In a community of people who could potentially work together to reason about possible world futures, being disrespectful - which is a more endemic sin here than being "mean" - causes people to change their LW goal set from, say, "save the universe from rogue AIs", to "save the universe from rogue AIs, and discredit person X at any opportunity." And it's not even being trite or irrational. If you know that someone has a low opinion of you, and shares it freely with others; then advances in that person's career may hinder your advance in your own. In a small world of people doomed to encounter each other over and over at different conferences and events, displaying open contempt is stupid. It hurts the entire community.
It helps you hold off on proposing diagnoses. As tempting as it may be to dismiss people as crazy or stupid, this is a dangerous label for us biased creatures. Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do.
Yes, this parallels why I've been finding hostility in argument increasingly disturbing lately. Insofar as people are rational and honest, they should expect to agree on questions of simple fact, and insofar as they differ on questions of value, then surely they should be able to reach some sort of game-theoretic compromise superior to the default outcome. If you can anticipate disagreeing even after extended interaction, something has gone horribly wrong. I read people's snarky swipes at the psychological motivations of their opponents, and it almost hurts---don't they see the symmetries of the situation? Instead of rushing to call the other mad, why don't they just jump to the meta level and ask, What do I (think I) know that they don't? What do they (think they) know that I don't?
Really, it should all be so simple. Figure out what questions you want to investigate, and ...
I want to ask, why are people mean in the first place? I think before we try to "fix" some behavior we should make sure we understand it first. Otherwise we might be like the social reformers who try to fix "broken" institutions without understanding their reasons for existing.
To a first approximation, meanness seems to be the deliberate cause of offense. (Although I wonder if I'm suffering from the man-with-a-hammer syndrome here.) Anyone have other ideas?
I second the question. In the ancestral environment, there was some individually fit balance between meanness and niceness. If niceness is supposed to pay off individually and selfishly, what changed between now and then? Why is our factory-default impulse toward niceness too weak, if niceness is such an advantage? The question is not meant to be unanswerable, but it ought to be answered.
It may not be too weak. In the ancestral environment, everybody you could consider being mean to was probably in the room with you at the time. They could hurt you, and if you were frequently mean, the other people in the vicinity would back them up. All we need to explain why people are mean, on the Internet and in civilized societies where assault is fairly uncommon, is a mechanism that ties the disposition to be nice to the power of the other person to do you harm.
It's a signal that you aren't scared of being retaliated against. Which can be a pretty powerful signal. It means you're too valuable to lose and don't think you'll be attacked, or that you're very good at defending yourself and can afford to get into an altercation.
If niceness is supposed to pay off individually and selfishly, what changed between now and then?
The way that you wrote seems to confuse reproductively fit with fit for getting me what I would want on reflection. Nothing needs to have changed since the ancestral environment. We just don't necessarily care that much about maximizing the number of our offspring.
Some hypotheses (I suspect actual cases of meanness are more complex than any of these):
It signals power and a lack of fear of repercussions (both to the person one is being mean to and to witnesses).
It is efficient at achieving certain results, like making people for whom the interaction is optional go away.
It can serve aesthetic or intellectual purposes, especially in the form of things like sarcasm.
It is sometimes employed as a defense mechanism to prevent unwanted closeness with others.
I believe "nice," makes an excellent default, and I think these arguments are good ones, well-presented. Not-niceness is sometimes an effort to signal intelligence, I think; it's not particularly effective at that.
It's important, too, though, to recognize when niceness doesn't pay the utilitarian bill:
Trolls. In any environment, people interested in reactions occasionally wander in. These people should be banned and ignored. Shunning is not a particularly nice thing, but even polite feedback is feedback. Do not feed these.
The ineducable. Suppose a person asserts that the Monty Hall problem results in a 50-50 chance of switching or not switching. One or two efforts to educate nicely is good. Additional efforts are wasted and unproductive.
Evil. Deliberately dishonest people are far rarer than alleged on internet fora generally, but it happens. Shaming people who are genuinely bad actors is fine with me, thanks.
I've probably missed several. Assistance welcomed.
Overall, I'd say LW is a particularly civil corner of the internet, and I've spent time at some uncivil places. The other side of pro-niceness posting is that assuming unkindness or bad motives is not a go...
1 and 2 are both examples where the correct response is not being not-nice, but saying nothing.
This also applies in case 3, except where you have evidence of deliberate dishonesty that you think other honest participants may not already be aware of and need brought to their attention.
In general, if you think someone isn't worth being nice to, don't address them at all. It's OK to talk about trolls, but never talk to them.
In other words, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything :-)
Trolls. In any environment, people interested in reactions occasionally wander in. These people should be banned and ignored. Shunning is not a particularly nice thing, but even polite feedback is feedback. Do not feed these.
Agreed - but the process of determining trollhood should probably be nice.
The ineducable. Suppose a person asserts that the Monty Hall problem results in a 50-50 chance of switching or not switching. One or two efforts to educate nicely is good. Additional efforts are wasted and unproductive.
There are nice ways to give up on teaching people. Some of these go by names that sound horrendous to our collective project here ("agreeing to disagree"); some may be more palatable ("changing the subject"). Only if the person is hotly intent on mis-educating you (or others whom you feel are themselves educable) does this quality warrant discarding niceness, and it's probably just a special case of trolling anyway.
Some of these go by names that sound horrendous to our collective project here ("agreeing to disagree"); some may be more palatable ("changing the subject").
I like "agreeing to postpone agreement".
Being mean to someone who is not themselves being mean or manipulative is often not just counterproductive and self destructive (due to the reasons you mentioned), but also the result of personal weakness and lack of control. Meanness usually results from one of the following situations:
In case 1, our anger reflects a personal weakness in that our emotion prevents us from behaving level headily and making sure that what we say really promotes our interests. In case 2 we are speaking without awareness of the consequences of our actions, and hence again put our interests at risk. Only case 3 has a shot of being (at certain times) a good strategy, but in that case we must ask why we are consciously and knowingly choosing to hurt another human being, and whether such an action is ethical and justified.
I VERY strongly agree with this post in general. I do have one objection though.
Most importantly, in my experience, fully recognizing that people are in general crazy and stupid has been the major enabler of positive interaction with them. The members of our community are prone to judging and condemning most people for behaving badly, and most people will continue to behave badly if judged, but if accepted as stupid and crazy and treated kindly they will be more likely to improve.
To me, of the other points 7 and 8 seem particularly important.
Good question to ask yourself: When have you thought "that would have ended better if only I'd been a more mean?"
I've seen many situations where I've thought "that would have ended better if only they'd been prepared to act in a more mean way", but I can't think if I've ever thought "that would have ended better if meaner words had been used".
So it's OK to do the mean thing and tell someone who travelled to your party that they weren't invited and they can't come in if circumstances warrant, but you'll get the best results if you tell them so firmly but as nicely as possible.
I've mentioned my motto here before: as polite as possible, as rude as necessary.
I am successfully mean all the time. When goals are things like, "I want that person to stop talking and go away," mean works wonders. This isn't even like ciphergoth's "Do a mean thing nicely." I mean blatant, over-the-top sarcasm and public status attacks.
Of course, the best of all worlds is to be mean to your target while appearing nice to the environment. It is sort of like lying with factual truths.
EDIT: Oops, I forgot the actual point. There are times when I stop and think, "I will be nice this time and try more tact." Later, after a night of tiptoeing around the fool, I realize that I should have just been mean.
Also, niceness is infectious. An individual entering a community is inclined to take on the tone and demeanour of established members. Even an established member may alter their demeanour to reflect that of others.
The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning.
Another possibility is The Grim Aesthetic -- an aversion to certain attitudes and practices that might be associated with cultures of deliberate "niceness".
(Though even if those excesses are distasteful, that's no reason not to be nice in the ordinary sense.)
Agree, second, and applaud.
I've mostly thought of this as a matter of economy. To quote something I wrote quite a while ago, elsewhere:
...In general, the things we don't like, don't want, won't tolerate vastly outnumber the things we do like, do want, do find acceptable. To enumerate them all would be a huge waste of time. And to name, for instance, only one thing we don't like - that is just getting started on the enumeration.
So, we communicate more efficiently by saying what we like, what we want, what we prefer, how we'd change things for the better, and
Another reason is the Meta-Golden Rule: "Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors."
My experience with a forum that has adopted this policy to an extreme in the last couple of years was that whenever local social norms strongly prescribe against any behavior that falls short of active niceness, the result is a suffocating atmosphere accompanied by a severe decline in content quality (because attempts to set higher standards are perceived as "rude" towards the people lowering the standard). (If that matters, the forum was themed around game graphics creations.) "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything"...
Of course, the real benefit of a "nice" atmosphere is that it attracts more people and grows the community. This could be worth sacrificing accuracy for: 100 people with 99% accurate beliefs is worth more (in reality) than 50 people with 100% accurate beliefs.
Why are you assuming that being nice must decrease accuracy? Several of the points that Alicorn mentioned increase accuracy.
Strongly agreed. It's been observed elsewhere on LW that sarcasm can hide gaping logical flaws in an argument that straightforward statement would immediately reveal. I have more than once found that I have been forced to be more intellectually rigorous when I'm unable to cover the gaps in my argument with dripping scorn.
Consider P Z Myers' scorn for transhumanists - I'd love to hear his "being nice" argument against us, and I think he'd have a much harder time sounding convincing.
I can't extract any meaning from these percentages. Well over 99% of an ordinary person's beliefs are true, because they are about prosaic, uncontroversial things like "I have fingernails".
I have been trying to inculcate this same trend on another forum I frequent (Richard Dawkins' Forums). Most of the respondents are horrible crass toward the ideas and beliefs of others on that forum (well, the crass towards the ideas and beliefs of theists), when it might be the case that the theist is there to try to figure out whether he/she should give up their faith.
Although, since adopting a be nice to strangers policy on that forum, I have noticed that the vast majority of theists who come to Richard Dawkins' forums are simply out to preach and tarni...
But being mean is a lot of fun.
(Speaking of which, browsing the comments is less enjoyable since the karma changes left me unable to downvote.)
There's another side of this coin.
Something I've been thinking about lately is that it seems like in most situations you are better off interpreting other people's actions and statements charitably.
React to comments as if the emotional content was meant in the best possible interpretation.
I find that I generally do this without thinking about it. Thus, the reason I was a little surprised to find this post on LW.
The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning.
Another part is that the norm 'be nice' can be used to mean ends far more effectively than crude rudeness. Rejecting the norm and then actually being nice (for reasons along the lines of your 9) tends to be a lot, well, nicer.
Reason five has got to be the best one.
However, you have to remember a few basic things, like the fact that being nice can be a waste of time (I love the fact that this community doesn't entertain "thank you" and "good job" as comments on their own), and that not everyone's definition of nice is the same. Monosyllables really -are- confusing when too much goes non-unpacked (un-unpacked? disunpacked?) inside.
Finally, re the aside on spelling, if there were an automatic "niceness checker" available the situation might be different, but as things stand poor spelling is a signal for laziness.
Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do. Conveniently, both these words (as applied to people, more than ideas) and closely related ones are culturally considered mean, and a general niceness policy will exclude them.
I am having a hard time parsing this passage. Particularly the beginning:
Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do.
And...
Good post because it's so relevant to this kind of forum. I also really appreciate your initial admission that actually niceness or kindness may have some degree of logical irrelevance in a forum of this nature.
Your list of positives associated with being nice I find a little bit unsatisfactory because I'm not sure how much the core idea really stands up to rational argument. For example, your list is quite un-axiomatic. Many of the items could be categorized or framed under one of the coexistent items, for example, 4 into 3, 1 into 5, and so on. As anothe...
In my experience, people who are particularly nice in debates and discussions (as opposed to mere conversations) are usually those whose opinions are either the bland dogmas that everyone accepts without thinking, or the ridiculous nonsense that only crackpots believe. In both cases, niceness is used as a defense against criticism: No one wants to be the strident jerk who has to tell the nice person how wrong he is.
In my experience, people who are particularly nice in debates and discussions (as opposed to mere conversations) are usually those whose opinions are either the bland dogmas that everyone accepts without thinking, or the ridiculous nonsense that only crackpots believe.
I strongly beg to differ. I haven't found niceness to be correlated with depth of thought; however, I have found that (ceteris paribus) I prefer reading exchanges between nicer people.
A negative feature of people you have observed to deploy niceness is not a good reason to eschew niceness.
I have hesitated to criticize you beyond a certain point in the past because you have often come across as mean, and because I expected such criticism to result in that being aimed at me. If you do not want people to hesitate to criticize you, perhaps you should be nice.
a spade has to be called a spade, and a moron has to be called a moron
These rules are not of a kind. In the former case, you have something that's indisputably a (shovel|playing card suit) and call it by its name. In the latter case, you likely don't have very solid grounds for identifying a person as a 'moron' (we're talking about Internet exchanges, right?) and the term isn't very well-defined in the first place.
If you're administering early 20th-century IQ tests then you have good reason to be calling people morons; otherwise, no.
A spade has to be called a spade, but when does a moron have to be called a moron?
Either other people are convinced by Moron's arguments, in which case you have to actually address them, and calling them a moron will only stand in the way. Or, no-one is, in which case if you've written off convincing Moron themselves, then there is simply no point in addressing them.
The role that you write for yourself is one I find very appealing - the guy who Tells It Like It Is - but I'm a long way from being convinced that it will maximise our tendency towards accurate conclusions.
In my experience very few people will listen to an argument after the person presenting the argument has called them stupid. When you call somebody a moron, then i expect that you've drastically reduced the chances that this person will listen to you.
In other words, the action of calling someone a moron takes convincing the target off of the table, if you haven't done that already.
My guess is that, when you call you're in a debate and you call your opponent stupid, it's mainly for the benefit of the people who already agree with you; the main purpose is probably designating "which side you're on" rather than convincing anyone who disagrees. This reminds me of the line of retreat idea -- it's easier for people to change their minds if they can do so without calling themselves stupid.
Calling a particular remark or behavior moronic seems sometimes necessary; I fail to see how it is helpful to characterize a person as a moron.
Most of the time this type of insult is false to fact: your interlocutors are not, in fact, mentally retarded, they are merely wrong. Sometimes obstinately wrong, sometimes wrong in ways actively harmful to themselves and others; but experience proves beyond doubt that this happens to people of average and higher intelligence.
Calling someone a moron is designed to provoke them, and signal something to other readers; it serves no useful discursive purpose.
It's still counterproductive. The trouble is, creationists are not crazy - not in the way that most people you might like to persuade would recognise. Creationism is crazy. Many people have trouble grasping that sane people can believe crazy things - and by calling the people crazy, you blur that understanding. This is in addition to the general bad effects documented in the post from calling people crazy.
The same applies to calling them stupid, only even more so.
The fact that you want to be that person should give you tremendous pause. You've written yourself a rather heroic role - I urge you to consider carefully whether this is really accuracy-maximizing behaviour.
Reason five has got to be the best one.
However, you have to remember a few basic things, like the fact that being nice can be a waste of time (I love the fact that this community doesn't entertain "thank you" and "good job" as comments on their own), and that not everyone's definition of nice is the same. Monosyllables really -are- confusing when too much goes non-unpacked (un-unpacked? disunpacked?) inside.
Finally, re the aside on spelling, if there were an automatic "niceness checker" available the situation might be different, but as things stand poor spelling is a signal for laziness.
What you are saying is fairish, except for one thing: the ad hominem is not a fallacy in itself. At least not in all situation, as your statement would imply. There's a generous literature on the "un-fallaciousness" of the ad hominem, and here's a good start: http://www.dougwalton.ca/papers%20in%20pdf/87AdHom.pdf
Another thing and I'm off: what you are evincing here are better called "pragmatical" (as opposed to "pragmatic") considerations. One could misconstrue it as "dealing with pragmatics" ... which it doesn't.
Your parenthetical point about spelling deserves longer development; otherwise I'd delete it, for fear of distracting.
EDIT: I turned the bulk of this comment into a top-level post, hoping for a broader response to a question that's important to me.
I really am confused by your 'commonsense notion' of niceness. Nice in common usage is very close to being a synonym for boring. Describing someone or something as nice usually sounds like damning with faint praise. I'm afraid I don't feel I've learnt anything from your post.
We can taboo "nice", and say instead "thinking about how my comment will make people feel, and revising it before I post it if the tone seems antagonistic or otherwise likely to distract from the underlying point".
The salient features are: a) thinking about feelings and b) acknowledging that form matters as well as content.
Your comment is a good example of "nice". You said you interpreted "nice" in such a way that you didn't get much from Alicorn's post, but you said that with some regard for her feelings. Let me attempt to rephrase it in a "mean" tone, attempting to preserve the content, and please tell me if the difference is apparent:
Last time I looked, "nice" was politically correct bullcrap for plain old "boring". "Nice" is what my mom calls old ladies and their doggies. Can we get back to discussing rationality now, or are you going to waste more of everyone's time ?
tl;dr: Sometimes, people don't try as hard as they could to be nice. If being nice is not a terminal value for you, here are some other things to think about which might induce you to be nice anyway.
There is a prevailing ethos in communities similar to ours - atheistic, intellectual groupings, who congregate around a topic rather than simply to congregate - and this ethos says that it is not necessary to be nice. I'm drawing on a commonsense notion of "niceness" here, which I hope won't confuse anyone (another feature of communities like this is that it's very easy to find people who claim to be confused by monosyllables). I do not merely mean "polite", which can be superficially like niceness when the person to whom the politeness is directed is in earshot but tends to be far more superficial. I claim that this ethos is mistaken and harmful. In so claiming, I do not also claim that I am always perfectly nice; I claim merely that I and others have good reasons to try to be.
The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning. Of course someone may be entirely miserable company and still have brilliant, cogent ideas; to reject communication with someone who just happens to be miserable company, in spite of their brilliant, cogent ideas, is to miss out on the (valuable) latter because of a silly emotional reaction to the (irrelevant) former. Since the point of the community is ideas; and the person's ideas are good; and how much fun they are to be around is irrelevant - well, bringing up that they are just terribly mean seems trivial at best, and perhaps an invocation of the aforementioned fallacy. We are here to talk about ideas! (Interestingly, this same courtesy is rarely extended to appalling spelling.)
The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy, so this is a useful norm up to a point, but not up to the point where people who are perfectly capable of being nice, or learning to be nice, neglect to do so because it's apparently been rendered locally worthless. I submit that there are still good, pragmatic reasons to be nice, as follows. (These are claims about how to behave around real human-type persons. Many of them would likely be obsolete if we were all perfect Bayesians.)