“Honestly, this is a terrible post. It describes a made-up concept that, as far as I can tell, does not actually map to any real phenomenon [...]”—if I am not mistaken, LessWrong contains many posts on “made-up concepts”—often newly minted concepts of interest to the pursuit of rationality. Don’t the rationalist all-stars like Scott Alexander and Yudkowsky do this often?
As a rationalist type who has also experienced abuse, I value Aella’s attempt to characterize the phenomenon.
Years of abuse actually drove my interest in rationality and epistemology. My abuser’s frame-controlling (or whatever it should be called) drove me to desperately seek undeniable truths (e.g. “dragging one’s partner around by the hair while calling them a stupid crazy bitch is objectively wrong”). My partner hacked our two-person consensus reality so thoroughly that this “truth” was dangerous speculation on my part, and he’d punish me for asserting it.
I think abuse is a form of epistemic hacking. Part of the ‘hack’ is detection avoidance, which can include use of / threat of force (such as “I will punish you if you say ‘abuse’ one more time”), he-said-she-said (“you accuse me of abuse, but i’ll accuse you right back”), psychological jabs that are 100% clear given context but plausibly denied outside that context, and stupid but effective shit like “this isn’t abuse because you deserve it.” In my experience, detection avoidance is such a systemic part of abuse that it is almost as if it could all be explained as a gnarly mess of instrumental goals gone wild.
My point is, abuse defies description. It is designed (or rather, honed) to defy description.
I don’t know if you’ll find this persuasive in the slightest. But if you do, even a tiny bit, maybe you could chill out on the “this is a terrible post” commentary. To invoke SCC (though I know those aren’t the rules here), that comment isn’t true, kind OR necessary.
I’m sorry to hear about the things that happened to you.
However, neither that, nor Aella’s experiences, change anything about what I wrote…
I don’t know if you’ll find this persuasive in the slightest. But if you do, even a tiny bit, maybe you could chill out on the “this is a terrible post” commentary. To invoke SCC (though I know those aren’t the rules here), that comment isn’t true, kind OR necessary.
Thankfully, that rule does not apply here, because it’s a really bad rule.
(This aside from the fact that my comment is of course true, or at least I claim so—otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it! How, exactly, does one apply that rule to a forum where the whole point of most of the discussions is to determine what is, or is not, true…?)
As a rationalist type who has also experienced abuse, I value Aella’s attempt to characterize the phenomenon.
If there exists a bad thing, and if it is good to describe the bad thing, it does not follow from this that all attempts to describe the bad thing are good (much less that all apparent or purported attempts to describe the bad thing are good).
As I say in my comment: Aella describes some genuinely, obviously abusive behaviors. But she lumps them in with other things which are not abusive behaviors, but are instead normal, or even praiseworthy traits—traits that many people whom I admire and respect have, traits that I have, even… and then she declares war on anyone who matches this supposed pattern of hers! War! “Burn it with fire”, she says!
Sorry, but I entirely stand by my assessment of the post. I truly regret what happened to you, and I hope that you and people like you can avoid such things in the future. (Indeed, in several of my other comments I suggest patterns of thinking and behavior that—in my opinion—tend to reduce one’s susceptibility to such abuse. It seems to me that if my suggestions were generally adopted as rules of thumb for sensible approaches to life, incidence of such abuse—at least among “rationalists”—might decrease. Too much to hope for, perhaps, but…)
But the fact of someone having undergone abuse does not remove from them the burden of standards for how to speak and write and behave sanely—nor does it remove from the rest of us the responsibility to point out what we see as terrible mistakes.
I think kindness is a good rule for rationalists, because unkindness is rhetorically OP yet so easily rationalized (“i’m just telling it like it is, y’all” while benefitting – again, rhetorically – from playing the offensive).
Your implication that Aella is not speaking, writing or behaving sanely is, frankly, hard to fathom. You may disagree with her; you may consider her ideas and perspectives incomplete; but to say she has not met the standards of sanity?
She speaks about an incredibly painful and personal issue with remarkable sanity and analytical distance. Does that mean she’s objective? No. But she’s a solid rationalist, and this post is appropriately representative.
But see, here we are trading subjective takes. You imply this post is insane. I say that it is impressively sane. Are we shouldering the burden of standards for speaking, writing and behaving sanely?
In other words, you’ve set quite a high bar there, friend, and conveniently it is to your rhetorical advantage. Is this all about being rational or achieving rhetorical wins?
--
Wrt “burn it with fire”—she goes on to say that she can’t have frame controllers in her life, not that she plans on committing arson. Her meaning was clear to me. If I detect that someone is attempting coercive control on me (my preferred phrasing), I block them on all channels. This has happened 2x in the last 5 years, since I escaped the abuser. I cut them out of my life with a sort of regret; not because I think they’re bad, but because I’ve determined that continued interaction puts me at risk. This is my personal nuclear option too (like Aella) because I’m not one to block people nor consider them irredeemable.
Perhaps you could re-read that part of her post with principle o’ charity / steel manning glasses on.
While I’m at it, your other criticism about normal or praiseworthy traits: she explicitly says “Keep in mind these are not the same thing as frame control itself, they’re just red flags.” A red flag doesn’t mean “a bad behavior” but rather means a warning sign. As is said elsewhere in the comment section (perhaps by you), some of those red flags might be exhibited by Aspie types or those who have successfully overcome some unhelpful social norms. As a different example, I have a friend who talks quickly, genuinely wants to help out even if there is nothing in it for him, and is polymathic—his rapidly covering lots of intellectual ground and wanting to help me out set off my “bullshitter” red flags. But that isn’t the case. He’s a good guy. And given that, the aforementioned traits are awesome. Red flags are signals and not necessarily bad behaviors.
I think kindness is a good rule for rationalists, because unkindness is rhetorically OP yet so easily rationalized (“i’m just telling it like it is, y’all” while benefitting – again, rhetorically – from playing the offensive).
Accusations of unkindness are also, as you say, “rhetorically OP”… best not to get into litigating how “kind” anyone is being.
Your implication that Aella is not speaking, writing or behaving sanely is, frankly, hard to fathom. You may disagree with her; you may consider her ideas and perspectives incomplete; but to say she has not met the standards of sanity?
Not difficult at all, I think. “That person is controlling my mind with their words!” is, actually, typical of things that a delusional person would say (and if you add “… and they don’t even know it!”, that only adds to the effect).
This in addition, of course, to all the “kill it with fire” stuff, which is … either ill-considered, or deliberately hostile. (One may justifiably use stronger language here, but I prefer to avoid such, if possible.)
She speaks about an incredibly painful and personal issue with remarkable sanity and analytical distance. Does that mean she’s objective? No. But she’s a solid rationalist, and this post is appropriately representative.
I’m afraid I cannot agree with your assessment.
But see, here we are trading subjective takes. You imply this post is insane. I say that it is impressively sane. Are we shouldering the burden of standards for speaking, writing and behaving sanely?
We are doing better at it than the OP, at least for now. (And the “takes” are not so subjective as all that…)
Perhaps you could re-read that part of her post with principle o’ charity / steel manning glasses on.
Perhaps I could, but that would be unwise. These concepts, as commonly deployed these days (if not, perhaps, as originally intended), tend to be more detrimental than beneficial to effective reasoning and communication.
If your “principle o’ charity / steel manning glasses” lead you to read this paragraph:
In this, I am a conflict theorist; this is not a mistake, this is war. And a part of me knows this isn’t “true”—as in, I could have been born into a brain that ended up doing strong frame control. I know they are real people with feelings and needs. But that “true” perspective will let them destroy you; when I run into strong frame control, I snap to an extremely antagonistic frame. No, you are not allowed into my life, my home, my friends, and I will try to remove you from the power you might use to hurt anybody else.
… as anything other than an expression of actual hostility, then I submit to you that said “glasses” are, in fact, blinders.
There is no way to read “I will try to remove you from the power you might use to hurt anybody else”, “extremely antagonistic frame”, “war”, as merely “I choose not to interact with such people, for my own personal idiosyncratic mental health needs”, or what have you—unless you’ve got blinders on.
As for “red flags” not necessarily meaning “bad behaviors”—for one thing, that is merely the motte in a very obvious motte-and-bailey scenario. In these sorts of discussions/scenarios, people never consistently refrain from treating “red flags” as definitely bad; people never consistently stick to the “it’s just a neutral-in-itself possible-warning-sign”. They simply do not.
But we don’t even need to go that far, because the specific alleged “red flags” to which I objected are not even warning signs, but are instead (a) directly and straightforwardly good, and—as I pointed out elsethread—also (b) some of the best ways to resist the actually bad things that Aella describes!
“Honestly, this is a terrible post. It describes a made-up concept that, as far as I can tell, does not actually map to any real phenomenon [...]”—if I am not mistaken, LessWrong contains many posts on “made-up concepts”—often newly minted concepts of interest to the pursuit of rationality. Don’t the rationalist all-stars like Scott Alexander and Yudkowsky do this often?
As a rationalist type who has also experienced abuse, I value Aella’s attempt to characterize the phenomenon.
Years of abuse actually drove my interest in rationality and epistemology. My abuser’s frame-controlling (or whatever it should be called) drove me to desperately seek undeniable truths (e.g. “dragging one’s partner around by the hair while calling them a stupid crazy bitch is objectively wrong”). My partner hacked our two-person consensus reality so thoroughly that this “truth” was dangerous speculation on my part, and he’d punish me for asserting it.
I think abuse is a form of epistemic hacking. Part of the ‘hack’ is detection avoidance, which can include use of / threat of force (such as “I will punish you if you say ‘abuse’ one more time”), he-said-she-said (“you accuse me of abuse, but i’ll accuse you right back”), psychological jabs that are 100% clear given context but plausibly denied outside that context, and stupid but effective shit like “this isn’t abuse because you deserve it.” In my experience, detection avoidance is such a systemic part of abuse that it is almost as if it could all be explained as a gnarly mess of instrumental goals gone wild.
My point is, abuse defies description. It is designed (or rather, honed) to defy description.
I don’t know if you’ll find this persuasive in the slightest. But if you do, even a tiny bit, maybe you could chill out on the “this is a terrible post” commentary. To invoke SCC (though I know those aren’t the rules here), that comment isn’t true, kind OR necessary.
I’m sorry to hear about the things that happened to you.
However, neither that, nor Aella’s experiences, change anything about what I wrote…
Thankfully, that rule does not apply here, because it’s a really bad rule.
(This aside from the fact that my comment is of course true, or at least I claim so—otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it! How, exactly, does one apply that rule to a forum where the whole point of most of the discussions is to determine what is, or is not, true…?)
If there exists a bad thing, and if it is good to describe the bad thing, it does not follow from this that all attempts to describe the bad thing are good (much less that all apparent or purported attempts to describe the bad thing are good).
As I say in my comment: Aella describes some genuinely, obviously abusive behaviors. But she lumps them in with other things which are not abusive behaviors, but are instead normal, or even praiseworthy traits—traits that many people whom I admire and respect have, traits that I have, even… and then she declares war on anyone who matches this supposed pattern of hers! War! “Burn it with fire”, she says!
Sorry, but I entirely stand by my assessment of the post. I truly regret what happened to you, and I hope that you and people like you can avoid such things in the future. (Indeed, in several of my other comments I suggest patterns of thinking and behavior that—in my opinion—tend to reduce one’s susceptibility to such abuse. It seems to me that if my suggestions were generally adopted as rules of thumb for sensible approaches to life, incidence of such abuse—at least among “rationalists”—might decrease. Too much to hope for, perhaps, but…)
But the fact of someone having undergone abuse does not remove from them the burden of standards for how to speak and write and behave sanely—nor does it remove from the rest of us the responsibility to point out what we see as terrible mistakes.
I think kindness is a good rule for rationalists, because unkindness is rhetorically OP yet so easily rationalized (“i’m just telling it like it is, y’all” while benefitting – again, rhetorically – from playing the offensive).
Your implication that Aella is not speaking, writing or behaving sanely is, frankly, hard to fathom. You may disagree with her; you may consider her ideas and perspectives incomplete; but to say she has not met the standards of sanity?
She speaks about an incredibly painful and personal issue with remarkable sanity and analytical distance. Does that mean she’s objective? No. But she’s a solid rationalist, and this post is appropriately representative.
But see, here we are trading subjective takes. You imply this post is insane. I say that it is impressively sane. Are we shouldering the burden of standards for speaking, writing and behaving sanely?
In other words, you’ve set quite a high bar there, friend, and conveniently it is to your rhetorical advantage. Is this all about being rational or achieving rhetorical wins?
--
Wrt “burn it with fire”—she goes on to say that she can’t have frame controllers in her life, not that she plans on committing arson. Her meaning was clear to me. If I detect that someone is attempting coercive control on me (my preferred phrasing), I block them on all channels. This has happened 2x in the last 5 years, since I escaped the abuser. I cut them out of my life with a sort of regret; not because I think they’re bad, but because I’ve determined that continued interaction puts me at risk. This is my personal nuclear option too (like Aella) because I’m not one to block people nor consider them irredeemable.
Perhaps you could re-read that part of her post with principle o’ charity / steel manning glasses on.
While I’m at it, your other criticism about normal or praiseworthy traits: she explicitly says “Keep in mind these are not the same thing as frame control itself, they’re just red flags.” A red flag doesn’t mean “a bad behavior” but rather means a warning sign. As is said elsewhere in the comment section (perhaps by you), some of those red flags might be exhibited by Aspie types or those who have successfully overcome some unhelpful social norms. As a different example, I have a friend who talks quickly, genuinely wants to help out even if there is nothing in it for him, and is polymathic—his rapidly covering lots of intellectual ground and wanting to help me out set off my “bullshitter” red flags. But that isn’t the case. He’s a good guy. And given that, the aforementioned traits are awesome. Red flags are signals and not necessarily bad behaviors.
Accusations of unkindness are also, as you say, “rhetorically OP”… best not to get into litigating how “kind” anyone is being.
Not difficult at all, I think. “That person is controlling my mind with their words!” is, actually, typical of things that a delusional person would say (and if you add “… and they don’t even know it!”, that only adds to the effect).
This in addition, of course, to all the “kill it with fire” stuff, which is … either ill-considered, or deliberately hostile. (One may justifiably use stronger language here, but I prefer to avoid such, if possible.)
I’m afraid I cannot agree with your assessment.
We are doing better at it than the OP, at least for now. (And the “takes” are not so subjective as all that…)
Perhaps I could, but that would be unwise. These concepts, as commonly deployed these days (if not, perhaps, as originally intended), tend to be more detrimental than beneficial to effective reasoning and communication.
If your “principle o’ charity / steel manning glasses” lead you to read this paragraph:
… as anything other than an expression of actual hostility, then I submit to you that said “glasses” are, in fact, blinders.
There is no way to read “I will try to remove you from the power you might use to hurt anybody else”, “extremely antagonistic frame”, “war”, as merely “I choose not to interact with such people, for my own personal idiosyncratic mental health needs”, or what have you—unless you’ve got blinders on.
As for “red flags” not necessarily meaning “bad behaviors”—for one thing, that is merely the motte in a very obvious motte-and-bailey scenario. In these sorts of discussions/scenarios, people never consistently refrain from treating “red flags” as definitely bad; people never consistently stick to the “it’s just a neutral-in-itself possible-warning-sign”. They simply do not.
But we don’t even need to go that far, because the specific alleged “red flags” to which I objected are not even warning signs, but are instead (a) directly and straightforwardly good, and—as I pointed out elsethread—also (b) some of the best ways to resist the actually bad things that Aella describes!