Failures in Kindness

So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? And maybe you add "I'm completely fine with anything!" to ensure you're really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.

This error reminds me of people on a dating app who kill the conversation by texting something like "How's your week going?"

When texting on a dating app, if you want to keep the conversation flowing nicely instead of getting awkward/strained responses or nothing, I believe the key is to anticipate that a couple seconds of low-effort processing on the recipient's part will allow them to start typing their response to your message.

"How's your week going?" is highly cognitively straining. Responding to it requires remembering and selecting info about one's week (or one's feelings about one's week), and then filtering or modifying the selection so as to make one sound like an interesting conversationalist rather than an undifferentiated bore, while also worrying that one's selection about how to answer doesn't implicitly reveal them as being too eager to brag, or complain, or obsess about a particular topic.

You can be "conversationally generous" by intentionally pre-computing some of their cognitive work, i.e. narrowing the search space. For instance:

"I'm gonna try cooking myself 3 eggs/day for lunch so I don't go crazy on DoorDash. How would you cook them if you were me?"

With a text like this (ideally adjusted to your actual life context), they don't have to start by narrowing down a huge space of possible responses. They can immediately just ask themselves how they'd go about cooking an egg. And they also have some context of "where the conversation is going": it's about your own lifestyle. So it's not just two people interviewing each other, it has this natural motion/momentum.

Using this computational kindness technique is admittedly kind of contrived on your end, but on their end, it just feels effortless and serendipitous. For naturally contrived nerds like myself looking for a way to convert IQ points into social skills, it's a good trade.

The computational kindness principle in these conversations works much like the rule of improv that says you're supposed to introduce specific elements to the scene ("My little brown poodle is digging for his bone") rather than prompting your scene partners to do the cognitive work ("What's that over there?").

Oh and all this is not just a random piece of advice, it's yet another Specificity Power [LW · GW].

People often act like this, and they tend to assume they're doing the other person a favor by being so open and flexible. After all, this way the other person will have to make no trade-offs and can spend their time exactly as they please. The problem with this however is that it's computationally unkind: it offloads all the effort

Computational kindness by this definition is equivalent to Emotional Labor, no?

I really liked this post! I will probably link to it in the future.

Edit: Just came to my mind that these are things I tend to think of under the heading "considerateness" rather than kindness, but it's something I really appreciate in people either way (and the concepts are definitely linked). 

Forget where I read it, but this Idea seems similar. When responding to a request, being upfront about your boundaries or constraints feels intense but can be helpful for both parties. If Bob asks Alice to help him move, and Alice responds "sure thing" that leaves the interaction open to miscommunication. But if instead Alice says, " yeah! I am available 1pm to 5pm and my neck has been bothering me so no heavy lifting for me!" Although that's seems like less of a kind response Bob now doesn't have to guess at Alice's constraints and can comfortably move forward without feeling the need to tiptoe around how long and to what degree Alice can help.

Curated. I like the variety of the examples, really highlights how there are multiple angles from which you might fail to be kind. Though failure is a harsh term. I'm often tempted to levels of labels on things, where I do think the attempts made ("we'll do whatever you want", "kick me out whenever") are still kindnesses and better than not doing those things. It's just we can aspire to even greater levels of kindness. 

I'm curious how much the response one wants to make in response to this is in that in individual interactions, move beyond cached notions of what's kind behavior and actually boot up more detailed models of the other person and their experience as opposed to recomputing what's actually kind across various common scenarios that can be more heuristically and cheaply applied. As usual, perhaps some of both!

I am guilty of both offering opt-ins and fake exits, and also being one of those people that don't want to rock the boat by taking an opt-in or a fake exit. Thanks for this article, as it's highlighted a double standard in me. I knew already that I have a tendency towards cognitive unloading, but this gives very clear examples of situations I might want to have a pre-prepared position for that's not contradictory.

This is an extremely relatable post, in both ways. I often find myself on the other side of the these interactions too and not knowing how to label and describe my awareness of what's happening without coming across as Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Thanks for writing this post, I really liked it!

Due to the high upvotes, I figure it has a decent chance to feature in the LW Review for 2024, so I figured I'd make some typo & edit suggestions. Feel free to ignore.

An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably in those closer to lesswrong, is -> An approach that may not be well received in all social circles, but probably is well received in those closer to LessWrong, is [I feel like an "is" is missing in the middle, but this edit makes the sentence a bit awkward due to the "lesswrong, is" follow-up]

in exchange for the utility you get out of it yourself -> in exchange for the utility you yourself get out of smoking

The idea is that when when people make some decision -> The idea is that when when people make some decision

instead of deciding for the other option. -> instead of deciding on the other option.

even though that would not be expected thing to do. -> even though that would not be the expected thing to do.

opt-in style questions -> opt-in-style questions

Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and make any such should-claims. -> Although in the end this post is not meant to be normative and not meant to make any such should-claims.

imagine a friend from a different country is visiting and will stay with you for a while. You're exchanging some text messages beforehand in order to figure out how to spend your time together. You want to show your friend the city, and you want to be very accommodating and make sure all their preferences will be met. So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? And maybe you add "I'm completely fine with anything!" to ensure you're really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.

An additional angle on situations like this: Your friend may be hoping to choose something that's positively enjoyable for you.  Saying "I'm completely fine with anything" may not meet that bar, and doesn't give any hints as to what would.  To illustrate directly, compare "There are ten restaurants nearby and I'm fine with any of them" vs "There are ten restaurants nearby, I've been to them all and I love them all".  I think there are people who would respond to the second with "Great, I'll look them up and pick my favorite" and would find the first frustrating (and may respond by probing, "Well, are there any that you particularly like?"  [And if you really don't care about food, then their hope to find a restaurant you enjoy is destined for frustration.]).

In this case there's also the aspect that, since you live there (likely for some years) and they're from another country, you likely know a lot more about the local offerings than they do (not guaranteed—perhaps you're an ascetic who doesn't explore such things and they're a tourist who has researched your town—but likely), so in a division-of-labor sense it's likely appropriate for you to volunteer info first.

That second aspect is indeed about the pure computational problem.  The first aspect is a combination of the computation/search problem and an emotional negotiation element.

Instead of flatly offloading responsibility the "throw me out whenever" way, invite the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together, by e.g. raising the question of when you should leave and then figuring out together what factors this depends on and how you want to make that decision

This fails the sniff test of "bad moods as a fragility test for social norms".  You critique Ask Culture for responsibility offloading, but ignore its upside-- much greater computational kindness than "inviting the other person to discuss the modalities of the question together". The primary characteristic of a bad mood (I'm using this term for "normal" bad moods like hungover, tired, caffeine crash) is lowered computational capacity.  

I wonder if Responsibility Offloading and Computational Kindness can be thought of as a position/velocity tradeoff; i.e, that one can not perfectly have the one without losing the other. 

There seems to be one particular situation that gets on my nerves and fits into this category. It goes something like these two ways: 1) at the end of an event, everyone is asked unexpectedly to make a short speech about the success of the event, or 2) in the middle of the event, everyone is abruptly expected to produce some creative output. Number two is, of course, worse, and can make the whole event a complete hell for half the participants. Number one is just annoying. Perhaps it would be better to ask if anyone has anything to add at the end, so that we can hear from the few people who really have something to add? Usually, however, this is resolved by practically everyone saying meaningless trivia in a couple of sentences. Even though many people can feel okay with their own triviality, others feel embarrassed that they had nothing meaningful or witty to say and that they therefore wasted people's time.

but this would be what I'd call a "fake exit option"

Here's how the simulation played out in my head as I was reading this:

1. I really wanted to halt the volunteering-chain before it came to the newbie.
2. I didn't manage to complete that intention before it was too late.
3. I wanted to correct my mistake and complete it anyway, by trying to offer the "exit option".

What I didn't notice immediately was that thought 3 was ~entirely invoked by heuristics from fake kindness that I haven't yet filtered out.  Thank you for pointing it out.  I may or may not have catched it if this played out IRL.

This is why social situations should have an obligatory 10-second pause between every speech-act, so I can process what's actually going on before I make a doofy.  xd

⧉: My motivations for writing this comment was:
       ➀ to affiliate myself with this awesome post,
       ➁ to say "hey I'm just like u; I care to differentiate twixt real & fake kindness!"
       ➂ to add my support/weight to the core of this post, and say "this matters!"

I've got to admit, I look at most of these and say "you're treating the social discomfort as something immutable to be routed around, rather than something to be fixed by establishing different norms". Forgive me, but it strikes me (especially in this kind of community with high aspie proportion) that it's probably easier to tutor the... insufficiently-assertive... in how to stand up for themselves in Ask Culture than it is to tutor the aspies in how to not set everything on fire in Guess Culture.

Really love this post. Thanks for writing it!

So what can we do about it? I think there's several options:

One approach here, which I don't think falls into the three listed, is to start by implicitly offering a concession and give everyone a chance to accept or refuse it. For example, "Where can I go to smoke?" might work well in your example, since it is implicitly offering to go somewhere else to do so; if everyone agrees, "You don't have to go anywhere," you can assume they are really unbothered or at least not weighting their own dislike enough to feel you have wronged them.

Thanks for this post! As someone who at times tends to be a bit socially slow and not super assertive, this definitely helps me to point a finger on what might have caused past, slightly unpleasant situations. I feel like this is something that can be taken into consideration quite well when preparing (private) events.

I liked the term Computational Kindness a lot! Thanks.

BTW, in the example you give for it and analogous situations it is, in addition, totally inefficient: you know your environment, what is worth visiting/doing and so on, so it is relatively easy to pick the day's program. The visitor, who doesn't know this environment will have a much harder time finding it out. So, it not only "offloads all the effort of coming up with ideas and making decisions to the other person", it greatly increases this effort. I think it is important to note this as well.

A tiny case of this I wrote about long ago: https://markxu.com/stop-asking-people-to-maximize

What you say doesn't matter as much as what the other person hears. If I were the other person, I would probably wonder why you would add epicycles, and kindness would be just one possible explanation.

I am not quite sure about the writing/examples in computational kindness and responsibility offloading, but I think I feel the general idea. 

For computational kindness, I think it is just really the difference in how people prefer to communicate, or making plans it seems, with the example on trip planning. I, for example, personally prefer being offered with their true thoughts - if they are okay with just really anything, or not. Anything is fine as long as that is what they really think or prefer (side talk: I generally think communicating real preferences will be the most efficient). I do not mind planning the trip myself in ways that I wanted. There is not really a right or wrong style. If the host person offered "anything is okay", but the receiver do not like planning, they could also simply say "Any recommendations? I like xxx or xxx generally." Communication goes both ways. The reason I think we should not say one way is better than another is, if the friend really wants to plan themselves, and then the host person planned a bunch, the receiver may also feel bad to reject the planned activities. Maybe what you really want to see, is that the host person cares enough to put some efforts into planning (just guessing)? And seems the relationship in this example between these two people are relatively close or require showing some efforts?

For responsibility offloading, I think some of these examples are not quite similar or parallel situations, but I generally get the proposal: "do not push other people in a pushy manner and should offer the clear option to say no" as opposed to a fake ask. In my opinion a fake ask is not true kindness - it is fake, so it is not really in any way kind. But at the same time, I've trained myself into taking the question literally - okay, if you asked, then it means you expect my answer to go both ways, then I will say no if I am thinking no. In the case the question is genuine - great! in the case it is not, too bad, the smoker should've be consistent with their words.

Most of these seems to be communication style differences, that just require another communication to sort out if the two parties need to communicate frequently.

Thank you for this great and well thought article on a topic of "kindness" that interests me in connection with the big puzzle: "how do people understand what people are meaning with their words?" In my observation, the process of understanding is not yet fully understood, except where understanding takes place without language.

In all the situations of ambiguity you describe, we again encounter the problem of language, that even clear and unambiguous sentences can be understood differently. And this is even possible in situations in which the context is shared by the speaker and the listener. In fact, even apparent sentences can be particularly difficult to understand if it remains unclear why they are being said.

Interestingly, this is always immediately the case when people have unfriendly feelings towards each other — the evidence for this is provided daily in heaps on social media (where the vast majority of "debates" revolve around the meaning of words and sentences that the other side supposedly misunderstands).

This leads to a surprising hypothesis: people can only understand each other in conversations when their minds are friendly towards the person they are talking to. Kindness means: I understand or want to understand what is happening inside you. 

Suppose you understand this and really want to be friendly. In that case, every embarrassing situation is “easy” (in fact: nothing comes easy in human communication) to resolve: 

1) Start a dialog: If there is the slightest embarrassment or uncertainty about a motive, always ask: "Do I understand you correctly that ... ?" 

2) "Please" is reciprocal friendliness in advance and an underestimated factor for successful sociality. 

3) Communicate your own feelings when there is an embarrassing moment. Allow your conversation partner to recognize how you feel. 

4) Smile. It is no coincidence that we live in the era of "smileys", the substitute signs for facial expressions and gestures. Smiling is a key signal for the willingness to understand the person you are talking to because you have no bad or rejecting feelings towards her. Unfortunately, men tend to lack expression. In the clips (Tik-Tok, YouTube, etc.), however, we see how smiley faces are increasingly being imitated in real facial expressions. This seems cartoonish and silly, but can be explained by the concern that the words spoken alone could be misunderstood without further signals for "intention detecting". 

In my eyes, however, humans much to easily fall into the loop of misunderstanding. There is no such thing as non-ambiguity. And when hidden feelings are involved, embarrassment is difficult to avoid. It even happens to lovers.     

The common solution to the problem of first timers is to make the first time explicitly free.
This is also applicable to clubs with fixed buy in costs but unknown (to the newbie) benefits and works well whenever the cost is realtively small (as it should be if it is optional). If they don't like the price they won't come again.

‘Computational unkindness’ seems to intersect quite heavily with the idea of emotional labour, in particular that example about taking responsibility for planning a trip. I think this has already been quite heavily discussed in feminist circles as I guess many women on average might tend to be less assertive in the types of situations you described. I’m struggling to think of any real distinction between the two ideas actually.

Your money-donating example is a difficult one. Ideally, it would be better to anticipate this sort of thing ahead of time and intentionally create an environment where it's ok to say "no". 

The facilitator could say something like: "this is intended as an exercise in group decision making, if you want to donate some of your own money as well to make this something you're more invested in, you are welcome to do that, but it's not something I expect everyone to be doing. We will welcome your input even if you're not putting money into the exercise this time." They could even say "I'm not adding anything myself today" to reinforce the message, and provide an ally, as in Asch's conformity experiments.

I find that most of these situations could be diffused by forward planning and expectation setting, though admittedly this is a mental load on the person who does the forward planning. Over time it becomes more natural and a person can build up conversational habits which follow these principles though. 

Re computational unkindness, optimizing solely for what one person wants is easy.  The complexity mostly arises from the picker trying to satisfy others' implicit preferences that they pretend not to have for the sake of being "flexible".

Social messaging is fine balancing act: people like to offload responsibility and effort, especially if it doesn't come at the cost of status. And, to be honest, you don't know if your question would impose upon the other (in terms of cognitive load, social pressure or responsibility), so you it is smart to start your social bid low and see if the other wants to raise the price. Sometimes they work, creating a feedback loop similar to how superstitions evolve: if it is minimal effort and sometimes it is effective, better continue using it.

As a child, I despised a lot of these practices, to me it felt like people were lying all the time, or at least, hiding their true motivations or concerns. I tended to simply call out these adults on their bullshit. If somebody said "I'm fine with everything", I simply proposed something that I know that person is not fine with but that is absurd enough to indicate that I'm not being serious. As a child you can still get away with such behaviour, but many adults find it highly annoying. However, I still employ it among friends who I know don't judge me on that interaction or at least lace it with humor to make it socially acceptable.

However, I think such messaging can often turn into a social communication into a prisoner's dilemma type situation, where each party puts in the minimum succesfull effort resulting in a situation unsatisfactory to either party. I'm just not sure how (and if) we are able to recognize when a situation is a prisoner's dillema and when not. "How was your week?" is often a very welcoming question to me, but not for others.

Leaving things unspoken and relying on generally accepted principles can increase communication efficiency enormously, a lot of communication isn't a prisoner's dilemma type exchange after all, but it will run into issues occasionally, especially if the communicator do not share a set of unspoken rules.

Having grown up in Dutch culture, I was unusually direct (rude) for even a Dutch person, so travelling in Iran where things are absurdly polite at times was very interesting for me, for example. However, a society like Iran requires quite an amount of cognitive load for even simple issues.

 

Examples one and two are normal situations and people should know how to respond to them. The general principle is that when given an open ended question, don't aim to answer it in full, but make a small contribution and let the conversation flow.

Computational unkindness:

"What do you want to do? I'm completely fine with anything!"

"I've heard about X, I'd love to visit that place!", or "I don't know. What's a good place to hang out?"

Responsibility Offloading 1:

B: "By the way - feel free to throw me out any time! I've got tomorrow off, so am flexible, but just let me know when you've had enough of me"

A: "Hmm... I usually  go to bed at 11pm."

Responsibility Offloading 2:

"Do you mind if I smoke?"

"Yes, I do mind people in a 10m radius of me smoking!"

Ok that was a joke. But you can still convey irritation and offoffload the responsibility at the same time. Say "Sure..." with discomfort in the intonation.

The problem raises an important problem. Though I have to admit my gut reaction is "neurotypicals are being weird again" :)

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a lot like conflating kindness with coddling and then presenting that as a sort of moral injunction against asshatery.

Nobody wants to be shy, insecure and socially anxious. These are not attributes that anybody sets out to cultivate in themselves. I think they are properly seen as vices worth overcoming. And the more we push the idea that well-adjusted, polite society communicate in such a way as to remove friction for peoples' purely detrimental neuroses, the less incentive there is for people to recalibrate towards confidence, assertiveness and a deep sense of the right to exist as much as anyone else. In other words, the more we enable pathological social anxieties.

The answer to this is obviously not to embrace obliviousness and lionize tactless communication, but this current paradigm of talking about shyness, insecurity and social anxiety as though they are intractable or essential personality traits that we should all learn to appreciate reeks of misguided affirmation culture propaganda to me.

This comment is probably too severe, but I've seen a lot of this sort of sentiment floating around lately and it strikes me as unnecessarily fatalistic. We need to work with those who have somehow landed in a place where they experience unnecessary social anxieties so that they cam eventually grow out of it, not coddle them. There are times that I feel being good to somebody is mutually exclusive with being kind to them.

Good Article! I have a suggestion for you - please add a link to the original post in your emails, so it's easy to like and comment on. I am subscribed to your emails (of this blog), but the email only contains a link to your home page with all posts, NOT the specific post you shared in the email.