A small number of terms are elevated from the pages of literature, up to the Mount Olympus of blog post vernacular. Moloch, as the dark god of failed coordination problems. The Dark Forest, as domains where there’s active incentive not to be noticed. And from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Omelas child, a person whose suffering is a counterweight to the joys of others.[1]

This post is an attempt to elevate another of Le Guin’s terms to the blog post realm. That term is shifgrethor.

Definition

Shifgrethor hails from The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin’s most celebrated standalone novel. In the novel, it’s an untranslatable alien concept, the sense of honor on the planet Gethen.

But basically, it boils down to an injunction against advice.

In the book, “shifgrethor” comes from “an old word for shadow”. Individuals have shifgrethor, and various slights can offend it. It’s everyone’s responsibility to respect everyone else’s shifgrethor, even that of enemies. And the main way to violate shifgrethor is to give advice.

Shifgrethor can be waived. But it’s not something you’d ask someone else to do. For example, when politicians get together in a smoke filled room, one fat cat, seeking another’s honest opinion, might say “What do you think I should do? I waive shifgrethor.” But you wouldn’t say “Senator, would you waive shifgrethor? I have an opinion on this matter.” That itself would be a (lesser) violation.

Examples

Shifgrethor is useful surprisingly often.

While human adults sometimes welcome advice, children have a strong sense of shifgrethor; parenting advice says it’s important to let them figure things out for themselves when possible. Shifgrethor is also famously present when people vent.

r/MadeMeSmile - a screenshot of a chat

Offering a solution when someone just wants to be heard? Classic shifgrethor blunder.

Or take the case of a micromanager. When one person has professional authority over another, advice often feels belittling. Managers would do well to heed shifgrethor, and avoid advising their reports when it isn’t necessary.

Shifgrethor also appears in competitive gaming contexts; few things are as infuriating after a close tournament loss as your buddy telling you, on your way back to the spectator zone, what you should have done differently. Would you like to know it eventually? Sure. But you need a minute before you’re ready to waive shifgrethor.

These cases have all been about emotions. Employees often feel vulnerable to their bosses, children have big emotions more generally, and a venting person or defeated gamer is almost definitionally displeased. But shifgrethor has other applications, too.

If you want someone to really learn something, it’s a common practice to help them figure it out themselves, rather than giving them the solution. A math textbook leaving certain results as an exercise for the reader? That’s respecting shifgrethor. Shifgrethor also comes up in domains where people have radically different experiences from each other: you must take care not to violate shifgrethor when talking about a diet that worked for you, since metabolisms vary.

Why a new term?

Well, technically it’s a pretty old term. The Left Hand of Darkness came out in 1969. But why do I want to introduce it to the vernacular?

Mainly, because advice is fraught in general, and we don’t have a word for that fact. Once you have the term, it’s obvious that parenting, being cool about dietary stuff, math textbook exercises, being a supportive romantic partner, handling gamer rage, and being a good manager all have this throughline. They’re all cases where you should be careful with advice, and treat your counterparty as allergic to it.

More generally, I think the notion of “advice” is a little too benign. Remembering that it can be experienced as a violation, or can cheat people out of doing their own reasoning, strikes me as a valuable correction. The planet Gethen does take it too far; there aren’t literally zero situations where unsolicited feedback is appropriate. But it should probably be rarer than it is!

  1. ^

    There isn’t one canonical blog post about the Omelas child, maybe in part because The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is already a short and philosophical story that speaks for itself. But I think many across the blogosphere would recognize the term (and if you wouldn’t, read the story).

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[-]Raemon1215

I like this as a thing to think about, but, Shifgrethor is just a way less easy-to-say or evocative word than "Moloch", "Child of Omelas" or "Dark Forest", alas, so I don't think this particular one will really make it into my repertoir.

I am also a little dubious that this is defining a concept which doesn't just mostly overlap with "face", which is substantially older, already well-known, and infinitely easier to remember & write.

Most of these examples seem like substituting in 'face' or 'lose face' would work just fine. "Senator, may I cause you to lose face by criticizing you publicly?" "He didn't like the advice I gave him about his errors because he lost face." "She felt infantilized and like losing face when her boyfriend told her how to solve something instead of commiserating with her."

I think this post introduced an important new angle for this, which is not about face, but instead about "I was actually just trying to solve a different problem than the one you're giving advice about, and it is disruptive to my problem-solving process for you to jam your frame into it. This is bad a) because it's annoying and time-wasting, and b) because there is something delicate about my thought process, and your frame is sort of violating (albeit maybe in a minor, non-traumatizing way)

That is what someone might claim, yes, to avoid losing face by too visibly caring about losing face or attempting to manipulate it.

Sure, that's a thing that can happen. I'm moderately confident the other thing is a relatively common thing to happen as well. 

(In addition to this not-seeming-true-across-the-board... also, literally nobody has ever made this claim to me. The entire reason I'm hypothesizing it is because this post suggested it, and it made sense given my model of how my/friends' cognition seems to work. So, IMO the slightly-aggro comment here is just basically wrong? Unless you've specifically seen people claim this?)

It does seem like this is pretty different from losing face, and having one word for both of them isn't obviously the best way to carve up concept space.

"Face" is pretty close, and it's cool to be reminded that that word (in this context) exists.

The main difference as I see it is that shifgrethor is narrower. At least as I propose the term be used (which is not as subtle or mysterious as in the book), it's specific to advice. You can also lose face by e.g. not responding to taunting, or something. Shifgrethor would have no opinion on that.

“Advice can be violating” is the concept-handle I think I will take away.

Reasonable! It strikes me as a little silly for in person conversation, but I find it fun to type and read.

'In essence, it is viewed as a form of adhamma (not-Dhamma) or misconduct to teach someone who is uninterested or unreceptive, since doing so does not respect the individual's disposition and may lead to misunderstanding or conflict rather than enlightenment.' (commentary on Akkosa Sutta (SN 7.2))

A math textbook leaving certain results as an exercise for the reader?

 

I think this is usually actually one of (1) the author not wanting to write out the proof (because it's boring/tedious) or (2) a proof that would make a good exercise because it is easy enough if you understand the big ideas (and coming up with good exercises is not always easy).

On Gethen, is advice crisply distinguished from from criticism? Are there norms or language that allow unvarnished feedback or criticism without taking someone's shifgrethor?

In the book, I don't remember and think probably it's just weird and subtle because part of the point of it is that it's alien.

As I intend it here, yeah, it would be a distinct thing. I think almost everyone knows criticism can be painful to receive and rude to give, whereas advice can feel a lot more benign.

You have given various examples of advice being unwanted/unhelpful. But there are also plenty of examples of it being wanted/helpful. Including lots of cases where the person doesn't know they need it. 

Why do you think advice is rarer than it should be?

(I assume you are asking why it should be rarer, not why it is rarer.)

A few reasons, including:

  • It's often given to children, where the best parenting book(s) caution against doing that too much (though of course there are tons of times it's fine)
  • It's often given to people in emotional distress, when it famously is less likely to work well

I suppose there may be lots of cases where upregulating advice would be good, and that these outweigh the common cases where downregulating it would be good. I just haven't thought of those. If you have, I'd be interested in hearing them!

I really do think this term would be very useful if it could be brought into common usage. Here is two examples I met from just the last 12 hours:

Yesterday I was eating tabletop raclette (kind of like mixed grill) with my family, and my wife tried to tell my son that he shouldn't try to just fry a lot of mushrooms together, that wouldn't be delicious. He got so sad because his shifgrethor was violated while he was having fun trying to cook real food for the first time.
A few hours ago, my wife told me about an article about proffesional test takers in China, who are paid by schools to take the university entrance exam multiple times, thus artificially inflating the schools statistics. I immediatly annoyed her by starting a long theory about how to optimally game the system, instead of just respecting shifgrethor and saying that it sounded really interesting.

Only look at the spoiled text if you are waiving shifgrethor!


::::spoiler  I think the word shifgrethor is too hard to pronounce to ever catch on. ::::