This is an important skill that it would be good for us to get better at! Thanks for sharing this thing that tries to help.
I don’t think this is quite enough, though—it’s advice on a very abstract level, without examples, and without advice on how to recognize occasions where apology is necessary. And it felt like being browbeaten and told I was bad, not like being given helpful advice.
Please someone else let me know if you learned how to implement a specific behavior from this, that you otherwise wouldn’t have learned how to implement.
But thanks again for bringing up the issue at all—good sources on this would be very helpful, and when you mention this as a problem, you increase the probability that someone will try to solve it.
I agree; it felt as if the video is trying to browbeat you and force you to apologize. It seemed that the person in the video was himself angry and confused and this made it hard to watch with a “Let’s learn a new skill” mindset.
It would have been better if this post could have actually linked to the research about human politeness and how it fits into the instrumental rationality framework. There has been a lot of research on this. A simple google search for ‘rationality politeness’ reveals a wealth of results.
I think a lot of the tone came from the pacing—the video was edited to mash together a bunch of sentences with minimal breaks in between. This made it much faster than normal speech, so it came across as a barrage of admonitions without allowing time to think about them in between. This was probably not intentional, and the speaker was probably not quite as angry as he sounds.
True, I was thinking about mentioning this in my reply above but I felt that criticizing the video would distract from the main point. Editing cuts in a video can be great, occasionally, to provide emphasis or keep the viewer’s attention, but yes, here it seems they were overused and this reduces the effectiveness of the communication.
Hardly. If you wish, I could go on to explicitly analyze this video bit by bit in order to achieve a more calm presentation of the ideas therein. It would go something like:
“Frequent mistake when apologizing, then how to do it right”
I have found myself making most of the mistakes he listed, some of which I have seen in bullies, most notably detaching oneself from the feelings one causes (“I’m sorry that you feel hurt” rather than “I’m sorry that I hurt you”) to outright blaming the other person for having feelings at all (“I’m sorry that you’re such a whiny pansy who can’t take a joke/some criticism/a bit of tough luck. Suck it up (like a man)!”)
But anger and “browbeating” are perfectly legitimate ways to present something that you care very much about; most of the Sequences are written in such a lecturing, passionate tone.
As for that research, I would be thankful if anyone could help me with that, since it’s a huge lot of work to review and incorporate it properly, and I don’t have a huge lot of time, what with college and all.
If you wish, I could go on to explicitly analyze this video bit by bit in order to achieve a more calm presentation of the ideas therein. It would go something like: “Frequent mistake when apologizing, then how to do it right”
Yes, that kind of format would be a much better way to present the ideas. It would then be easier to have a constructive argument about them. Provided, of course, that the reason is given for why said mistakes are actually mistakes.
But anger and “browbeating” are perfectly legitimate ways to present something that you care very much about; most of the Sequences are written in such a lecturing, passionate tone.
The tone of the sequences is far from emotionally neutral, and ‘passionate’ would be a good word to describe many parts of the sequences, but the way is this is often done is by providing a justification, building up to the main point, then using a passionate form of presentation to emphasize the important take-away points. It seems that this video skips right to the ‘passion’ part without addressing the ‘why we should even care’ part.
And that seems like the most important part to me. If you don’t mind me saying, I get the impression that you might be missing that part as well. Politeness is all about human psychology and interaction and our in-built sense of empathy towards others. The correctness of an argument has little to do with how politely it is presented, but its impact on other people, on the other hand, does. So it would be useful examining this a little bit more deeply. Again, this is something that is often done in the sequences: things are broken down deeply and a ‘view from above’ is taken.
This is an important skill that it would be good for us to get better at! Thanks for sharing this thing that tries to help.
I don’t think this is quite enough, though—it’s advice on a very abstract level, without examples, and without advice on how to recognize occasions where apology is necessary. And it felt like being browbeaten and told I was bad, not like being given helpful advice.
Please someone else let me know if you learned how to implement a specific behavior from this, that you otherwise wouldn’t have learned how to implement.
But thanks again for bringing up the issue at all—good sources on this would be very helpful, and when you mention this as a problem, you increase the probability that someone will try to solve it.
I agree; it felt as if the video is trying to browbeat you and force you to apologize. It seemed that the person in the video was himself angry and confused and this made it hard to watch with a “Let’s learn a new skill” mindset.
It would have been better if this post could have actually linked to the research about human politeness and how it fits into the instrumental rationality framework. There has been a lot of research on this. A simple google search for ‘rationality politeness’ reveals a wealth of results.
I think a lot of the tone came from the pacing—the video was edited to mash together a bunch of sentences with minimal breaks in between. This made it much faster than normal speech, so it came across as a barrage of admonitions without allowing time to think about them in between. This was probably not intentional, and the speaker was probably not quite as angry as he sounds.
True, I was thinking about mentioning this in my reply above but I felt that criticizing the video would distract from the main point. Editing cuts in a video can be great, occasionally, to provide emphasis or keep the viewer’s attention, but yes, here it seems they were overused and this reduces the effectiveness of the communication.
Hardly. If you wish, I could go on to explicitly analyze this video bit by bit in order to achieve a more calm presentation of the ideas therein. It would go something like: “Frequent mistake when apologizing, then how to do it right”
I have found myself making most of the mistakes he listed, some of which I have seen in bullies, most notably detaching oneself from the feelings one causes (“I’m sorry that you feel hurt” rather than “I’m sorry that I hurt you”) to outright blaming the other person for having feelings at all (“I’m sorry that you’re such a whiny pansy who can’t take a joke/some criticism/a bit of tough luck. Suck it up (like a man)!”)
But anger and “browbeating” are perfectly legitimate ways to present something that you care very much about; most of the Sequences are written in such a lecturing, passionate tone.
As for that research, I would be thankful if anyone could help me with that, since it’s a huge lot of work to review and incorporate it properly, and I don’t have a huge lot of time, what with college and all.
Yes, that kind of format would be a much better way to present the ideas. It would then be easier to have a constructive argument about them. Provided, of course, that the reason is given for why said mistakes are actually mistakes.
The tone of the sequences is far from emotionally neutral, and ‘passionate’ would be a good word to describe many parts of the sequences, but the way is this is often done is by providing a justification, building up to the main point, then using a passionate form of presentation to emphasize the important take-away points. It seems that this video skips right to the ‘passion’ part without addressing the ‘why we should even care’ part.
And that seems like the most important part to me. If you don’t mind me saying, I get the impression that you might be missing that part as well. Politeness is all about human psychology and interaction and our in-built sense of empathy towards others. The correctness of an argument has little to do with how politely it is presented, but its impact on other people, on the other hand, does. So it would be useful examining this a little bit more deeply. Again, this is something that is often done in the sequences: things are broken down deeply and a ‘view from above’ is taken.
That seems likely to be more helpful.