I deleted it for such poor reading comprehension and adversarially selective quotation of the Facebook post in question—
(which is over 2200 words long and has tons of relevant context that softens the impression of the above text, which also didn't contain the added bolding that pushes it in an even more straw direction)
—that it was inescapably either malice or negligence sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from malice. I would've greatly preferred that DirectedEvolution take the hint rather than reposting elsewhere, but since that hint was not taken I am now banning DirectedEvolution from being able to do any similarly shitty psychologizing on my future posts (and lodging this brief defense of myself, which I would have preferred not to have to write in the first place, and was with the original deletion trying to avoid needing to write).
From that same Facebook post:
I'm just going to blurt words and blame the lack of artistry and sophistication on insomniac COVID delirium
...
And yeah, it's actually fine 99.9% of the time, the thing I'm saying here isn't, like, "it's impossible to coordinate or cooperate with humans." I drive on roads. I shop at grocery stores. I engage in chitchat with Uber drivers and people at the airport.
And from discussion beneath it:
re: felt sense of strong fear, it's not that I'm actually, like, nervous-system activated at all times? I do not walk around feeling viscerally anxious, for the most part. I think I *do* shift into high-alert faster and on smaller bits of evidence than most people.
DirectedEvolution's overt attempt to categorize me as mentally ill, and my models suspect based purely on that categorization, is unjustified and not particularly welcome, LessWrong's enthusiasm for upvoting shitty behavior notwithstanding.
(I also found a bunch of the reasoning in the four bullet points to be pretty poor, but that just made me unenthusiastic about trying to bridge gaps; it was the last paragraph that earned intended-to-be-silent deletion.)
One thing I didn't have time for in the post proper is that ask culture (or something like it) is crucial for diplomacy—diplomatic cosmopolitan contexts require that everyone set aside their knee-jerk assumptions about what "everyone knows" or what X "obviously means," etc. I think part of why it came about (/has almost certainly been reinvented thousands of times) is that people wanted to interact nondestructively with people whose cultural assumptions greatly differed from their own.
Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism
To the best of my ability to detect, the answer is clearly and obviously "no" — there's an important property of people not-bullshitting and not doing the LinkedIn thing, but you can actually do clear and honest and constructively critical communication without assholery (and it seems to me that the people who lump the two together have a skill issue and some sort of color-blindness; because they don't know how to get the good parts of candor and criticism while not unduly hurting feelings, they assume that it can't be done).
I think there's a conflation here between "the internal experience of the emotion of caring" and "the act of caring, visible to external observers."
I think you're saying "I might take actions that look like not-caring, due to constraints like memory, and I don't want this to be misconstrued as not having the internal experience of caring," but I think that ultimately if one has ... akrasiatic caring? ... this doesn't matter. I think that whether it's down to unfortunate memory constraints or like deliberate callousness, what usually carries weight is "does this person take the actions that I need them to take, in order to be happy interacting?" and if the answer is "nope" then the reason doesn't matter all that much to me.
Or to put it another way, "sufficiently advanced obliviousness is indistinguishable from malice" is a sentence pattern that has a lot of other versions, e.g. "sufficiently advanced inability to scrape together spoons, due to chronic illness, is indistinguishable from apathy."
It's not that an "I don't care about you" signal was accidentally sent, it's that the action of care, sufficient for the needs of the other person, wasn't taken. It's tragic when it wasn't-taken due to reality constraints, as opposed to due to a free and unpressured choice, but what matters is whether the action is on the table.
Your colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, for instance ... in my culture, it's bad to excoriate that colleague if it's a genuine constraint issue, but whether it's inability or unwillingness isn't pertinent if what matters is "can we say each other's names, reliably?"
I volunteer as tribute
1I was going to type a longer comment for the people who are observing this interaction, but I think the phrase "case in point" is superior to what I originally drafted.
(It was me, and in the place where I encouraged DrShiny to come here and repeat what they'd already said unprompted, I also offered $5 to anybody who disagreed with the Said ban to please come and leave that comment as well.)
Just noting that
one should object to tendentious and question-begging formulations, to sneaking in connotations, and to presuming, in an unjustified way, that your view is correct and that any disagreement comes merely from your interlocutor having failed to understand your obviously correct view
is a strong argument for objecting to the median and modal Said comment.
But I think a lot of Said's confusions would actually make more sense to Said if he came to the realization that he's odd, actually, and that the way he uses words is quite nonstandard, and that many of the things which baffle and confuse him are not, in fact, fundamentally baffling or confusing but rather make sense to many non-Said people.
(My own writing, from here.)
This can definitely work! But it's often hard to do adroitly; there are situations where it comes off basically the same as not responding at all (e.g. in the eyes of the chunk of the audience that's inclined to view non-response as cowardice, this sometimes comes off as cowardice plus trying to dodge the consequences of cowardice).