Crocker's Rules: How far to take it?

I don't know or care whether someone I'm talking to online has declared Crocker's rules. I'm still going to attempt to be polite.

Crocker's rules are an oddity. The LW wiki's declaration that they are "a rationality enhancing technique" strikes me as an example of Vulcan rationality.

As I understand it, Crocker's rules is not supposed to be a moral code or a way of life, but is a standard of etiquette. It's a protocol. Humans are great at inventing and applying (and also subverting) social protocols, but you have to choose the right tool for the job.

Further data points: a few centuries ago, it was the convention particularly in written communication to use what would now be regarded as ridiculously flowery language. But, as Samuel Johnson said:

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet." You don't care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly.

Within rigid conventions of extreme politeness, people can still figure out ways to be extremely rude when they want to be. At least one writer has suggested that Isaac Newton's famous quote about seeing further than other men "by standing on the shoulders of giants" was a veiled attack on Robert Hooke for being short. These days, British MPs are capable of expressing extreme contempt about Right Honourable Gentlemen in the opposition.

On the other side of the spectrum, Tom Wolfe has written that one of the main features of the secret Skull and Bones society at Yale was to engage in criticism sessions that were somewhere between Crocker's rules and hazing:

At Yale the students on the outside wondered for 80 years what went on inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull and Bones. On Thursday nights one would see the secret society members walking silently and single file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples on the campus, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those 30-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few? What went on was... lemon sessions!—a regularly scheduled series of lemon sessions, just like the ones that occurred informally in girls' finishing schools.

In the girls' schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random in nights when a dozen or so girls might end up in someone's dormitory room. One girl would become "it," and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect... her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality. Likewise, in the secret societies: They held lemon sessions for boys. Is masturbation your problem? Out with the truth, you weenie! And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions. Yes! I do it! I whack whack whack it! I'm afraid of women! I'm afraid of you! And I get my shirts at Rosenberg's instead of Press! (Oh, you dreary turkey, you wet smack, you little shit!)... But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American race guerrière.

Most people don't have anything useful to tell you, polite or not. Crocker's rules do nothing to help with that.

My understanding is that Crocker's Rules are usually declared for the duration of a conversation. In the case of Less Wrong, a conversation in the comments can last for as long as people keep posting, but I think that it's implied that most people intend Crocker's Rules to apply to a specific situation, rather than living under them indefinitely. That said, I'd be interested to hear how living under them turns out for you if you decide to go through with it.

So Crocker's rules seems like a worthwhile thing to say if there's a social convention of people not saying useful things. The place I've seen them be most useful is in criticism of writing style, which otherwise might be left unsaid. However, for "idea posts," they don't seem that useful - people already say what they think about ideas on here without worrying too much, and useful criticism is usually easily differentiated from boring rudeness.

In my experience, declaring Crocker's rules to people that aren't LWers is just met with confusion, even when explained. The most harm it is likely to do to your social status is due to people thinking you are weird for knowing what something like Crocker's rules is.

If I were looking into this I would want to know how often do folks have something to say to me they think would be useful for me to hear, but which they choose not to say, but which they would have said if I'd declared Crocker's Rules. (Ideally, I'd like to know the net expected value of those things to me, though that's harder to obtain.)

A related question is the net expected value of the things folks chose not to say, which they endorse saying if I'd declared Crocker's Rules (even if they wouldn't necessarily have said them) but not otherwise.

It occurs to me that simply declaring "Crocker's rules apply to me," does not automatically mean that the people around you that matter will comply with your intention, no matter how sincere you are. If salespeople still think that they can get a commission by flattering you, they'll tell you that outfit/car/house is just what someone of your amazing qualities needs. Similarly, if your work subordinates think you'll shoot the messenger of bad news, they'll think twice about telling you the unvarnished truth even when you specifically ask for it by name.

To me, it would make most sense to declare Crocker's Rules in certain contexts (subjects, settings, individuals) rather than in general.

So you might have one particular friend or a few who can 'look at you from the outside', tell you how you're coming across or weaknesses you haven't seen. With the added benefit that it would be easier to disagree with such a close friend - I suspect one of the tough things about Crocker's Rules is that you'd have to disagree with people's criticism of you more often, which is a very awkward thing with anyone but the closest friend.

Alternatively it might be at work: I know people who always frame any critique with a lot of 'I really like the approach you've taken and overall this is very effective' stuff, and then keep on returning to that during the critique. Frankly, I find that more insulting in a sense, and I definitely can see it being valuable having a work environment where people could just be very straightforward. Although it would be less personal than Crocker's and would probably have to be agreed by a group to apply between all of them, rather than declared unilaterally.

I'll grant that Crocker's Rules are a useful toolset for some aspiring rationalists. However, my opinion is that they're an extremely primitive tool with a low learning curve being used where highly advanced tools with a high learning curve are also available. Use Crocker's Rules where you must, but social skills (like learning to be tactfully forthright) are a skillset with a potentially large payoff.

Crocker's Rules strikes me as something someone thought was a good idea based on some sort of first principles reasoning more than trying to improve actual social interactions after lots of observation and experiment.

Declaring the Rules has been around for at least ten years. How many cases have there been where declaring the Rules has led to an useful social interaction that otherwise would not have taken place?

Or to turn this around, any way to guesstimate the amount of useful social interaction, which requires both someone having useful new information to provide and the recipient being actually able to receive and use the information, that gets lost due to politeness? And what about the interactions that end up noise from the "honest talk" being redundant or otherwise not useful, that do not get made due to politeness norms?

Random and anonymous commenters seem to already do the speaking their mind thing very well even when Crocker's Rules are not declared, and their input is mostly noise.

If it is clear that the risk is low, and if the value to be gained is clearly very high, we should probably be doing more to encourage it as an explicit norm.

I don't know about the value being very high but I suspect that encouraging it as an explicit norm would be seen by many as a blanket permission to be rude. So it might not be such a good idea.

Oh, and a thought about the value of declaring them: the concern about being polite sometimes prevented me from getting caught-up in meta or personal arguments. I was going to tell someone that they're biased in some way or that they had fallen into some standard failure mode of thinking but the desire not to be too aggressive made me pause and realize that what I was doing was a failure mode itself.