includes “one of the people is willing to escalate to physical violence and the other is only willing to yell and scream.”
I think there’s also a lot of mini-variables here. There’s “how confident is someone in what they want?” or “in what they believe?”. There’s “how much has a person been socialized to try to prioritize the needs of others, vs their own needs?”. Or “do they feel entitled to get angry? Do they feel entitled to walk away from a conflict vs sit there and deal with it?”. How much are they willing to escalate to get what they want?
So the first thing here is “it’s at least possible for people to have very different forcefulnesses, and different “self-securenesses”. And it may not be obvious to Alex and Bob how much Alex is persistently steamrolling Bob.
Is that Alex’s problem? I dunno. I have previously argued with Alexes that it should be their problem and they were like “I think Bob should grow more of a spine, I should be allowed to say things I think are true without having to worry about Alex’s feelings.”
I think, regardless of whether you locate “responsibility” in any particular place, I think it’s useful at the very least for Alex to be modeling that they might be having a stronger effect than he naively realizes (and I’d guess worth spending at least some time thinking about alternate strategies or ways of phrasing things), and it’s useful for Bob to think of “grow a spine” or “leave” or “change his relational stance to Alex” as some of the options available to him.
Here’s an example situation. One day, Alex, Bob and me were all having a negotiation, trying to figure out what to do about Dave. We all agreed Dave had done something wrong. Alex and Bob both thought Dave was… something like “overwhelmingly in the wrong, and had defected first.” I thought that we’d all been kinda complicit in an escalation spiral, and I cut Dave more slack.
At a point when Alex, Bob and I were all in a room talking about Dave, and I was pointing out a way that Bob had escalated things with Dave.
Alex said, forcefully, with a bit of edge in his voice, “Ray is only saying that because he has a pathological need to listen to Dave and [I can’t remember the exact phrasing here].
And...
...I think Alex was at least moderately right. There is some way in which I feel compelled to take people’s stories at face value, and be kind of a bleeding heart for them, and put in extra work trying to cater to them. Often at my own expense and the expense of other important stuff I care about. I think this has in fact been the wrong call, and I’ve made significant updates over the years about being more stone-hearted about it.
But, also, in this case, I’m pretty sure this was at most 25% of what was going on (at least in this conversation). I remember some specific ways I updated about Dave that week, and I trust my deliberate introspection about it (even if I don’t trust all of my background-process-introspection).
This was all during a pretty tense time period, when we were all kinda exhausted.
A few things that stick out here:
Alex spoke really confidently. I think in general this triggers some kind of “I should listen to what this person is saying” behavior. I also do respect their opinions a lot (often more than my own), so part of me was thinking “I dunno am I the crazy one here? Am I wrong about why I’m thinking this? I’m pretty sure I’m not wrong.” I felt like my own sense-of-self was under siege.
I expected Bob also to be listening to what Alex said, which meant my ability to speak and be-heard within this group also felt under siege.
A thing about Alex was that he was often willing to escalate in ways that I wouldn’t have. Like, we were having this conversation because he wanted to escalate conflict with Dave in ways that seemed excessive to me. This meant I wasn’t sure what would happen if I ended up in direct conflict with Alex. I think Alex had a model of exactly when-and-how he’d escalate that seemed clear and fair to him, but I didn’t understand it. So I felt “an unknown amount of threat” that was anxiety inducing.
I think Alex was, in part, protecting Bob from me. I also speak more forcefully/confidently than average. I think it seemed to Alex like I was making it harder for Bob to think through and stand by their own opinions.
Relatedly: later on when I accused Alex of speaking with edge-in-his voice that conveyed a willingness to escalate in scary ways, he noted that I also speak with edge in my voice a fair amount, probably more than Alex. This does seem true on reflection.
I am fairly uncertain how to think about all of this. It’s noteworthy that I think Alex was wrong about my *overall* motivations here, but wasn’t wrong about at least part of my motivations. This makes for an annoying situation where he has a reasonably justified story of why my account-of-myself is untrustworthy (which makes it hard to correct), but, is still wrong in some ways.
The thing that feels most confusing here to me is how to spell out “why exactly this feels so bad.” I felt like my epistemics and sense-of-self-direction were under assault. Was that “real”, or was it just a feeling, and the problem is located inside my feelings rather than inside Alex’s speech-actions?
Digging into this feels like “the hard part”. I’ll leave this here for now again.
I guess another thing to note is that “people telling you that you are wrong about how you think” can also be an important part of breaking out of wrong, sticky narratives you have about yourself.
Perhaps annoyingly: many of the people who I have found very helpful for learning to “see the water I was swimming in, and take it as object” seem also actively destabilizing for some people around them. (i.e. I’ve gotten a lot of value from Brent, Ziz, Vassar and Geoff Anders. In each of those cases I didn’t actually get too close for long, but I know other people who did and had various flavors of bad experience).
Habryka’s gloss on all this is “telling people they are wrong about what they think is high variance and should be treated as risky, but also has important upside.” I feel like “high variance” is too positive a spin on it, but there’s something important there.
“Relative Forcefulness-of-personality” is variable to be aware of.
“Suddenly having to defend boundaries you didn’t expect to have to” is a particular way that it can be difficult/scary interacting with someone more forceful than you. (Corollary: it’s scarier to interact with forceful people who do a lot of unpredictable things)
“Forcefully telling people how they think” can feel particularly violating, to somewho is less self-assured, because it can leave them doubting their sanity, and undermining their ability to figure out what they want.
I’d like to point out that of these three things, #3 is one (and, note, the only one) which is traditionally frowned upon, according to commonly accepted rules of conversational conduct, independently of any views about how “forceful” one ought to be, etc. This seems to me to be instructive. (We have many words/phrases for it, too: “Bulverism”, “psychoanalyzing your conversation partner”, etc. These are not laudatory terms!)
To add: different orientations to the conversation can produce different forcefulness-of-personality. In the first half of my chat with Nate, I was rather cooperative and truth-seeking, and it mostly felt like Nate was steamrolling me. In the second half, I oriented towards it as an adversarial sparring match with someone who was trying to beat me, and began calling out a bunch of (IMO) shaky claims, and the conversation felt pretty even.
I haven’t really interacted with Nate in the sorts of contexts getting discussed here. But one of Turntrout’s comments reminded me of some similar experiences I’ve had with other people that I wanted to write up.
I think there are three high level points:
“Relative Forcefulness-of-personality” is variable to be aware of.
“Suddenly having to defend boundaries you didn’t expect to have to” is a particular way that it can be difficult/scary interacting with someone more forceful than you. (Corollary: it’s scarier to interact with forceful people who do a lot of unpredictable things)
“Forcefully telling people how they think” can feel particularly violating, to somewho is less self-assured, because it can leave them doubting their sanity, and undermining their ability to figure out what they want.
I feel sold on “these are things to be aware of.” I don’t necessarily prescribe any particular takeaway with them.
I think rather than write a giant effort-comment I’m going to write pieces at a time. Fleshing out point #1 a bit:
People vary in how forceful a personality they are. I don’t think there’s a single “correct” amount of forcefulness to be, but whenever there’s a mismatch it can leave some people feeling steamrolled. This varies all the way down to “both people are very timid / guess-culture-y, but one is slightly more ask-culture-y” to includes “one of the people is willing to escalate to physical violence and the other is only willing to yell and scream.”
I think there’s also a lot of mini-variables here. There’s “how confident is someone in what they want?” or “in what they believe?”. There’s “how much has a person been socialized to try to prioritize the needs of others, vs their own needs?”. Or “do they feel entitled to get angry? Do they feel entitled to walk away from a conflict vs sit there and deal with it?”. How much are they willing to escalate to get what they want?
So the first thing here is “it’s at least possible for people to have very different forcefulnesses, and different “self-securenesses”. And it may not be obvious to Alex and Bob how much Alex is persistently steamrolling Bob.
Is that Alex’s problem? I dunno. I have previously argued with Alexes that it should be their problem and they were like “I think Bob should grow more of a spine, I should be allowed to say things I think are true without having to worry about Alex’s feelings.”
I think, regardless of whether you locate “responsibility” in any particular place, I think it’s useful at the very least for Alex to be modeling that they might be having a stronger effect than he naively realizes (and I’d guess worth spending at least some time thinking about alternate strategies or ways of phrasing things), and it’s useful for Bob to think of “grow a spine” or “leave” or “change his relational stance to Alex” as some of the options available to him.
...
I’ll leave it there for now.
Okay, now shifting to give more details about #3:
“Forcefully telling people how they think”
Here’s an example situation. One day, Alex, Bob and me were all having a negotiation, trying to figure out what to do about Dave. We all agreed Dave had done something wrong. Alex and Bob both thought Dave was… something like “overwhelmingly in the wrong, and had defected first.” I thought that we’d all been kinda complicit in an escalation spiral, and I cut Dave more slack.
At a point when Alex, Bob and I were all in a room talking about Dave, and I was pointing out a way that Bob had escalated things with Dave.
Alex said, forcefully, with a bit of edge in his voice, “Ray is only saying that because he has a pathological need to listen to Dave and [I can’t remember the exact phrasing here].
And...
...I think Alex was at least moderately right. There is some way in which I feel compelled to take people’s stories at face value, and be kind of a bleeding heart for them, and put in extra work trying to cater to them. Often at my own expense and the expense of other important stuff I care about. I think this has in fact been the wrong call, and I’ve made significant updates over the years about being more stone-hearted about it.
But, also, in this case, I’m pretty sure this was at most 25% of what was going on (at least in this conversation). I remember some specific ways I updated about Dave that week, and I trust my deliberate introspection about it (even if I don’t trust all of my background-process-introspection).
This was all during a pretty tense time period, when we were all kinda exhausted.
A few things that stick out here:
Alex spoke really confidently. I think in general this triggers some kind of “I should listen to what this person is saying” behavior. I also do respect their opinions a lot (often more than my own), so part of me was thinking “I dunno am I the crazy one here? Am I wrong about why I’m thinking this? I’m pretty sure I’m not wrong.” I felt like my own sense-of-self was under siege.
I expected Bob also to be listening to what Alex said, which meant my ability to speak and be-heard within this group also felt under siege.
A thing about Alex was that he was often willing to escalate in ways that I wouldn’t have. Like, we were having this conversation because he wanted to escalate conflict with Dave in ways that seemed excessive to me. This meant I wasn’t sure what would happen if I ended up in direct conflict with Alex. I think Alex had a model of exactly when-and-how he’d escalate that seemed clear and fair to him, but I didn’t understand it. So I felt “an unknown amount of threat” that was anxiety inducing.
I think Alex was, in part, protecting Bob from me. I also speak more forcefully/confidently than average. I think it seemed to Alex like I was making it harder for Bob to think through and stand by their own opinions.
Relatedly: later on when I accused Alex of speaking with edge-in-his voice that conveyed a willingness to escalate in scary ways, he noted that I also speak with edge in my voice a fair amount, probably more than Alex. This does seem true on reflection.
I am fairly uncertain how to think about all of this. It’s noteworthy that I think Alex was wrong about my *overall* motivations here, but wasn’t wrong about at least part of my motivations. This makes for an annoying situation where he has a reasonably justified story of why my account-of-myself is untrustworthy (which makes it hard to correct), but, is still wrong in some ways.
The thing that feels most confusing here to me is how to spell out “why exactly this feels so bad.” I felt like my epistemics and sense-of-self-direction were under assault. Was that “real”, or was it just a feeling, and the problem is located inside my feelings rather than inside Alex’s speech-actions?
Digging into this feels like “the hard part”. I’ll leave this here for now again.
I guess another thing to note is that “people telling you that you are wrong about how you think” can also be an important part of breaking out of wrong, sticky narratives you have about yourself.
Perhaps annoyingly: many of the people who I have found very helpful for learning to “see the water I was swimming in, and take it as object” seem also actively destabilizing for some people around them. (i.e. I’ve gotten a lot of value from Brent, Ziz, Vassar and Geoff Anders. In each of those cases I didn’t actually get too close for long, but I know other people who did and had various flavors of bad experience).
Habryka’s gloss on all this is “telling people they are wrong about what they think is high variance and should be treated as risky, but also has important upside.” I feel like “high variance” is too positive a spin on it, but there’s something important there.
I’d like to point out that of these three things, #3 is one (and, note, the only one) which is traditionally frowned upon, according to commonly accepted rules of conversational conduct, independently of any views about how “forceful” one ought to be, etc. This seems to me to be instructive. (We have many words/phrases for it, too: “Bulverism”, “psychoanalyzing your conversation partner”, etc. These are not laudatory terms!)
Thanks for sharing these factors.
To add: different orientations to the conversation can produce different forcefulness-of-personality. In the first half of my chat with Nate, I was rather cooperative and truth-seeking, and it mostly felt like Nate was steamrolling me. In the second half, I oriented towards it as an adversarial sparring match with someone who was trying to beat me, and began calling out a bunch of (IMO) shaky claims, and the conversation felt pretty even.