When you live in The Dark World, it’s just really really hard to escape. If you have a strong prior on (e.g.) self-serving Machiavellian manipulation as the motivating instinct behind someone else’s behavior, there isn’t much that person can do to convince you that they’re not doing stuff for self-serving, Machiavellian, manipulative reasons.
(Setting out to convince you is already sort of self-defeating, at that point.)
[...]
it’s not enough to merely make it safe, in truth. You have to go much, much farther than that—provide the person with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypotheses, is visibly inconsistent with their anticipations of Doom.
I don’t think the situation is quite so… dark.
Setting out to convince (aka “manipulate the beliefs of”) someone who is already primed to see you as manipulative is indeed self defeating. At the same time though, as you say, you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis.
If I were try try to come up with that data for Mitchell (granted, Monday morning quarterbacking is always much easier), here’s what I’d say:
“Yeah, I’m sorry it came off that way. Can you help me understand what I’m missing?”
Pulling it off and coming off as sincere is greatly helped by genuinely being sorry that it came off that way, and genuinely caring to understand what you’re missing—even if it might only be an understanding of how exactly he came to his mistaken conclusions.
I think that’s kinda part of making sure to operate in a light way though, no? After all, how are we to know that we’re not merely blinded by our own preconceptions, if not for loud inarguable data that will move even people starting with inaccurate preconceptions?
I think you’re onto something really important here, and I’m glad you came back to share this essay. Navigating from an imperfectly light world to a lighter one is indeed tricky. One rule I try to hold myself to, is to hold mutual agreement (or at least anticipated mutual agreement) above my own perspective as “best arbiter of truth”. In other words, I try to keep my own perspective tagged as “my perspective” no matter how seemingly-solid, and keep my confidence-that-I’m-right bound to my confidence that they’ll come to see it my way too, once I finish sharing why I believe what I believe (and why I don’t believe what they believe). That’s not to say I never stray, or that I don’t think I can ever find the truth when others (perhaps rationally) refuse to engage with it, but when I live up to this ideal I find that it really helps.
Tee hee … allow me to recount the story of the one other person who lives in the same mental bucket in my head as Mitchell (lightly edited from a FB post from late 2021):
When I say things like “other people genuinely feel like a different species to me,” it’s because it would literally never occur to me to:
- Agree to meet with Person X, who had a grievance with me
- Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying “I think my job here is to listen, first.”
- Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology, which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me
- Maybe even cry a little, because things have been hard, and accept their clumsy attempts to offer a little comfort and empathy
- Years later, after no other substantive interactions of any kind, join in a dogpile against Person X behind their back where I besmirched their apology and insinuated that it was insufficient and rooted in an invalid motivation
- Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through
- Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day
Like, there’s a whole bunch of people out there for whom this is just … business as usual, nothing to see here.
I think there are indeed enmities that call for that kind of blatantly adversarial two-facedness, but I think they take WAY more in the way of inciting incident than anything I’ve ever done, had done to me, or seen happen around me with my own two eyes.
Alternate title: This Is The Sort Of Thing That Makes Coordination Hard
...all of which is to say, re: “you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis” … I do want to emphasize just how hard it is to create that data. The test can’t actually be run, but I would bet several hundred dollars to someone’s one dollar that a panel of a dozen neutral observers watching the whole interaction described above from start to finish would have agreed that it was a clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine attempt to rebuild a bridge, but this did not stop the other party (who is a well-respected member of the social group that calls itself the rationalist community, e.g. gave multiple talks at LessOnline this past weekend) from being … well, shitty. Really, really, really shitty.
No, I get it. It’s definitely way easier said than done. While that story sure sounds frustrating/disappointing (especially the part where the community accepts and respects this person, despite that), it’s actually not surprising.
Let me climb into what I think this person’s shoes might be, from hearing your side of the story...
- Tell Person X what things I was upset about, because Person X started off the meeting by saying “I think my job here is to listen, first.”
Okay, Person X wanted to hear why I was upset with them. Good. He’s been shitty enough that this is certainly called for. At least he has *this* much decency in him.
- Listen to, accept, and thank Person X, explicitly, for their subsequent apology,
Look, I’m trying to do my part. I accepted his apology in good faith and gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he really only apologized because he knows how bad it’d look if he didn’t.
Also, it’s not like I had a choice. Other people aren’t going to see this pseudo-apology for what it is, and he’s just going to make me look bad if I don’t. He’s really manipulative like that, and good at it because I think on some level he’s actually doing his best and doesn’t know how manipulative he can be.
Still, screw this guy, man. His best just isn’t enough, and I’m done trying to pretend it is.
which they offered without asking for any sort of symmetrical concession from me
Lol, I didn’t do anything wrong. What would he even ask me to apologize for? Getting quite reasonably upset when he objectively wronged me by his own admission?
- Outright lie in that dogpile, and claim that Person X had insisted that I jump through hoops that they never asked me to jump through
Maybe he didn’t explicitly ask, but we both know what he meant. What kind of fool hears “I think it’d be better if you did X” and doesn’t recognize it to be a request for you to to do X? Or like, equate things that aren’t literally “insisting” with insisting when the pressure is there. This just sounds like a disingenuous complaint made by someone who is trying to make me look bad.
- Give no sign of any of this ongoing resentment in private communication initiated by Person X on that very same day
I mean, I’m trying to move on with my life. What am I to do, frown all day, to no good end? Again, Person X literally isn’t capable of better. He doesn’t even know he’s closed minded, and you can’t tell him because he just tries to explain why “you’re wrong”.
There’s literally nothing I could say to get this person to see that he’s being a jerk. Some people are just stuck in dark worlds, where no matter how hard I try to let go of what he did and move on, he’s still going to hold it against me. There’s no way to run the test, but I bet you a hundred to one that he’ll still be bitching about this in 2025.
Okay, that was fun. Climbing back out of those shoes now, I can totally see where that person might be coming from. I have no idea what you did to upset this person and obviously can’t comment on how (un)reasonable it was/is for them to be upset about it, but I don’t think it’s important.
I spent a few years talking to the most unreasonable person I’ve ever met, explicitly for the purpose of getting practice dealing with unreasonable people. It was this kind of thing on steroids.
To give an idea of what kind of person she was, she complained to me about her boyfriend not hitting her when she asked him to, saying that he objected “You’re just going to get upset and say you didn’t think I’d actually do it!”. She then went on to treat him like shit, up to pouring her drink on his head in clear attempt to provoke him into hitting her—and then she complained to me when he finally did. I asked how she squares that with the fact that she literally asked him to not too long before, and her response was “I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”.
She was very difficult to get along with. Even when I would try my honest best and not complain at all about how she was shitty towards me, and she’d still get upset with me. And you know I’m not secretly or “unconsciously” trying to get away with something else, since figuring out how to get along with her was literally the only reason I had for talking to her in the first place. It’s not the kind of mental/emotional work I’d want to be required to do on a day to day basis, but I did eventually figure it out. I basically had to get very good at showing her that I understood and cared about her perspective—even if I wasn’t also going to be swayed by it. By the time she got her boyfriend to hit her, she was able to laugh at herself when I pointed out how ridiculous she was being, despite how close that is to “It’s kinda your fault your boyfriend hit you” which is a pretty triggering statement in general, let alone for people who are extremely sensitive and live in the darkest of worlds.
By any normal/reasonable standards, my initial attempts to get along with her were “clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine”. At the same time, the solution involved getting better at rooting out even the tiniest slivers of unintentional pressure and unintentional rounding of her perspective to something it wasn’t (quite) -- even if the differences were quite insignificant (at least, in my perspective, which is totally always right. Almost.)
This problem of “says one thing in the moment, then reverts to previous behavior later on” closely mirrors a common problem in naively implemented hypnotherapy. Basically, hypnotists almost by definition are good at getting contradicting thoughts out of peoples minds so that they can’t block change. “In the office” you can get “miraculous” results and have people can learn to be disgusted by cigarettes in a literal snap of the fingers, only to pick up the habit again later down the line when they get fired or whatever. The problem is that if you don’t deal with all the underlying drivers of behavior, then when a situation comes up that reminds them, it’ll still be there.
In the hypnotists office, this might look like “Fast forward three months and you get laid off at work and you’re feeling stressed. What do you do?”—and noticing if the urge to smoke comes up then. In the context of offering an apology, it might look like “So in three months from now, if you’re telling people I didn’t really mean it when I apologized, why is that?”. If they don’t spontaneously start laughing then the situation isn’t absurd for them and there’s a reason they might. Okay great, you have more work to do. Do I not look sincere enough? Are there more things I have yet to apologize for? What is it?
I get that it’s all very hard and not necessarily fair and all that. I put a lot of effort into developing the skills to do this, and I still don’t get it right all the time. Especially not in the short term. And the most difficult people aren’t always who you’d think.
What I’m pointing at is that the cause of this difficulty looks an awful lot like difficulty in making the world truly and knowably light. With that difficult woman, for example, the skill was in taking into account her perspective as she sees it—which is surprisingly hard. It’s also necessary though, because if I can’t pass her “Ideological Turing Test” and prove that I get it according to her perspective, maybe I don’t? And if I don’t, then maybe I’m missing something important.
For the “light world” interpretation to be true, and knowably so, it seems like “your friends actually care where you’re coming from, and aren’t dismissive of your perspective—at least, until they have sufficiently strong evidence that it overwhelms the differences in your preconceptions” is kinda necessary.
Does that not match with what you mean when you talk about a “light world”?
This problem of “says one thing in the moment, then reverts to previous behavior later on” closely mirrors a common problem in naively implemented hypnotherapy.
I don’t think the situation is quite so… dark.
Setting out to convince (aka “manipulate the beliefs of”) someone who is already primed to see you as manipulative is indeed self defeating. At the same time though, as you say, you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis.
If I were try try to come up with that data for Mitchell (granted, Monday morning quarterbacking is always much easier), here’s what I’d say:
“Yeah, I’m sorry it came off that way. Can you help me understand what I’m missing?”
Pulling it off and coming off as sincere is greatly helped by genuinely being sorry that it came off that way, and genuinely caring to understand what you’re missing—even if it might only be an understanding of how exactly he came to his mistaken conclusions.
I think that’s kinda part of making sure to operate in a light way though, no? After all, how are we to know that we’re not merely blinded by our own preconceptions, if not for loud inarguable data that will move even people starting with inaccurate preconceptions?
I think you’re onto something really important here, and I’m glad you came back to share this essay. Navigating from an imperfectly light world to a lighter one is indeed tricky. One rule I try to hold myself to, is to hold mutual agreement (or at least anticipated mutual agreement) above my own perspective as “best arbiter of truth”. In other words, I try to keep my own perspective tagged as “my perspective” no matter how seemingly-solid, and keep my confidence-that-I’m-right bound to my confidence that they’ll come to see it my way too, once I finish sharing why I believe what I believe (and why I don’t believe what they believe). That’s not to say I never stray, or that I don’t think I can ever find the truth when others (perhaps rationally) refuse to engage with it, but when I live up to this ideal I find that it really helps.
Tee hee … allow me to recount the story of the one other person who lives in the same mental bucket in my head as Mitchell (lightly edited from a FB post from late 2021):
...all of which is to say, re: “you can still provide people with data that loudly and inarguably contradicts the dark hypothesis” … I do want to emphasize just how hard it is to create that data. The test can’t actually be run, but I would bet several hundred dollars to someone’s one dollar that a panel of a dozen neutral observers watching the whole interaction described above from start to finish would have agreed that it was a clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine attempt to rebuild a bridge, but this did not stop the other party (who is a well-respected member of the social group that calls itself the rationalist community, e.g. gave multiple talks at LessOnline this past weekend) from being … well, shitty. Really, really, really shitty.
No, I get it. It’s definitely way easier said than done. While that story sure sounds frustrating/disappointing (especially the part where the community accepts and respects this person, despite that), it’s actually not surprising.
Let me climb into what I think this person’s shoes might be, from hearing your side of the story...
Okay, Person X wanted to hear why I was upset with them. Good. He’s been shitty enough that this is certainly called for. At least he has *this* much decency in him.
Look, I’m trying to do my part. I accepted his apology in good faith and gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he really only apologized because he knows how bad it’d look if he didn’t.
Also, it’s not like I had a choice. Other people aren’t going to see this pseudo-apology for what it is, and he’s just going to make me look bad if I don’t. He’s really manipulative like that, and good at it because I think on some level he’s actually doing his best and doesn’t know how manipulative he can be.
Still, screw this guy, man. His best just isn’t enough, and I’m done trying to pretend it is.
Lol, I didn’t do anything wrong. What would he even ask me to apologize for? Getting quite reasonably upset when he objectively wronged me by his own admission?
Maybe he didn’t explicitly ask, but we both know what he meant. What kind of fool hears “I think it’d be better if you did X” and doesn’t recognize it to be a request for you to to do X? Or like, equate things that aren’t literally “insisting” with insisting when the pressure is there. This just sounds like a disingenuous complaint made by someone who is trying to make me look bad.
I mean, I’m trying to move on with my life. What am I to do, frown all day, to no good end? Again, Person X literally isn’t capable of better. He doesn’t even know he’s closed minded, and you can’t tell him because he just tries to explain why “you’re wrong”.
There’s literally nothing I could say to get this person to see that he’s being a jerk. Some people are just stuck in dark worlds, where no matter how hard I try to let go of what he did and move on, he’s still going to hold it against me. There’s no way to run the test, but I bet you a hundred to one that he’ll still be bitching about this in 2025.
Okay, that was fun. Climbing back out of those shoes now, I can totally see where that person might be coming from. I have no idea what you did to upset this person and obviously can’t comment on how (un)reasonable it was/is for them to be upset about it, but I don’t think it’s important.
I spent a few years talking to the most unreasonable person I’ve ever met, explicitly for the purpose of getting practice dealing with unreasonable people. It was this kind of thing on steroids.
To give an idea of what kind of person she was, she complained to me about her boyfriend not hitting her when she asked him to, saying that he objected “You’re just going to get upset and say you didn’t think I’d actually do it!”. She then went on to treat him like shit, up to pouring her drink on his head in clear attempt to provoke him into hitting her—and then she complained to me when he finally did. I asked how she squares that with the fact that she literally asked him to not too long before, and her response was “I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”.
She was very difficult to get along with. Even when I would try my honest best and not complain at all about how she was shitty towards me, and she’d still get upset with me. And you know I’m not secretly or “unconsciously” trying to get away with something else, since figuring out how to get along with her was literally the only reason I had for talking to her in the first place. It’s not the kind of mental/emotional work I’d want to be required to do on a day to day basis, but I did eventually figure it out. I basically had to get very good at showing her that I understood and cared about her perspective—even if I wasn’t also going to be swayed by it. By the time she got her boyfriend to hit her, she was able to laugh at herself when I pointed out how ridiculous she was being, despite how close that is to “It’s kinda your fault your boyfriend hit you” which is a pretty triggering statement in general, let alone for people who are extremely sensitive and live in the darkest of worlds.
By any normal/reasonable standards, my initial attempts to get along with her were “clearly unpressured, sincere, caring, and genuine”. At the same time, the solution involved getting better at rooting out even the tiniest slivers of unintentional pressure and unintentional rounding of her perspective to something it wasn’t (quite) -- even if the differences were quite insignificant (at least, in my perspective, which is totally always right. Almost.)
This problem of “says one thing in the moment, then reverts to previous behavior later on” closely mirrors a common problem in naively implemented hypnotherapy. Basically, hypnotists almost by definition are good at getting contradicting thoughts out of peoples minds so that they can’t block change. “In the office” you can get “miraculous” results and have people can learn to be disgusted by cigarettes in a literal snap of the fingers, only to pick up the habit again later down the line when they get fired or whatever. The problem is that if you don’t deal with all the underlying drivers of behavior, then when a situation comes up that reminds them, it’ll still be there.
In the hypnotists office, this might look like “Fast forward three months and you get laid off at work and you’re feeling stressed. What do you do?”—and noticing if the urge to smoke comes up then. In the context of offering an apology, it might look like “So in three months from now, if you’re telling people I didn’t really mean it when I apologized, why is that?”. If they don’t spontaneously start laughing then the situation isn’t absurd for them and there’s a reason they might. Okay great, you have more work to do. Do I not look sincere enough? Are there more things I have yet to apologize for? What is it?
I get that it’s all very hard and not necessarily fair and all that. I put a lot of effort into developing the skills to do this, and I still don’t get it right all the time. Especially not in the short term. And the most difficult people aren’t always who you’d think.
What I’m pointing at is that the cause of this difficulty looks an awful lot like difficulty in making the world truly and knowably light. With that difficult woman, for example, the skill was in taking into account her perspective as she sees it—which is surprisingly hard. It’s also necessary though, because if I can’t pass her “Ideological Turing Test” and prove that I get it according to her perspective, maybe I don’t? And if I don’t, then maybe I’m missing something important.
For the “light world” interpretation to be true, and knowably so, it seems like “your friends actually care where you’re coming from, and aren’t dismissive of your perspective—at least, until they have sufficiently strong evidence that it overwhelms the differences in your preconceptions” is kinda necessary.
Does that not match with what you mean when you talk about a “light world”?
Just wrote a post about this btw — “Flaky breakthroughs” pervade coaching — and no one tracks them
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll give it a read and probably respond with my thoughts later.