Don't Get Offended

Upvoted for proposing a useful test.

FYI, this pattern matches on "disagreeing with my complaint makes you part of the problem," at least to me, with all the problems that implies.

Interesting. I see what you mean, but I don't see a clearer way of pointing to a particular cached-thought reaction that I anticipate some readers having. Any ideas?

No. I did think it was likely to be used as a source of rationalizations by people who do offend people, though, without some caveat that, well, offending people is ceteris paribus bad; and that a lot of common responses people have (especially online) to complaints of offense are actually rather weak rationalizations.

My response was intended in the spirit of Eliezer's "Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People" — that this sort of thing may unintentionally provide ammunition for bad behavior.

I think that's much closer (and upvoted), but you don't need to invoke such an extreme example to demonstrate it; you just need to notice that offense thresholds are different in different contexts. Treating your boss as if she's your drinking buddy is likely to provoke offense. So's treating your drinking buddy as if he's a child. Yet you're generally safe treating boss as boss, buddy as buddy, and child as child -- in other words, giving people the status they contextually expect.

If someone lowers your status and you act offended, then it makes you look weak because it confirms that they've successfully hurt you. What you could do in those situations is to offer them advice on how not to offend you - promote their communication skills. That way you reassert your authority by determining the standard of dialogue you allow around you and potentially improve them as a resource.

That said. There's a difference between discounting a certain noise level of offence - I'll try not to be offended if I believe you're honestly offering criticism and don't meant to offend me. And discounting all offence.

I would suggest that the former is vastly preferable. If someone rocks up to you and starts tearing a strip off it seems worth getting offended over.

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I'm not sure I buy into Machiavelli's idea that accepting advice lowers your status though. Well, not entirely anyway.

In old Chinese courts courtiers used to advise their Emperors by means of heavenly prophecy. In - I forget which king's reign it was but in France - a king was famous for having two people on opposing sides of an issue debate it and then saying 'we shall see', and that was how he got his advice, he was one of the most powerful, at least in political terms, kings that France ever had IIRC.

So there are ways of mitigating it without having to shut yourself off completely from advice, as Machiavelli supposes.

And then a lot of it depends on how you react to the advice, and how it's given - even if it's given directly in person. If someone comes up to you and is all pro-social: "Hey we could do this too and it might work even better!" "Fantastic, why don't you come on board and head up that part of it?" That's potentially something that's been good for both of you and made more people want to work with you and share their ideas - and that gives you more power, not less.

Working with others is a very complicated sort of thing. I think the most important lesson of it may well be that power tends to be lent by others, for their own purposes. If you have 'power' over a bunch of people but none of them want to work with you your effective power is often very close to 0.

If you take that Machiavellian idea one step further... How about shifting the view of who to take advice from. People can only make you more like themselves... so only take advice, in any particular area, from someone who has ALREADY ACHIEVED the results you are seeking... otherwise, what is the point?

Also, though, your boss should not 'become offended' if you treated them as a drinking buddy... that would be unprofessional on HIS part... he should have a discussion with you, in a rational manner, about the roles that you both are to play in your working environment. I do not agree that people have certain areas where they would 'benefit' from being offended. Being offended often simply validates the person being offended, not matter what the offended person retorts with. If someone is rude to you in some way, and then you are rude back, it just makes the first rude person feel justified in their being rude to you in the first place.

If someone is INTENDING to be insulting to you, then rising to the occasion only proves to them that they have power over you. If they were NOT intending to be insulting to you, then all you have done is proven how much of a boob you are.

The best approach is to be conscious of what will advance your goals and act accordingly.

You may think a cop is not recognizing your status but you may be best served by letting it pass and getting out of the situation more quickly.

No, but social power + respect can be useful for achieving your goals (especially if one of your goals is social power and respect, which seem to be true for a lot of people).

We are humans, and even our truth-seeking activities are influenced by social aspects.

Imagine a situation where someone says that you are wrong, without explaining why. You would like to know why they think so. (They may be right or wrong, but if you don't know their arguments, you are less likely to find it out.) If they consider you too low status, they may refuse to waste their time explaining you something. If they consider you high status, they will take their time to explain, because they will feel a chance to get a useful ally or at least neutralize a potential enemy.

Generally, your social power may determine your access to information sources.

Maneuvering into a position of social power is an intrinsic, biologically-mediated goal for many humans (cf. the "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis"). Thus, treating 'status' as an intrinsic rather than instrumental goal is a very common trap for humans to fall into, especially particularly clever humans (since 'cleverness' probably evolved primarily to serve precisely these purposes, and so the stimulus will activate those modules preferentially).

If locating truth in the search space is a preferable goal to gaining social status, then it might be worthwhile to taboo the word 'status' for awhile, especially on lesswrong - it seems to be collecting a lot of unfortunate cached subtext.

Also: be very careful asking questions like that, because they tend to signal low status if you ask them wrong. ;)

It's not clear that everyone can learn not to be offended, and being offended imposes costs on the group in terms of the things they're going to consider and share.

But assuming that everyone could learn not to be offended:

Everyone can learn not to be offended by the few offensive people, or a few offensive people can learn to be less offensive. The group where the latter holds has made much more efficient use of its time and can work with a wider range of other groups.

So, for all you need people who can discount a certain level of offence in order that they can share differing ideas, I don't know whether don't be offended is the most efficient group norm to put in place for dealing with cases of disrespect and/or wilful offence.

Were you commenting on an earlier version?

I made there be an earlier version. 8)

(Because I asked for edits, so that increased the chances of there being a later version because that's what edits are. Which then implies that there was an earlier version because you can't have an later version without an earlier version ... yeah.)

katydee has been editing in response to suggestions.

Thank you for your reply! I'm really glad you're planning to cover this topic more, and I definitely agree that extremely emotional mental states are derailing for rationality.

Unfortunately, I don't think your reply quite addressed my concern, and I'm starting to see a lot of comments from other people who are also reading this post as "don't get angry" rather than "detect your offended/victimized mental state, don't make any decisions and speedily think yourself out of it" because of the conflated language throughout the post. I would really super-appreciate it if you could edit it to be precise, because it seems to use "getting offended", and "acting angry" and "acting defensive" interchangeably in a lot of places.

Not all offended people act angry. Some people have really peaceful-looking offended states where they're secretly making mental notes to hold a grudge forever! They might read this post and think it doesn't apply to them. Some of us don't get offended at all and need to teach ourselves to socially demonstrate that something is wrong. Some people unfortunately don't even think they're allowed to get offended because they think they deserve every bad thing :(, but aren't in the scope of this post. They might read this and think there isn't anything to learn here.

My concern with your assertions is that there is a serious risk that it with be used as a complete counter-argument to certain disliked social movements (proto-example here).

I'm not saying that all of my putative allies are rational, or have terminal values that can be reasonably implemented. Clearly, that is not the case. But a great deal of that problem is caused by the general low sanity line across the political spectrum.

In short, I'm concerned that your message will be interpreted as narrowly focusing that criticism to only one part of the spectrum.

EDIT: Fubarobfusco said it better

... I think this may lead to a theory of acausal insult.

Personally, it's my strategy to insult anyone who could have contributed to my being born, but didn't.

I believe that it is both possible and desirable to discourage antisocial behavior without becoming (or even acting) offended.

I realize this is possible, but is it actually effective ? Entire social movements have been built on the basis of acting offended; and some of them, f.ex. the Civil Rights movement, have been spectacularly successful (comparatively speaking). Of course, one could argue that their success wasn't worth the cost...

I'd like to propose another procedure!

1. "Are you okay?" This covers the Sensitivity angle by Showing Concern.
2. "Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?" This allows you to obtain a procedure for Doing Something, but not only are you Doing Something, you are also doing the exact Thing that the crying person wants you to do. Customization! Sometimes, crying people don't want you to do anything, but also if they tell you something random at step 2 and see you actually do it, they might be more inclined to trust you with the actual Thing they want you to do.

I think this is pretty versatile!

So I think I originally had "leave" and I changed it to "disengage" to try to encompass situations where you can't physically leave and I was referring to checking out mentally from the conversation. I'm not sure how many situations this covers (work?), but you could keep repeating "I'm not going to talk about this anymore," and force your brain to space out. A handy epistemic perspective here says to think of what they're saying as "meaningless chunks of wordmeat," which I've personally found to be helpful.

As someone that doesn't get offended in the typical way, I had a huge breakthrough when I realized that there exist people that don't mean what they say. (Whaaa?!) From what it looks like to me, some people get mad and then grasp at the closest words in their cache to verbalize their madness feelings and then spout them out at other people. But once they've done that, their madness feelings go away! So they can't really model them anymore and so they don't even remember what they said, just that they yelled at you. So what would happen to me is that they'd apologize for yelling at me, and I'd say "We have to talk about that thing you accused me of because I have this detailed argument about why it's wrong," and they'd be like "I said that? Whatever, I'm sorry." Even when there are chat logs! (Whaa?!)

So now I've gotten better at recognizing that in people, and once I can sorta tell that they've checked out, then I can expect to get no closure on the event by continuing to listen to more of what they're saying because they don't mean it and won't remember most of it anyway.

Otherwise, if they're malevolently trying to hurt you in a systematic way, I think it helps to distinguish between what hurts more: is it the fact that they're trying to hurt you at all or is it the method by which they go about it? Because if it's the latter, then you could feed them ammunition that makes them model you wrong. Tell them you really care about stuff that you actually don't care about?

My strategy in situations like that is to try to get rid of all respect for the person. If to be offended you have to care, at least on some level, about what the person thinks then demoting them from "agent" to "complicated part of the environment" should reduce your reaction to them. You don't get offended when your computer gives you weird error messages.

Now this itself would probably be offensive to the person (just about the ultimate in thinking of them as low status), so it might not work as well when you have to interact with then often enough for them to notice. But especially for infrequent interactions and one time interactions I find this to be a good way to get through potentially offensive situations.

But on a long term basis, if you find yourself constantly on the recieving end of moving fists, you might want to seriously consider learning to dodge better.

That really, really depends though. Two different people may find themselves in that situation for completely different reasons. Some folks really just can't catch a break; others really are ready to see a slight in anything that remotely discomfits them. Some folks need to learn to dodge better, some folks probably won't get far with any advice that tells them to do something different since all these moving fists are not their idea and they're taking pains to avoid as it is, and I daresay many folks will encounter both types of situations because moving fists are not a single class of thing...

Ironically, the text of your post seems unambiguously correct to me.

I'm also reminded of, IIRC, Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed containing the directive to not allow oneself to become angry, because anger distorts clear thinking, but also observes that sometimes it is necessary to display anger so as to effect desirable change in the world.

You give up the notion "if <thing I don't prefer is the case in the universe> then ".

Right, so I think what is being missed here is the functional role sadness, anxiety and offense play in motivating human action. Sadness has intensionality - it is about something - and its proper role in a human mind is to motivate various complex responses along the lines of "avoid this" or "prevent this from ever happening again." Lose the sadness and you lose the motivational power it contains. I don't think this motivational power is actually replaceable by a more generic abstract preference. (Or else charity fundraising would just say "we offer 20 utilitons per dollar" and that would be enough.)

Of course, the kind of emotional distancing recommended here might be necessary if the sadness/anxiety/offense actually becomes, in itself, an obstacle to achieving your goals - which can certainly happen. But it is not the general case.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I am talking descriptively about humans, not prescriptively here. It's too bad that we aren't strongly motivated by "20 utilitons per dollar." We should be! But we aren't.

Not that it's impossible mind. Just harder. Still, good point.

Good question. First of all, is it even possible to change an individual's terminal values ? My guess is that the answer is "no"; that's why they are called "terminal values".

That's not what "terminal values" means. It simply means the values from which all of a person's other values can be derived. It is perfectly possible to change one's terminal values -- for instance, a young child cares only about itself, while almost no adults care only about themselves.

There have been many historical examples that look like changes in terminal values. For example, George Wallace appears to have changed positions on racism in government (going from pro to anti).

As you yourself note, the US Civil Rights movement appears to have successfully changed the US society's terminal values. Although I'm not sure "getting offended" is an accurate paraphrase of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's strategy or tactics.

I endorse not responding excessively or inappropriately to attacks, and I endorse responding firmly and effectively to attacks.

I agree that if my emotions are preventing me from doing these things, that's worth correcting. And I agree that this is a common problem.

The solution is not necessarily (or typically, in my experience) to not have the emotion in the first place.

Responding firmly and effectively to actual attacks may preserve status and discourage others from abusing or taking advantage of you. Being emotionally upset is not an important part of that response.

I don't think that's true. I've seen lots of cases of manipulation where being emotionally upset was the whole focus. Genuine distress evokes sympathy from onlookers and persecutors alike.

Also note that if your status is low, higher status people can and frequently do hurt you for the fun of it.

I'm not rejecting environmental causes, I'm objecting to whowhowho's claim that genetic causes aren't even worth discussing.

or even outright lies

You're misunderstanding Julian's claim, albeit I think for reasons of inferential distance rather than deliberate misreading. The claim was not that anthropology/Sinister Cathedral Orthodoxy endorses inborn gender identity, despite its being wrong, for its political utility to trans rights. Such Orthodoxy is precisely the basis on which he thinks it is wrong. The claim was that activists endorse this false belief for its political utility, and that he and other Sinister Cathedral Agents don't feel particularly obliged to go out of their way to correct it (although doing so was precisely what he did in that post.) If there was a widespread belief that washing your hands protected you from demons, I would not fault epidemiologists for failing to prioritize disabusing the public of this. Nor does it strike me as an affront to science that epidemiologists, as a general rule, have normative commitments that extend beyond scientific inquiry and on to the belief that health is better than sickness.

First, let's taboo "humanities." No disrespect for the literature professors, but the type of analysis aimed at determining whether Hamlet is really insane, or pretending so for political / social advantage . . . is not what we are talking about in the conversation.

Instead, we are trying to talk about academic fields that are attempting to examine human beings and human societies in order to make useful and falsifaible statements about them. We are also talking about philosophy-of-science, particularly analytical, conceptual, and methodological considerations for the human-studying field.

Because random controlled trials (RCTs) are impossible or unethical in these fields, the quality of the data is much poorer than in fields where RCTs are practically possible. And quality of data is an important bulwark against nonsense, particularly politically motivated nonsense. That still does not justify claiming that entire fields are filled with liars. To make an equally ridiculous claim, the so-called harder sciences are filled with liars because fraudulent retractions are commonplace.

Anthropology results should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. But you argue the stronger claim that anthropology is worthless, through and through. Regardless of some folks here announcing a willingness to stretch to make a point, that doesn't prove the experts in the field are doing misleading things. Stick your neck out - tell us what evidence would make you believe that heteronormativity exists. (I can easily list facts that would make me doubt the phenomena of heteronormativity).

The humanities study fields where scientific evidence is generally not available, thus they have to rely on other kinds of evidence.

I don't understand your reference to this article. To quote it:

The question "Is it really science?" is ill-formed.

To the extent Eliezar asserts that there is empirical, but non-scientific evidence, I reject the usefulness of the distinction.

Then the husband shouldn't rape his wife even though he's offended, and the bullies shouldn't assault the kid even though they're offended, and the racists shouldn't lynch the black people even though they're offended.

Offense and harm aren't the same thing. The OP conflates them senselessly.

You can have a debate about when offence is justified. I was making the point that in some cases it definitely is, and we shouldn't view offence as obfuscation/manipulation or follow the principle 'Don't Get Offended'.

This is why living in an advanced society is highly desirable.

I will always admire the Norwegians at how they responded to Breiviks actions.

Point taken, but I think those different perspectives are meaningful.

In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean "you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don't like".

"Gay people shouldn't marry because it will undermine the very fabric of civilization" "Women shouldn't vote, because they don't understand male concepts like War and Empire" "Everyone knows Irish people get drunk on St. Patrick's day!"

This is the sort of stuff that frequently arises in the world.

I would suggest you probably live in a very filtered environment. It's cool, most people do. I've been trying to re-filter my own environment. But, trust me, these things are all still alive and kicking out there. Following the news, activist blogs, or just having friends who are oppressed in their daily life and talk about it, will quickly draw this sort of racist, homophobic, sexist comments to your attention.

If you really think this qualifies as "stating an unpleasant truth" then... wow.

For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders?

It depends on what relevance it has, and on what is being left out. Someone once told me that GW Bush must be smarter than Obama because he is white. That's an intellectual fallacy even if it isn't boo-word racism.

In my experience these words, especially when spoken by the offended, frequently mean "you are making an argument/stating a potential truth that I don't like".

In my experience, references to "human biodiversity" are frequently presented as if they are value neutral, but frequently aren't because of the factors mentioned above.

For example: is it racist/sexist to point out the differences in average IQ between the people of different races/genders?

The way I'd use the word, it depends on why you're pointing them out. (Hint: if someone is pointing out that white people are more intelligent than black people in average for non-army1987::racist reasons, they'd most likely point out that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even more intelligent in average.)

The wording is also important -- “blacks are idiots” is no more of a reasonable way to put that than “females are midgets” is a reasonable way to state the fact that the average woman is shorter than the average man, so if someone is willing to say the former but not the latter, there's likely something wrong.

(BTW, AFAIK men and women have the same average IQ (though different types of intelligence are weighed in a way deliberately chosen to make that the case), but the distribution of men's IQs has a larger standard deviation.)

Yes and yes. We live in a world where people disregard qualifiers, so if you say "on tests of mathematical ability, men have higher variance in test scores, so the most talented mathematicians are disproportionately men" people will hear "men are better at math" and assume that average men are better than average women at math (this might also be true, but is not what you said). Basically, some people don't distinguish between "most a are b" and "most b are a", so you end up with people drawing conclusions that hurt other people with no real benefit. So as a general rule, we pretend that there are no between-group differences because if we don't, people have a tendency to focus exclusively on between group differences and ignore within-group differences, which is worse.

Does it become racist/sexist if one attempts to speculate on the cause of these differences?

Racism has three definitions:

1) The belief that there are implicit (read: genetic) differences between races which give rise to behavioral differences.

2) The belief that different races have different worth and/or aught to be treated differently because of these differences.

3) An actual act of treating a race differently which stems from explicit or implicit negative opinions about that race.

Sexism mostly lies only in the domain of (2) and (3) with (1) often seeming like a gray area because believing (1) almost always implies (2) or (3).

So you would be racist (1) if you proposed that the IQ differences are genetic.

The reason people say "you are being racist" is because people often implicitly do (3) and implicitly believe (1) and (2) without explicitly stating the belief. The intent behind telling someone they are racist is to make the underlying belief explicit.

The moral connotations of being racist/sexist continue to be implicitly bad or wrong. So now, if the person wishes to continue justifying the initial belief, they have to defend the moral good or factual correctness of certain types of racism / sexism.

To summarize the point: For the majority of individuals in your culture, System 1 is racist/sexist while System 2 believes racism and sexism are bad. The intent of saying "statement x is racist" is to initiate a shift to system 2.

You didn't state your views, but if your system 2 holds some racist/sexist beliefs as well (as in, you actually think racial IQ differences are genetic) than you would misinterpret "you are racist" as being analogous to "I don't like your argument". What's really happening is that the person who you are arguing with believes that your racism is coming out of system 1, and wants to notify system 2 of that fact.

(I know this is a bit of an abuse of dual process theory and a horrible oversimplification even otherwise but I'm trying to be at least somewhat succinct - apologies)