Ok, 1 like = 1 opinion on “judging people”. Good prompt @vgr, lots of stuff here.
@vgr “Judgmentalness” feels scary to some people because a part of our mind isn’t good at the use-mention distinction — “Alice says ‘you are bad’” and “You are bad” don’t feel different.
@vgr This is associational thinking. “If two things are associated, they’re basically the same, right?” It runs on clustering, not grammar; it can’t ask “in what *sense* are these things related?”
@vgr To cluster-mind, words are magic. Enactive. To say a thing is to make it real. Going meta and thinking *about* the words is impossible. So of course criticism hurts if you’re stuck in this mode.
@vgr This is related to the frame of mind where “okay”, “allowed”, “acceptable”, are felt to be primary objects in the world, not reducible to predictions like “these people will treat me this way in this context.”
@vgr That’s a very scary headspace to be in; trying to describe it makes it sound like it’s a very severe mental illness; but it’s actually common among so-called “healthy” people. Heidegger got this.
@vgr You actually feel like social opinions are ontological primaries, and things like atoms, tables, or even sense perceptions are abstractions *over* social judgments. It’s as spooky as it sounds.
@vgr We all use associational cognition constantly; we literally could not see if we didn’t. It’s not a “bad” mode of thought, it’s essential.
@vgr But using *exclusively* associational cognition *for interpreting language* is, I think, a flattened, contracted, degenerate state, relative to what human minds can do in general. Being “insecure” or “easily triggered” is *not* just due to having finite computational power.
@vgr The usual cynical explanation is that being “insecure” is a subconscious self-interested power move — “I precommit to getting upset unless you devote more resources to me.” But I think it’s actually even creepier than that.
@vgr I think it’s a selfish gene thing. A gene for being “triggerable” isn’t there to benefit the organism it’s in, but to benefit its *kin*, who also have the gene, and can benefit from having victims who are easier to abuse and manipulate.
@vgr This is pure speculation on my part, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. The selfish-gene figure-ground inversion applies to behavior too — which means not all your instinctual behaviors were evolved to benefit *you*. Some may be evolved to benefit your kin at your expense.
@vgr The thing that makes “judgment” freighted, makes it “judgmental”, is really hard to explain to people who aren’t as sensitive to it. It really is like your words are magic binding commands, “thou shalt feel bad about thyself.”
@vgr Twitter is especially bad for this because most tweets are commands or evaluative judgments. You just scroll through and get dozens of people telling you what to do and think.
@vgr Ironically, spreading memes that say “think for yourself!” doesn’t help — because those are commands too!
@vgr Making “judgy” pronouncements about how awful insecure people are, isn’t helpful either for making them less insecure.
@vgr But neither is just accommodating people’s insecurities indefinitely going to make them any less insecure. Insecurity is not merely an “unmet need” that goes away once you meet it.
@vgr What conditions promote being more reflective and generative rather than reactive? What gets you away from “judginess” or “being insecure about being judged”?
@vgr 1. Truly asocial contemplation. Getting alone and into a nonverbal, feral state; or writing or drawing where definitely nobody will see. Calling it “meditation” is too virtue-signal-y. Just try to do something that doesn’t have social pressure.
@vgr 2. Focus attention on something super concrete (like making a physical object) or super impersonal (like math/science); something that prompts you to think about the thing itself, not your image.
@vgr 3. Don’t underestimate “merely intellectual” understanding; the literal words and their dictionary meanings and parsing the logical structure. This level of understanding is “shallow” or “mere” because you don’t feel compelled to act on it.
@vgr That “mereness” is bad from the perspective that desires obedience (“you merely comprehend what I say, you don’t *do* it!”) but it’s good if you want to understand what’s going on before acting.
@vgr Getting other people to reflect is hard, but I think it helps to keep the topic on things that lend themselves to “merely abstract geeking out”, because people will naturally have more reflective attitudes about that stuff.
@vgr A certain type of high-integrity person is super resistant to talking about “politics and society” because they correctly note that people including themselves are more enactive/reactive about those topics. They’d rather talk science because those conversations are healthier.
@vgr (Or talk about birdwatching or cooking or woodworking or whatever. “Real” things.)
@vgr If we could get people to think about politics/psychology/society in the same way they think about parts of the physical world they’re curious about, it would be super powerful.
@vgr “Judgment” that is “merely intellectual” — just an assessment or a prediction — is a *good* thing once you get away from all the performative/validating/invalidating baggage.
@vgr Why? If an assessment of a person conveys useful information, you can use it to accomplish goals. Same as all knowledge.
@vgr Of course, when you think about it that way, it’s obvious that often you don’t have enough info to assess people, or your true assessment is kind of boring and moderate.
@vgr True judgments of people allow for relative magnitudes, not just adjectives. Once I was arguing with a friend that I was “not very good at math.” He disagreed. Once we pinned it down we both agreed that there are probably 5000-10,000 living Americans better at math than me.
@vgr True judgments of people allow you to say “this person is better than average in such-and-such a respect, but still not good enough to achieve such-and-such a goal.” Not everything has to be a dichotomy.
@vgr Actually evaluating people — such that you can accurately predict their future behavior — is hard and I’m not unusually good at it.
@vgr What I do think I’m decent at is discerning *when I don’t care* what the truth about the person is. When I’m thinking about the cartoon of them in my head, rather the imperfectly known real person outside it. (Because @oscredwin calls me out on that!)
@vgr @oscredwin You’re gonna have things you don’t care about! Or that you only talk about as a pretext to talk about your own feelings and agendas. Or that you only talk about as a joke or for social bonding fodder.
@vgr @oscredwin But for every topic that you only talk about as a way of talking about something else, there will be people who literally care about the thing itself.
@vgr @oscredwin Celebrities and news events are the obvious example; for some people they’re a conversational hook or meme; to a much smaller number of people they’re real life.
@vgr @oscredwin A lot of gossipy “judgments” people make are just *not real* in this way. They’re designed to make a good story or hyperbolic one-upping move. You can’t use them to navigate reality; and translating the subtext into text is fiendishly hard.
@vgr @oscredwin Insecurity and shame makes it hard to talk about “hey, you shouldn’t have done that thing” without getting derailed by whether the criticism is “insulting” or “judgmental”.
@vgr @oscredwin In particular, conveying “it is especially important that you change” sounds exactly like “you are especially bad as a person” or “you should be especially harshly punished.”
@vgr @oscredwin This sucks because often the biggest, highest priority positive impact on the world would come from a change in the behavior of a person who’s *already doing a lot of good*.
@vgr @oscredwin Let’s say it’s the 19th century and you’re trying to convince doctors to wash their hands. These are people who have dedicated their lives to healing the sick! They’re cleaner than most people! How dare you accuse them of killing patients! Are you saying they should be hanged?
@vgr @oscredwin How do you convey *urgency* (you really have to wash your hands! People are dying!) without cruelty (I really don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself or make anyone hate you; just wash your hands!)
@vgr @oscredwin Even harder mode: what if the issue isn’t so much present harms as the *absence* of potential benefits? How can you hold people accountable for missed opportunities— the houses not built, the cures not discovered, the technologies not invented?
@vgr @oscredwin Any way you try to express this, you’ll often be “blaming” the people who are already *doing the most to contribute* for not doing even more.
@vgr @oscredwin You don’t have to be an unusually bad person to miss an unusually important opportunity.
@vgr @oscredwin In fact, you don’t have to be an unusually bad person to commit an atrocity either. Genocides are committed by *normal* people who would never do a socially deviant thing like rob a bank.
@vgr @oscredwin Our intuitions for “a really bad person” are about “who could we all agree to punish”, not at all about “who is causally responsible for great harm or missed opportunity for great good.”
@vgr @oscredwin It’s really really hard to express *the need for change* all by itself, without smuggling in shame/punishment.
@vgr @oscredwin Also super hard: saying “this needs to change and I have no idea how to do that.” People will read it as you judging them for not having solved the whole problem already.
@vgr @oscredwin I used to feel super defensive about people talking about “systemic problems.” Pro tip: if you’re conservative or libertarian, mentally replace “systemic problem” with “incentive problem.” You might find you agree there is one!
@vgr @oscredwin The overall pattern is that even if your goal is just to say “there’s a problem, let’s try to solve it”, you run the risk of either making people feel judged, or being so understated you aren’t listened to at all.
@vgr @oscredwin Urgency without cruelty totally exists; think of pulling a child back from running in the street and shouting “No!” You don’t want to hurt the kid, you’re 100% uninterested in labeling him “bad”, you just *need him to stop right now*.
@vgr @oscredwin I’ve noticed a thing where *once you get over the hump* of defensive posturing around “are you saying I suck as a person? Of course I don’t suck!” and establish that *we’re not talking about that*, feedback and problem solving immediately gets more productive.
@vgr @oscredwin One way that gets resolved is by crisis. You fucked up, your fuckup has been exposed, and now we all have to work together to fix it; suddenly the communication around how to fix it becomes more productive, and you wish you could have been talking this candidly all along.
@vgr @oscredwin In “An Everyone Culture” they describe a company that has an onboarding process where you self-evaluate as either tending to be arrogant or underconfident, and you tell everybody this. There is no “making a good impression” here; everyone has a character flaw.
@vgr @oscredwin I see this as trying to “get over the hump” early; so you don’t have to spend months or years foolishly trying to prove you have no character flaws and you’re the perfect hardworking emotionally balanced employee (so please don’t fire me.)
@vgr @oscredwin I think something similar is going on in discourse about “white fragility” and such. White people tend to want to prove they’re innocent of racism — “don’t judge or punish me! I’m not bad!” Well, the alternate perspective is “maybe you’re good, maybe you’re bad, I don’t care;
@vgr @oscredwin can we *please* work on the *actual problems people face related to race* and stop changing the subject to whether you’re a good or bad person?”
@vgr @oscredwin “Ok, fine, you want me to judge you? Ok, you’re a bad person. I can see your flaws. *Now* can we stop posturing over whether you’re perfect or not and move on to what a bunch of imperfect people can do to solve the problem?”
@vgr @oscredwin It can be a relief when your flaws are finally out in the open and the other person *isn’t* actually abandoning you or beating you up or whatever. “Yes, I can see you suck at this. Everyone can see it. No, I don’t hate you for that. What now?”
@vgr @oscredwin You can get to the same place with loving acceptance instead of harshness, but I think that can be even harder. It works best IME when it’s coming from someone like a close friend or partner who is *credible* when they say they love you and they’re not trying to put you down.
@vgr @oscredwin @oscredwin likes to tell me “I’m *never* arguing with you about “Sarah, pro or con?” I married you; I’m pro! If you killed someone, I’d help you hide the body!” And I know him, and this is true, and so we can go back to the *actual* issue.
@vgr @oscredwin Defensiveness and insecurity basically do harm by distracting attention and wasting time. Each individual instance doesn’t delay dealing with the issue that long, but they add up.
@vgr @oscredwin It’s not that it’s “not okay” to have feelings about “feeling judged.” (“ok” isn’t a primordial thing anyway!) It’s that whatever someone was being “judgy” about might be an *actual issue that still matters* and changing the topic to feelings makes us forget the object level.
@vgr @oscredwin (Or all that might be irrelevant! Sometimes people are being mean/gossipy/judgy just cause they wanna, and there is no object level problem. If you only pay attention to tone and not content, though, you’ll never know the difference.)
@vgr @oscredwin *Not* being defensive or full of “motivated cognition” or relitigating the same fights over and over can be scary in a new way because you’re covering brand new territory. It’s like a TV show that covers too much plot per episode; you worry they’ll run out of plot!
@vgr @oscredwin If you’re *not* pattern-marching each other’s positions to dumber, less nuanced ones, the two of you will rapidly start to diverge from the rest of society; you’ll become high-context, illegible, hard for most people who don’t know you to understand.
@vgr @oscredwin I’m not really sure what to do about that one. I’ve always had a sense that it’s nicer/more cooperative to be easy to understand. After all, we all were newbies once at anything we’re expert in today. It feels *weird* to have thoughts I don’t expect to be able to explain.
@vgr @oscredwin If you ask yourself “is this conversation producing information?” (Like, literally Shannon information) you’d be surprised how much optimization is going on all the time to *avoid* producing too much information.
@vgr @oscredwin This is in Finite and Infinite Games too. People mostly don’t want to go in directions that might have surprising or undefined outcomes.
@vgr @oscredwin Anxiety about “are you judging me?” is one of many, many tactics to bring attention back to a familiar social game so it won’t go off into some uncharted wilderness.
@vgr @oscredwin You know “wilderness” is nearby when it feels — not acutely bad, but “are you sure we should be doing this? this is getting kind of bizarre. this would have some weird implications.”
@vgr @oscredwin I don’t know what happens if you try leaning *into* the directions that take you to new places, rather than away from them; if you don’t try to slow down the “plot clock.” Maybe the inhibition is there for good reason! Here There Be Dragons.
@vgr @oscredwin But, like, the creation of quantum physics theory would be an example of people going “well we *could* model it that way, but it would take us to some weird places” and then *not stopping* and going to the weird places.
@vgr @oscredwin And quantum physics (and the Bomb) is both an example of a great human achievement and a top candidate for the thing that will ultimately destroy human life. So...beware I guess?
@vgr @oscredwin EA is a great example of this. When a bunch of idealistic people try to ascertain how to do the most good, they come up with weird shit. “Actually no charities are good.” “Destroy the rainforests.” “Wirehead chickens.” “AI safety.” It’s never, like, “give to United Way.”
@vgr @oscredwin Different people of course have different values for what’s good, but once you start trying to *optimize* them you leave the mainstream fast. Ecologists think in terms of saving ecosystems, not cute polar bears. Development economists think about institutions and infrastructure.
@vgr @oscredwin You either get “arcane, abstract, boring” (legal details! administrative policy! spreadsheets and models!) or you get “bizarre supervillain shit” (gene drives! carbon capture! brain uploads!)
@vgr @oscredwin Honest inquiry rarely leads to “just do a nice normal thing that you probably felt like you ought to do before but you never got around to.”
@vgr @oscredwin If you just want your “inquiry” to reinforce what you already think, you had better put a lot of guardrails on it so it doesn’t spit out weird shit. Being scope sensitive at all leads to weird proposals.
@vgr @oscredwin This doesn’t just apply to ethical questions. The way to literally make the most money is not gonna be the same as “do the most prestigious and glamorous thing that everyone associates with rich people.”
@vgr @oscredwin The way to answer a scientific question is not gonna be the same as “do what proves to the world you’re the smartest and have mastered the trickiest techniques.”
@vgr @oscredwin This comes back to judgment again; if you’re trying to achieve a goal you’re gonna get judged. And you’re gonna have to think about what if anything the judgment *means* or *refers to*, not just the experience of hearing it.
@vgr @oscredwin Does the feedback *in fact* tell you that you should change your plan in real life? Why is the person giving that feedback? What does that tell you about the world?
@vgr @oscredwin Back to judging people; I believe doing bad things is common. “So and so has this common character flaw” is not an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
@vgr @oscredwin It doesn’t make sense to ostracize or punish the vast, vast majority of people you suspect of having character flaws.
@vgr @oscredwin It also doesn’t make sense to flip the bozo bit on people just because you think they have a blind spot.
@vgr @oscredwin I generally believe in being very very slow to conclude you have nothing to learn from someone. But also being quick to expect that almost everyone engage in behavior & thought patterns that harm themselves and others.
@vgr @oscredwin “I can’t believe you’re accusing this lovely person of having self-flattering biases!” Well, it would be extraordinary if she didn’t!
@vgr @oscredwin “Mistake vs conflict theory” is a false dichotomy. The most typical way people do harm is through subconscious motivation. There is optimization power steering towards the outcome you don’t like; but the person doesn’t have conscious control or insight into that process.
@vgr @oscredwin Most people are usually wrong when we guess at others’ subconscious motivations; but it’s not a conspiracy theory or paranoia to believe most people have some disturbing subconscious motivations.
@vgr @oscredwin Some particular examples: it’s not an extraordinary claim to say someone has racial, gender, or class biases towards siding with the higher-status groups in their society. Almost all people do to some degree.
@vgr @oscredwin It’s not an extraordinary claim that someone stretches or spins the truth to make themselves look good. Almost everyone does to some degree.
@vgr @oscredwin It’s not an extraordinary claim that most people won’t actually follow through on everything they say they care about.
@vgr @oscredwin It’s not an extraordinary claim that someone has done something illegal, especially someone who runs an organization. There are a lot of laws, not all regularly enforced. It’s surprisingly easy to break one unintentionally.
@vgr @oscredwin We get stuck in semantic debates of “is it really fair to use words to describe people that have negative connotations when the people in question aren’t *that* bad?”
@vgr @oscredwin Trouble is, I don’t think we *have* great words to describe problems that don’t have a judgmental or condemnatory connotation.
@vgr @oscredwin “Liar” is an insult and accusation; but lots of people really do stretch and spin the truth; arguing over whether it’s fair to name someone a liar is kind of a distraction from “what is this person saying, what does he believe, what do his listeners believe...
@vgr @oscredwin what’s actually true, and what impact does it have that these things are different?”
@vgr @oscredwin In general everyone underinvests in finding out what literally happens, what causes it, and what effects it has. We want to skip straight to reacting to it, especially socially and emotionally.
@vgr @oscredwin This is why people have processes like "Five Whys" or experimental protocols or court trials with formal rules of evidence. "Ok what literally just happened here" will not usually be done well by default.
@vgr @oscredwin Also, investigating "what literally just happened here" feels wasteful or "merely intellectual" if you aren't currently on board with the notion that there *is a problem worth caring about* in the first place. This is a legit disagreement! Just not usually made explicit.
@vgr @oscredwin "Why are people going into so much detail to investigate what went 'wrong'? Things seem fine to me! This is bullshit!" <= totally valid reason not to want to do a postmortem.
@vgr @oscredwin But if it's socially unacceptable to appear not to care about the problem, it's more likely that people will sabotage or derail the postmortem, or argue that it's being done wrong in some way, than own up to their real issue with it.
