There’s certainly something to be said, at least for those of us who tend to try to shy away from potential confrontations, for deliberately being a little more vocal.
lahwran made a comment earlier today that he explicitly labelled “De-silencing comment”. I was baffled at the time by this label; now I understand what it meant, but still can’t convince myself that “De-silencing” is a good name for the thing; perhaps the name plus a link here might do OK, but what the name immediately suggests to me is something more like “The viewpoint I’m about to express is in danger of being suppressed, so I’m bravely fighting against oppression by saying it”—which, when attached (as I suppose it always will be) to a comment of the sort that is more than averagely likely to provoke a fight, doesn’t look good: it seems like an attempt to seize the moral high ground while being rude to someone else.
With the context of this article, of course, it looks different: the prefix “De-silencing comment:” needs to be interpreted as something more like “I know that this may sound confrontational, and for that very reason I nearly didn’t say it, but I’m trying to increase the overall amount of feedback people here get. I hope this won’t provoke a fight.”.
But a thing that strikes me here is this: the LW community really doesn’t, so far as I can tell, have the reputation of being a place where ideas don’t get frank enough criticism. I’m not convinced that the community as a whole is really taking that side of the tradeoff between “informative” and “polite”. I’d be more confident of the experiment being helpful overall if LWers who embrace confrontation were running a parallel experiment of trying to be a couple of notches nicer even at the cost of not always giving the challenging feedback that they think would be useful.
I guess the thing to do is to watch what actually happens. Do we end up having more fights? Do we end up learning more? I think it’ll be hard to tell...
But a thing that strikes me here is this: the LW community really doesn’t, so far as I can tell, have the reputation of being a place where ideas don’t get frank enough criticism.
But the character of LW definitely has changed. In the early days when it was gaining its reputation, it seemed to be a place where you could often find lots of highly intense, vociferous debate over various philosophical topics. I feel that nowadays a lot of that character is gone. The community seems to have embraced a much softer and more inclusive discourse style, trying to minimize the overall amount of offense and anxiety one could feel when they are trying to engage here. And indeed, a large amount of the discussion topics these days are surrounding social norms and community norms, which is a pretty big difference from the original LW culture.
I’m not completely sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, we seem to have created a place that seems much more approachable (and the changes might probably be a factor in why I began to take part in the discussions somewhat recently), and less intimidating to newcomers. So I think that part of it is good. On the other hand, some of the best thinkers were people who had a pretty aggressive conversational style (such as EY himself). I think these people have mostly switched over to private discussions among people they trust with limited public engagement. It’s unclear how much we are missing from them.
There are obvious situations where you would desire one style of discourse versus the other: In situations where you need to gather support from many groups with potentially competing interests and complex needs, you would definitely prefer to be as inclusive and inoffensive as possible, while limiting discussion to matters that relate to everyone. In the situation which amounts to casual debate among trusted people, it becomes a lot safer to be as frank and transparent as possible.
LW began very organically as conversations between many people who already interacted quite frequently sort of merged into a single locus. That meant that lively and open debate could happen somewhat safely at least initially, but that changed as soon as the space became more known outside of its bubble and grew.
There’s nothing that can be done to prevent that from happening, I think, but one thing that can be done is to siphon aggressive conversations into separate locations, away from the front-facing side but still possible to enter if you’re prepared.
I’m noticing a lot of anxiety in myself about your disagreement with the name. I realized that asking you for feedback on the name, and suggestions for what to change it to, would make my anxiety go away. What are your thoughts on better names for this, that still capture the essence of “I’m dropping this tidbit here because otherwise you won’t even be able to know something is wrong, and/or what it is”?
I edited the post title. But I also notice that this discussion we’re having is exactly the sort of thing that, when I anticipate, would normally lead me to not make a post at all; if that’s not “de-silencing”, what should it be?
I regret being a source of anxiety. I think the things I don’t like about “de-silencing” are (1) that it’s liable to suggest that it’s a fix for being silenced rather than for being silent (i.e., that the problem is some kind of deliberately-applied pressure from outside rather than internal anxieties etc.) and (2) that it’s rather uninformative—I mean, any time you say anything you’re making yourself less silent/silenced, and presumably the point is to pick out particular instances, namely those in which you might have avoided saying anything for fear of confrontation (or whatever).
So what might be better? Nothing leaps out at me as being a really good name. (Which shouldn’t be a big surprise; probably most things don’t have obvious really good names, and most people can’t reliably locate them even when they exist.) I might consider something cute like “avoidance avoidance” (which would need an explanatory link just as much as “de-silencing” does, but at least avoids the help-help-I’m-being-oppressed vibe), or I might call instances of the pattern something vaguer like “constructive criticism” (which doesn’t draw attention to the motivation you’ve described here, but it’s not clear to me that that’s always a problem), but I would be immensely unsurprised to find that there are much better options than those.
(Maybe there’s a useful distinction to be drawn, between (1) a name for use in a post like yours here, and (2) a name for labelling instances as they arise. I’m not sure #2 is actually needed at all; after all, most comments don’t come tagged with explanations of the motives behind them. Hmm, and to what extent do we need #1 either? “Avoiding selection bias” is your current title for the article; it’s not a name for the action of “de-silencing” but that doesn’t make it a bad title, does it?)
I don’t just mean for this to be about confrontations.
The viewpoint I’m about to express is in danger of being suppressed, so I’m bravely fighting against oppression by saying it
That is how I meant it, though “oppression” is maybe a bit stronger than I meant—I mean that people in a fairly common social attractor in mindspace tend to try to make anyone who disagrees with them into an argument target. I do this to prevent their credible threat of dismissing me if I try to tell them nicely from completely shutting me up.
frank enough criticism
That’s not what I mean, though; the place I got this name is that I often notice that I want to give feedback about a way someone has done something that excluded me, and they won’t be happy with me complaining. this policy is an attempt to make sure that some of the time, they still find out. I have found that it applies a bit more generally, and I execute this any time I worry that someone will be blackholed or ghosted or in some other way simply abandoned if they aren’t told what’s happening.
“informative” and “polite”
Yeah, I agree that there are things that I don’t often have the energy for that would make things come across better, and possibly things I do have the energy for that I don’t understand well enough to do easily/correctly. There may even be free actions I could take. These are all probably true of others. I’m interested in any comments you can make about how someone who’s constantly background on guard against rejection can still minimize rudeness.
There’s certainly something to be said, at least for those of us who tend to try to shy away from potential confrontations, for deliberately being a little more vocal.
lahwran made a comment earlier today that he explicitly labelled “De-silencing comment”. I was baffled at the time by this label; now I understand what it meant, but still can’t convince myself that “De-silencing” is a good name for the thing; perhaps the name plus a link here might do OK, but what the name immediately suggests to me is something more like “The viewpoint I’m about to express is in danger of being suppressed, so I’m bravely fighting against oppression by saying it”—which, when attached (as I suppose it always will be) to a comment of the sort that is more than averagely likely to provoke a fight, doesn’t look good: it seems like an attempt to seize the moral high ground while being rude to someone else.
With the context of this article, of course, it looks different: the prefix “De-silencing comment:” needs to be interpreted as something more like “I know that this may sound confrontational, and for that very reason I nearly didn’t say it, but I’m trying to increase the overall amount of feedback people here get. I hope this won’t provoke a fight.”.
But a thing that strikes me here is this: the LW community really doesn’t, so far as I can tell, have the reputation of being a place where ideas don’t get frank enough criticism. I’m not convinced that the community as a whole is really taking that side of the tradeoff between “informative” and “polite”. I’d be more confident of the experiment being helpful overall if LWers who embrace confrontation were running a parallel experiment of trying to be a couple of notches nicer even at the cost of not always giving the challenging feedback that they think would be useful.
I guess the thing to do is to watch what actually happens. Do we end up having more fights? Do we end up learning more? I think it’ll be hard to tell...
But the character of LW definitely has changed. In the early days when it was gaining its reputation, it seemed to be a place where you could often find lots of highly intense, vociferous debate over various philosophical topics. I feel that nowadays a lot of that character is gone. The community seems to have embraced a much softer and more inclusive discourse style, trying to minimize the overall amount of offense and anxiety one could feel when they are trying to engage here. And indeed, a large amount of the discussion topics these days are surrounding social norms and community norms, which is a pretty big difference from the original LW culture.
I’m not completely sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, we seem to have created a place that seems much more approachable (and the changes might probably be a factor in why I began to take part in the discussions somewhat recently), and less intimidating to newcomers. So I think that part of it is good. On the other hand, some of the best thinkers were people who had a pretty aggressive conversational style (such as EY himself). I think these people have mostly switched over to private discussions among people they trust with limited public engagement. It’s unclear how much we are missing from them.
There are obvious situations where you would desire one style of discourse versus the other: In situations where you need to gather support from many groups with potentially competing interests and complex needs, you would definitely prefer to be as inclusive and inoffensive as possible, while limiting discussion to matters that relate to everyone. In the situation which amounts to casual debate among trusted people, it becomes a lot safer to be as frank and transparent as possible.
LW began very organically as conversations between many people who already interacted quite frequently sort of merged into a single locus. That meant that lively and open debate could happen somewhat safely at least initially, but that changed as soon as the space became more known outside of its bubble and grew.
There’s nothing that can be done to prevent that from happening, I think, but one thing that can be done is to siphon aggressive conversations into separate locations, away from the front-facing side but still possible to enter if you’re prepared.
I’m noticing a lot of anxiety in myself about your disagreement with the name. I realized that asking you for feedback on the name, and suggestions for what to change it to, would make my anxiety go away. What are your thoughts on better names for this, that still capture the essence of “I’m dropping this tidbit here because otherwise you won’t even be able to know something is wrong, and/or what it is”?
I edited the post title. But I also notice that this discussion we’re having is exactly the sort of thing that, when I anticipate, would normally lead me to not make a post at all; if that’s not “de-silencing”, what should it be?
I regret being a source of anxiety. I think the things I don’t like about “de-silencing” are (1) that it’s liable to suggest that it’s a fix for being silenced rather than for being silent (i.e., that the problem is some kind of deliberately-applied pressure from outside rather than internal anxieties etc.) and (2) that it’s rather uninformative—I mean, any time you say anything you’re making yourself less silent/silenced, and presumably the point is to pick out particular instances, namely those in which you might have avoided saying anything for fear of confrontation (or whatever).
So what might be better? Nothing leaps out at me as being a really good name. (Which shouldn’t be a big surprise; probably most things don’t have obvious really good names, and most people can’t reliably locate them even when they exist.) I might consider something cute like “avoidance avoidance” (which would need an explanatory link just as much as “de-silencing” does, but at least avoids the help-help-I’m-being-oppressed vibe), or I might call instances of the pattern something vaguer like “constructive criticism” (which doesn’t draw attention to the motivation you’ve described here, but it’s not clear to me that that’s always a problem), but I would be immensely unsurprised to find that there are much better options than those.
(Maybe there’s a useful distinction to be drawn, between (1) a name for use in a post like yours here, and (2) a name for labelling instances as they arise. I’m not sure #2 is actually needed at all; after all, most comments don’t come tagged with explanations of the motives behind them. Hmm, and to what extent do we need #1 either? “Avoiding selection bias” is your current title for the article; it’s not a name for the action of “de-silencing” but that doesn’t make it a bad title, does it?)
I don’t just mean for this to be about confrontations.
That is how I meant it, though “oppression” is maybe a bit stronger than I meant—I mean that people in a fairly common social attractor in mindspace tend to try to make anyone who disagrees with them into an argument target. I do this to prevent their credible threat of dismissing me if I try to tell them nicely from completely shutting me up.
That’s not what I mean, though; the place I got this name is that I often notice that I want to give feedback about a way someone has done something that excluded me, and they won’t be happy with me complaining. this policy is an attempt to make sure that some of the time, they still find out. I have found that it applies a bit more generally, and I execute this any time I worry that someone will be blackholed or ghosted or in some other way simply abandoned if they aren’t told what’s happening.
Yeah, I agree that there are things that I don’t often have the energy for that would make things come across better, and possibly things I do have the energy for that I don’t understand well enough to do easily/correctly. There may even be free actions I could take. These are all probably true of others. I’m interested in any comments you can make about how someone who’s constantly background on guard against rejection can still minimize rudeness.
(Keep in mind that I’m not just oblivious.)