I expect these topics are hard to write about, and that there’s value in attempting it anyway. I want to note that before I get into my complaints. So, um, thanks for sharing your data and thoughts about this hard-to-write-about (AFAICT) and significant (also AFAICT) topic!

Having acknowledged this, I’d like to share some things about my own perspective about how to have conversations like these “well”, and about why the above post makes me extremely uneasy.

First: there’s a kind of rigor that IMO the post lacks, and IMO the post is additionally in a domain for which such rigor is a lot more helpful/necessary than such rigor usually is.

Specifically: I can’t tell what the core claims of the OP are. I can’t easily ask myself “what would the world look like if [core claim X] was true? If it were false? what do I see?” “How about [core claim Y]”? “Are [X] and [Y] the best way to account for the evidence the OP presents, or are there unnecessary details tagging along with the conclusions that aren’t actually actually implied by the evidence?”, and so on.

I.e., the post’s theses are not factored to make evidence-tracking easy.

I care more about (separable claims, each separately track... (read more)

I'm particularly frustrated by the thing where, inevitably, the concept of frame control is going to get weaponized (both by people who are explicitly using it to frame control, and people who are just vaguely ineptly wielding it as a synonym for 'bad').

I don't have a full answer. But I'm reminded of a comment by Johnswentworth that feels like it tackles something relevant. This was originally a review of Power Buys You Distance From the Crime. Hopefully the quote below gets across the idea:

When this post first came out, I said something felt off about it. The same thing still feels off about it, but I no longer endorse my original explanation of what-felt-off. So here's another attempt.

First, what this post does well. There's a core model which says something like "people with the power to structure incentives tend get the appearance of what they ask for, which often means bad behavior is hidden". It's a useful and insightful model, and the post presents it with lots of examples, producing a well-written and engaging explanation. The things which the post does well more than outweigh the problems below; it's a great post.

On to the problem. Let's use the slave labor example, becaus

I appreciate this post. I get the sense that the author is trying to do something incredibly complicated and is aware of exactly how hard it is, and the post does it as well as it can be done. 

I want to try to contribute by describing a characteristic thing I've noticed from people who I later realized were doing a lot of frame control on me: 

Comments like 'almost no one is actually trying but you, you're actually trying' 'most people don't actually want to hear this, and I'm hoping you're different'.' I can only tell you this if you want to hear it' 'it feels like you're already getting it, no one gets that far on their own' 'almost everyone is too locked into the system to actually listen to what I'm about to say' 'I've been wanting to find the right person to say this to, but no one wants to listen, but I think you might actually be ready to hear it': the common thread is that you, the listener, are special, and the speaker is the person who gets to recognize you as special, and the proof of your specialness is that you're going to try/going to listen/going to hear them out/ not going to instantly jump to conclusions

Counterexamples: 'you're the only Political Affiliati... (read more)

I really like this post. I'd been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton's Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.

In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.

WRT positive things to look for I'll add this: A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.

Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)

1. To their face
2. Behind their back
3. Not at all

My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.

Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:

Good teachers don't encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I'll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher oft... (read more)

This phenomenological account of frame control doesn't provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question someone would be trying to answer when asking "is this person doing frame control?" aside from noticing which of the features of "frame control" they satisfy.

Some of the "red flags" seem like they could equally well point to someone fanatically committed to totally dominating others, or someone whose perspective responds to evidence but not social pressure, and many of the signs that someone is not a "frame controller" seem like the opposite. From the description of the first red flag:

They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.

These are signs of submission, as is the description of the first sign that someone isn't "doing frame control":

They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.

This resembles a pattern I see across many contexts where the idea of listening to someone because they have something to say is replaced... (read more)

The post is saying: "Here's a very common thing that basically everybody does sometimes."

Technically, everybody "frame controls" all the time; we can probably find numerous examples where every one of us - including me - does the things I outline as bad.

And then it's telling us that, if you identify that someone is doing this thing, this should be sufficient evidence to cast them out of society.  Even if they have good intent, even if there's no evidence of harm, even if nobody has told them the thing they are doing is bad.

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.

I'm worried that this is basically a general-purpose tool for anyone to denounce anyone else.

I think the author should get a lot of credit for identifying that this is dangerous and admitting how dangerous it is right in the post.  But I wish that she'd gone a step further and refined the post until it wasn't dangerous in this way.

This article gives me a strange feeling of looking through a mirror into a very different kind of world. I'm highly disagreeable. Vulnerability to frame control seems to stem from being agreeable/conflict-avoidant/unassertive. I personally find many of the situations where person A tries to frame control person person B and person B just silently takes it and doesn't say anything (at least in the initial stages) really weird and hard to imagine myself doing. Further, while rationally I know people behave like this, I really can't put myself in their shoes and see why. The reactions to situations just seem so different from what mine would be.

E.g:

• The burning man example. If I made a point and another person suggested people just listen to me because I'm tall/eloquent/have other trait X, I'd immediately confront them. I can't imagine letting a shitty argumentative tactic like that slide, much less the insult it implies.
• The student who asks the master a question, the master then responds by asking the student what motivates them to seek problems. Again, my response would be to pointedly confront the master and point out that they haven't answered my question.

This is an important concept that is tricky to describe. Some thoughts:

Minor vs Major Frame Control

Lots of relationships and minor interactions have low-key frame control going on pretty frequently. I think it's useful to be able to name that without implying that it's (necessarily) that big a deal. I find myself wanting separate words for "social moves that control the frame", "moves that control the frame in subtle ways", "move that control the frame pervasively in a way that is unsettlingly unhealthy." 

This is harder because even the most pervasive frame control appears on a spectrum. A romantic partner or family member can consistently weave a frame that is slightly unhealthy, but that doesn't hold a candle to a cult that systematically eliminates all your mental defenses.

Abusers can also be victims

One of the most important, sad lessons I had to learn about this is that the person weaving a frame, or controlling, or abusing you, can be weak.

Society taught me scripts for handling powerful, high status abusers who needed to be whistleblown. And society taught me scripts for handling predators who were... clearly villainanous. But it turned out the people I needed to be aware... (read more)

Here's a few things I believe:

1. Frame control is definitely real. I think if I were to try to operationalize it, it's something like the ability influence the ontologies people use and the valence they assign to objects with in those ontologies.  This caches out as influencing how important and virtuous people find certain ideas and actions.
2. Frame control is probably necessary for good leadership.  A good leader is a Kegan 5 individual who can find the ontology that they can use to educate and motivate Kegan 4 and Kegan 3 underlings in an organization that will allow them to correctly respond to current conditions, and then help them to change that ontology as the conditions change.
3. But frame control is also the thing that Kegan 4.5 sociopaths use to control the narrative in cults and moral mazes.  It allows them to get all of the credit, take none of the blame, and keep less powerful or sophiscated people in the dark about their games, and even happy to give them more control and power.
4. A well aligned Kegan 5 leader aware of the possiblity of capture by sociopaths, and skilled in frame control, is one of the best defenses against sociopaths, moreso than any specifi

Frame control is an effect; very often, people who frame control will not be aware that this is what they’re doing, and have extensive reasoning to rationalize their behavior that they themselves believe.

Of note: in my experience, as someone who accidentally did lots of frame control and now has it at least partly in his own view (and thus does a mix of "accidentally still doing it," "endorsedly still doing it," and "endorsedly specifically not doing it"), often the frame controller is themselves stuck in the frame.  They either don't know another kind of frame could even exist, or rely on it for their own self-image or self-worth or something.

(I know this is sort of addressed in the above but I wanted to pull it out and highlight it.  This is a clinical explanation of what happens and why, not an attempt to justify or excuse.)

I don't know how to handle the fact that everything Aella said about vulnerability and reciprocity is true, and also some people are vastly better at things than other people, and some people are better at a lot of things than other people. If you insist on being treated as an equal in certain ways, you either rule out interacting with people who are sufficiently better at sufficiently many things than you, or demand they lie. Many people claiming vast amounts of power knowledge and wisdom are flat out wrong, but not all of them are. And even if you could distinguish between the two perfectly, being genuinely better at a lot of things doesn't make someone inherently safe: in many ways it makes them more dangerous, either because they can use superior skill to manipulate you, or because sometimes doing the wrong thing because it feels right to you is long better than doing the right thing because someone told you to.

I'm not ruling out "just don't interact with people who are sufficiently beyond you (especially if they won't spend time proactively valuing you in ways you haven't actually earned)", but "only interact with your exact equals" can't be right either- it removes the best people to learn from. 

Note: I'd be excited to frontpage and curate a post similar-to-this. This particular post feels a bit too embedded in a live conflict for that to feel right to me. 

I recognize that it's pretty hard to write a post like this without examples and the best examples will often necessarily involve recent conflict / live-politics / be-a-bit-aiming-to-persuade. I'm sure shipping this out the door was already a sizeable chunk of effort. But I think there could be a hypothetically idealized split-into-two posts version, where one post simply outlined the model, and the other post applied it to recent events.

I think that the first red flag, and the first anti-red-flag, are both diametrically wrong.

… here’s a non-exhaustive list of some frame control symptoms …

1. They do not demonstrate vulnerability in conversation, or if they do it somehow processes as still invulnerable. They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.

This seems good, actually? Why should anyone be interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview? What’s so great about your opinion? (General-‘your’, I mean; I am not referring to OP specifically.) It seems to me that the baseline assumption should be that no one is interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview, unless (and this ought to be expected to be unusual!) you manage to impress them considerably (and even then, such conformance should not be immediate, but should come after much consideration, to take place at leisure, not in the actual moment of conversation!).

More generally: attempting to think deeply and without restriction about the ideas of others, and to change our minds, while actively being subject to social pressures in a live interpersonal setting, ... (read more)

To connect the concepts here with some existing work: the special case of “frame control” where the result is self-doubt is also called “gaslighting.”

Here's some notes I took about the first some minutes of Gaslight (1944) (SPOILER alert. It's a very good movie, and somewhat relevant).

When he grabs the letter out of her hands he's like "Oh uh I was just worried about all the unhappy memories it's reminding you of". It's weird, it's a double move: on the one hand, most obviously it's a lie to cover up that he's worried about something else, but also it reveals that he's positioning himself as hyperconcerned about her. He doesn't excuse it by some selfish motive like "I became super curious about the letter" or "Your talking is annoying me" or whatever. Further, his supposed concern is about her "unhappy memories", positioning himself as an agent who takes it as a salient variable to track, what's going on with her memories and emotions; and implicitly, that he's an agent in the position to affect and manage her relationship with her memories and emotions.

And in the next breath, he explicitly tells her to forget all that unhappy stuff. He says "While you are afraid of anything, there cannot be any happiness for us"; "You must forget her". This sounds sort of innocent, especially in the context of concern, but it's ambiguous betw... (read more)

One fairly central reaction I had to this post is not so much about the specific phenomenon of frame control but rather about the general observation that it's quite common for the aspects of an abusive situation that are worst to experience to NOT be the same as the aspects that are most clear-cut bad and easiest to convey objectively to another person.

This seems true; I have heard multiple people with objectively horrifying stories of abuse report that actually they don't really care about the objectively awful parts that their friends are horrified about, but instead they are really fucked up by some stuff that's much harder to convey. (Probably in some cases that's the same general phenomenon described in this post and in other cases it's some other interpersonal fuckery.)

I have also heard people report that they experienced a situation as abusive and NOT have any clear-cut objectively awful behavior to point to. It makes perfect sense that this would happen in some cases - because the abuser is savvy enough about what people will object to to avoid those things, or because the abuser is actually trying to be good by following the ethical rules they know but is not managing to ... (read more)

First of all, this is an excellent and important post. I wanted to add some thoughts:

I think the core issue that is described here is a malevolent attempt for dominance via subtle manipulation. The problem with this is that this is anti-inductive, e.g., when manipulative techniques become common knowledge, clever perpetrators stop using them and switch to other methods. It's a bit similar to defender-attacker dynamics in cyber-security. Attackers find weaknesses, and these get patched, so attackers find new weaknesses. An example would be the PUA community "negs" that once became common knowledge lost all effectiveness.

In social dynamics, the problem happens when predators are more sophisticated than their prey and thus can be later in logical time, e.g., an intelligent predator that reads this post can understand that it's vital for him to show some fake submissive behaviors (See Benquo comment) to avoid clueing in others of his nefarious nature. So he can avoid being "checklisted" and continue manipulating his unsuspecting victims.

But even though this entire social dynamics situation has an anti-inductive illegible nightmarish background, there is still value in listing red flags... (read more)

what are some signs that someone isn’t doing frame control? [...]

1. They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.

There was a discussion on the Sam Harris podcast where he talks about the alarming frequency at which leaders of meditation communities end up abusing, controlling or sleeping with their students. I can't seem to find the episode name now.

But I remember being impressed with the podcast guest, a meditation teacher, who said they had seen this happening all around them and before they took over as the leader of their meditation centre had tried to put in place things to stop themselves falling into the same traps.

They had taken their family and closest friends aside and asked them for help, saying things to this effect: "If you ever see me slipping into behaviour that looks dodgy I need you to point it out to me immediately and in no uncertain terms. Even though I've experienced awakening I'm still fallible and I don't know how I'm going to handle all this power and all these beautiful young students wanting to sleep with me."

This kind of mindset is a norm I'd love to see encouraged and supported in the leaders of the rationalist community.

Great post. I agree with your analysis. I especially like the part about how it often doesn’t help to try to judge the frame controller’s intent.

FWIW, in the “Looks like I’m boring Aella” scenario, assuming I perceive the speaker to be overly aggressive in their frame control attempt, my move would be to politely disagree, except with a noticeable attitude of not buying into the frame that there’s anything wrong with me looking at my phone. I would reply with a tongue-in-cheek “No, this is all interesting stuff. Please continue.” where my voice is cheerful and encouraging but I’m still just looking at my phone.