I expect these topics are hard to write about, and that there’s value in attempting it anyway. I want to note that before I get into my complaints. So, um, thanks for sharing your data and thoughts about this hard-to-write-about (AFAICT) and significant (also AFAICT) topic!

Having acknowledged this, I’d like to share some things about my own perspective about how to have conversations like these “well”, and about why the above post makes me extremely uneasy.

First: there’s a kind of rigor that IMO the post lacks, and IMO the post is additionally in a domain for which such rigor is a lot more helpful/necessary than such rigor usually is.

Specifically: I can’t tell what the core claims of the OP are. I can’t easily ask myself “what would the world look like if [core claim X] was true? If it were false? what do I see?” “How about [core claim Y]”? “Are [X] and [Y] the best way to account for the evidence the OP presents, or are there unnecessary details tagging along with the conclusions that aren’t actually actually implied by the evidence?”, and so on.

I.e., the post’s theses are not factored to make evidence-tracking easy.

I care more about (separable claims, each separately trackable by evidence, laid out to make vetting easy) here than I usually would, because the OP is about politics (specifically, it is about what behaviors should lead to us “burning [those who do them] with fire” and ostracizing those folks from our polity. Politics is damn tricky stuff; political discussion in groups about who to exclude and what precedents to set up for why is damn tricky stuff.

I think Raemon’s comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] is pretty similar to the point I’m trying to make here.

(Key to my reaction here is that this is a large public discussion. I’m worried that in such discussions, “X was claimed, and upvoted, and no one objected” may cause many readers to assume “X is now a vetted claim that can be assumed-and-cited when making future arguments.” I’m not sure if this is right; if it’s false, I care less.)

(Alternately put: I like this post fine for conversation-level discussion; it’s got some interesting examples and anecdotes and claims and hypotheses, seems worth reading and helpful-on-some-points. I don’t as much like it as a contribution to LW’s “vetted precedents that we get to cite when sorting through political cases”, because I think it doesn’t hit the fairly high and hard-to-hit standard required for such precedents to be on-net-not-too-confusing/“weaponizable”/something.)

I expect it’s slower to try to proceed via separable claims that we can separately track the evidence for/against, but on ground this tricky, slower seems worth it to me.

I’ve often failed at the standard I’m requesting here, but I’ll try to hit in in the future, and will be a good sport when people point out I’m dramatically failing at it.

—

Secondly, and relatedly: I am uneasy about the fact that many of the post’s examples are from a current conflict that is still being worked out (the rationalist community’s attempt to figure out how to relate to Geoff Anders). IMO, we are still in the process of evaluating both: a) Whether Geoff Anders is someone the rationalist community (or various folks in it) would do better to ostracize, in various senses; and b) Whether there really is a thing called “frame control”, what exactly it is, whether it’s bad, whether it should be “burned with fire,” etc.

I would much rather we try to prosecute conversation (a) and conversation (b) separately, rather than taking unvetted claims about what a new bad thing is and how to spot it, and relatively unvetted claims about Geoff, and using them to reinforce each other.

(If one is a prerequisite for the other, we could try to establish that one first, and then bring in the other.)

The reason I’d much rather they be done separately, is that I don’t trust my own, or most others’, ability to track evidence when they’re done at once. The sort of confusion I get around this is similar to the confusion the OP describes frame-controllers as inducing with “burried claims”. If (a) and (b) are both cited as evidence for one another, it’s a bit tricky to pull out the claims, and I notice myself getting sort of dizzy as I read.

—

Hammering a bit more here, we get to my third source of unease: there are plenty of ways I can excerpt-and-paraphrase-uncharitably from the OP, that seem like kinds of things that ought not to be very compelling, and that I’d kind of expect would cause harm if a community found them compelling anyhow.

Uncharitable paraphrase/caricature: “Hey you guys. There’s a thing that is secretly very bad, but looks pretty normal. (So, discount your “this is probably fine”, “the argument for ostracism doesn’t seem very compelling here” reactions. (cf. “Finger-trap beliefs.)) I know it’s really bad because my dad was really bad for me and my mom during my childhood, and this not-very-specified thingy was the central thing; I can’t give you enough of a description to allow independent evaluation of who’s doing it, but I can probably detect it myself and tell you which people are/aren’t doing (the central and vaguely specified bad thing). We should burn it with fire when we see it; my saying this may trigger your “wait, we should be empathetic” reactions, but ignore those because, let me tell you so that you know, I’m normally very empathetic, and I think this one vaguely specified thing should be burned with fire. So you guys should override a bunch of your usual heuristics and trust (me or whoever you think is good at spotting this vaguely specified thing) to decide which things we should collectively burn with fire.”

It’s possible there are protective factors that should make me not-worry about this post, even if I’m right that a reasonable person would worry about some other posts that fit my above caricature. But I don’t clearly see them, and would like help with that if they are here!

I like a bunch of the ending, about holding things lightly and so on. I feel like that is basically enough to make the post net-just-fine, and also helpful, for an individual reading this, who isn’t part of a community with the rest of the readers and the author — for such an individual, the post basically seems to me to be saying “sometimes you’ll find yourself feeling really crazy around somebody without knowing how to pin down why. In such a case, feel free to trust your own judgment and get out of there, if that’s what your actual unjustifiable best guess at what to do is.” This seems like fine advice! But in a community context, if we’re trying to arrive at collective beliefs about other people (which I’m not sure we’re doing, and I’m even less sure we should be doing; if we aren’t, maybe this is fine), such that we’re often deferring to other peoples’ guesses about what was and wasn’t “frame control” and whether that “frame control” maps onto a set of things that are really actually “burn it with fire” harmful and not similar in some other sense [LW · GW]… I’m uneasy!

I'm particularly frustrated by the thing where, inevitably, the concept of frame control is going to get weaponized (both by people who are explicitly using it to frame control, and people who are just vaguely ineptly wielding it as a synonym for 'bad').

I don't have a full answer. But I'm reminded of a comment by Johnswentworth that feels like it tackles something relevant. This was originally a review of Power Buys You Distance From the Crime [LW · GW]. Hopefully the quote below gets across the idea:

When this post first came out, I said something felt off about it. The same thing still feels off about it, but I no longer endorse my original explanation of what-felt-off. So here's another attempt.

First, what this post does well. There's a core model which says something like "people with the power to structure incentives tend get the appearance of what they ask for, which often means bad behavior is hidden". It's a useful and insightful model, and the post presents it with lots of examples, producing a well-written and engaging explanation. The things which the post does well more than outweigh the problems below; it's a great post.

On to the problem. Let's use the slave labor example, because that's the first spot where the problem comes up:

No company goes “I’m going to go out and enslave people today” (especially not publicly), but not paying people is sometimes cheaper than paying them, so financial pressure will push towards slavery. Public pressure pushes in the opposite direction, so companies try not to visibly use slave labor. But they can’t control what their subcontractors do, and especially not what their subcontractors’ subcontractors’ subcontractors do, and sometimes this results in workers being unpaid and physically blocked from leaving.

... so far, so good. This is generally solid analysis of an interesting phenomenon.

But then we get to the next sentence:

Who’s at fault for the subcontractor(^3)’s slave labor?

... and this where I want to say NO. My instinct says DO NOT EVER ASK THAT QUESTION, it is a WRONG QUESTION, you will be instantly mindkilled every time you ask "who should be blamed for X?".

... on reflection, I do not want to endorse this as an all-the-time heuristic, but I do want to endorse it whenever good epistemic discussion is an objective. Asking "who should we blame?" is always engaging in a status fight. Status fights are generally mindkillers, and should be kept strictly separate from modeling and epistemics.

Now, this does not mean that we shouldn't model status fights. Rather, it means that we should strive to avoid engaging in status fights when modeling them. Concretely: rather than ask "who should we blame?", ask "what incentives do we create by blaming <actor>?". This puts the question in an analytical frame, rather than a "we're having a status fight right now" frame.

The final paragraph there is the most interesting bit, so much so that I'm going to quote it again:

Now, this does not mean that we shouldn't model status fights. Rather, it means that we should strive to avoid engaging in status fights when modeling them. Concretely: rather than ask "who should we blame?", ask "what incentives do we create by blaming <actor>?". This puts the question in an analytical frame, rather than a "we're having a status fight right now" frame.

The object level has been helpful. But what's particularly interesting to me is that example of "here is an attempt to come up with a rule that constrains conversation in a way that asymmetrically favors good epistemics." This is a fairly specific rule that addresses one particular kind of (minor [LW · GW]) frame control – the notion that 'we should blame someone' is a frame, John's suggested rule* helps avoid being trapped in that particular frame without giving up the ability to model relevant classes of situations. 

[edit: *worth noting that John's suggested rule also comes embedded in a frame]

But I list this as a pointer to (hopefully) other types of engagement that might asymmetrically help navigate frame conflict in a broader sense.

I appreciate this post. I get the sense that the author is trying to do something incredibly complicated and is aware of exactly how hard it is, and the post does it as well as it can be done. 

I want to try to contribute by describing a characteristic thing I've noticed from people who I later realized were doing a lot of frame control on me: 

Comments like 'almost no one is actually trying but you, you're actually trying' 'most people don't actually want to hear this, and I'm hoping you're different'.' I can only tell you this if you want to hear it' 'it feels like you're already getting it, no one gets that far on their own' 'almost everyone is too locked into the system to actually listen to what I'm about to say' 'I've been wanting to find the right person to say this to, but no one wants to listen, but I think you might actually be ready to hear it': the common thread is that you, the listener, are special, and the speaker is the person who gets to recognize you as special, and the proof of your specialness is that you're going to try/going to listen/going to hear them out/ not going to instantly jump to conclusions

Counterexamples: 'you're the only Political Affiliation X I've ever found worth listening to' does not at all seem to come from the same kinds of motivations as the above. Some people have said "[x writing] demonstrated a rare ability to Actually Get It" and weren't doing weird manipulative shit at all; people who said it publicly in fact I think have in every case just been sincere/being nice/recommending a thinker they think highly of. The frame control people all said it privately or semiprivately, possibly because that way they can reuse the compliment on lots of people, possibly I'm just overgeneralizing from a small number of data points. 

I really like this post. I'd been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton's Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.

In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.

WRT positive things to look for I'll add this: A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.

Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)

1. To their face
2. Behind their back
3. Not at all

My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.

Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:

Good teachers don't encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I'll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher often fall into the category of looking for someone to fix everything that is wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. Bad teachers will encourage this dynamic in a few ways, an important one being that they don't undermine seeker's tendency to look to them for all the answers. I've seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time. New people entering who don't know any better then copy what they see. There was also a sense of pride for masochistic tendencies, that others 'couldn't handle' the 'real' things that were going on in the scene.

Hungry ghosts feel highly uncertain about themselves and the world, they always feel they are doing everything wrong. They are drawn towards the overconfident people who act as though they are doing everything correctly. This will select for narcissistic or exploitative teachers. This dovetails with the Guru model which, as I understand it, has been poorly translated to the west. A good teacher is less like a priest and more like a PhD advisor. This also ties in with the point about questions mentioned previously. Hungry ghosts will be satisfied by glossy answers, assuming that any lack of understanding is a failure on their part. They will also create an environment hostile to real questions as they don't want anything deflating the bubble of the infallibility of the teacher. There will also be a lot of interactions that seem to be about mutual validation of being on the correct path instead of openness to multiple approaches.

Such hungry ghost dynamics can be detected by how engaging with a scene makes you feel. If you exit feeling agitated, like you are doing something wrong, like others are making more progress than you and you need to 'hurry up', like there is winning to be done, like you are overloaded with things you need to learn, these are all bad signs. Good teaching creates more relaxed looseness, more playfulness, more freedom, more feeling of confidence and the tractability of practice. In short, the teachings themselves creating a palpable sense of less dukkha.

This would seem to be counter to what I'll call the high discipline focused schools. I won't say there's nothing to discipline, especially as specific periods of formal practice. But given how poor most schools are in producing people with obvious levels of insight I think the burden of proof lies with them to show that what they are offering works. A higher level of commitment that is asked for should also come with a higher level of demonstrated effects. (I'll add here abusers will avoid any explicitness about the commitments they are actually asking for and receiving from you. This is for deniability later. After all, you did those things of 'your own volition.')

And just because it can never be said too many times: if something looks hierarchical, cloistered, with members sleeping with each other, and personal finances becoming entangled in the org run far far away very fast.

This phenomenological account of frame control doesn't provide a causal model precise enough for me to understand what additional question [LW · GW] someone would be trying to answer when asking "is this person doing frame control?" aside from noticing which of the features of "frame control" they satisfy.

Some of the "red flags" seem like they could equally well point to someone fanatically committed to totally dominating others, or someone whose perspective responds to evidence but not social pressure, and many of the signs that someone is not a "frame controller" seem like the opposite. From the description of the first red flag:

They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.

These are signs of submission, as is the description of the first sign that someone isn't "doing frame control":

They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.

This resembles a pattern I see across many contexts where the idea of listening to someone because they have something to say is replaced with the submissive behavior of believing someone out of loyalty. I don't mean to say anything about your intent here, just to point out the general pattern, so we have a better chance of doing something else instead.

Second red flag:

A key component that makes frame control dangerous is when it’s linked to concrete consequences; maybe people really respect them, maybe they control resources, maybe they are the person throwing big events, maybe they gave you a new name, maybe they have the power to exclude you from your social group.

In general I would expect people whose beliefs are more responsive to valid evidence to have an easier time acting to produce the consequences they want. In environments that allocate credit straightforwardly I would also expect them to be more respected, entrusted with more resources, and have their concerns about others listened to more. In perverse environments I would expect the opposite.

The other red flags and opposite signs seem more ground-truth-oriented if I take them literally, as long as we don't skip the step of investigating whether what the other person is saying is false or true. For instance, reframing "harm" as "beneficial" is helpful if I start out by mistakenly think that my discomfort confronting a criticism is a sign that the criticism is hurting me, but harmful if I'm being trained to treat the grinding-my-gears feeling of endorsing an incoherent narrative as a sign of healthy spiritual challenge.

If you can evaluate directly whether someone has more of a tendency to introduce errors or to correct them, then you can additionally judge whether they are introducing errors in a way calculated to make error-correction harder, to make themselves more central, and to make you more responsive to their commands. If they're just giving commands and not making claims, then you can skip the first step and just see whether you think their commands are making you better off. In either case, it can help a lot to check whether you are behaving as though the other person is threatening you, whether they are behaving in a way optimized to produce that impression, and whether on reflection you believe that the threats are credible.

If you can't evaluate that, then you're in a more confusing situation. It can often be a good idea to switch contexts and see if things seem clear when outside that particular social field. If not, then you're stuck, and at best you can decide which interactions seem to give you the best chance of achieving autonomy.

The post is saying: "Here's a very common thing that basically everybody does sometimes."

Technically, everybody "frame controls" all the time; we can probably find numerous examples where every one of us - including me - does the things I outline as bad.

And then it's telling us that, if you identify that someone is doing this thing, this should be sufficient evidence to cast them out of society.  Even if they have good intent, even if there's no evidence of harm, even if nobody has told them the thing they are doing is bad.

No, you are not allowed into my life, my home, my friends, and I will try to remove you from the power you might use to hurt anybody else.

I'm worried that this is basically a general-purpose tool for anyone to denounce anyone else.

I think the author should get a lot of credit for identifying that this is dangerous and admitting how dangerous it is right in the post.  But I wish that she'd gone a step further and refined the post until it wasn't dangerous in this way.

This article gives me a strange feeling of looking through a mirror into a very different kind of world. I'm highly disagreeable. Vulnerability to frame control seems to stem from being agreeable/conflict-avoidant/unassertive. I personally find many of the situations where person A tries to frame control person person B and person B just silently takes it and doesn't say anything (at least in the initial stages) really weird and hard to imagine myself doing. Further, while rationally I know people behave like this, I really can't put myself in their shoes and see why. The reactions to situations just seem so different from what mine would be.

E.g:

• The burning man example. If I made a point and another person suggested people just listen to me because I'm tall/eloquent/have other trait X, I'd immediately confront them. I can't imagine letting a shitty argumentative tactic like that slide, much less the insult it implies.
• The student who asks the master a question, the master then responds by asking the student what motivates them to seek problems. Again, my response would be to pointedly confront the master and point out that they haven't answered my question.

This is an important concept that is tricky to describe. Some thoughts:

Minor vs Major Frame Control

Lots of relationships and minor interactions have low-key frame control going on pretty frequently. I think it's useful to be able to name that without implying that it's (necessarily) that big a deal. I find myself wanting separate words for "social moves that control the frame", "moves that control the frame in subtle ways", "move that control the frame pervasively in a way that is unsettlingly unhealthy." 

This is harder because even the most pervasive frame control appears on a spectrum. A romantic partner or family member can consistently weave a frame that is slightly unhealthy, but that doesn't hold a candle to a cult that systematically eliminates all your mental defenses.

Abusers can also be victims

One of the most important, sad lessons I had to learn about this is that the person weaving a frame, or controlling, or abusing you, can be weak.

Society taught me scripts for handling powerful, high status abusers who needed to be whistleblown. And society taught me scripts for handling predators who were... clearly villainanous. But it turned out the people I needed to be aware of were legitimately victims in their own right. Society didn't give me a script for "So-and-so is a victim and an abuser and it doesn't matter that they're sad and need help – you have a responsibility to help keep your social circle safe. You can also try to help them, but need to do so in a way that doesn't put your friends or other vulnerable people in harms way."

Here's a few things I believe:

1. Frame control is definitely real. I think if I were to try to operationalize it, it's something like the ability influence the ontologies people use and the valence they assign to objects with in those ontologies.  This caches out as influencing how important and virtuous people find certain ideas and actions.
2. Frame control is probably necessary for good leadership.  A good leader is a Kegan 5 individual who can find the ontology that they can use to educate and motivate Kegan 4 and Kegan 3 underlings in an organization that will allow them to correctly respond to current conditions, and then help them to change that ontology as the conditions change.
3. But frame control is also the thing that Kegan 4.5 sociopaths use to control the narrative in cults and moral mazes.  It allows them to get all of the credit, take none of the blame, and keep less powerful or sophiscated people in the dark about their games, and even happy to give them more control and power.
4. A well aligned Kegan 5 leader aware of the possiblity of capture by sociopaths, and skilled in frame control, is one of the best defenses against sociopaths, moreso than any specific communication rules, although rules like e.g. transparency of communication are helpful in this regard, as is Malcolm's norm around honoring distrust.
5. So I disagree that intent doesn't matter - it matters supremely, as you actually want a leader who's skilled in frame control to prevent you from getting taken advantage of.  BUT, the caveat is that a Kegan 3 or 4 person trying to understand the intent of a Kegan 4.5 or 5 person skilled in frame control will most times not be able to - that's the nature of hierarchical complexity.  So in practice trying to "determine the intent" of your leader to figure out if they're aligned with your interests or not isn't useful, even if the intent itself is one of the most important things.
6. This is basically an unsolved problem and one of the causes of civilizational inadequacy. The inability to select between competent Kegan 5 leaders who apply aligned frame control, and competent Kegan 4.5 sociopaths who apply misaligned frame control, is the cause not only of unhealthy religious style cults, but also the cause of most of the Moral Mazes that cause harm to people in normal corporate contexts.

Frame control is an effect; very often, people who frame control will not be aware that this is what they’re doing, and have extensive reasoning to rationalize their behavior that they themselves believe.

Of note: in my experience, as someone who accidentally did lots of frame control and now has it at least partly in his own view (and thus does a mix of "accidentally still doing it," "endorsedly still doing it," and "endorsedly specifically not doing it"), often the frame controller is themselves stuck in the frame.  They either don't know another kind of frame could even exist, or rely on it for their own self-image or self-worth or something.

(I know this is sort of addressed in the above but I wanted to pull it out and highlight it.  This is a clinical explanation of what happens and why, not an attempt to justify or excuse.)

I don't know how to handle the fact that everything Aella said about vulnerability and reciprocity is true, and also some people are vastly better at things than other people, and some people are better at a lot of things than other people. If you insist on being treated as an equal in certain ways, you either rule out interacting with people who are sufficiently better at sufficiently many things than you, or demand they lie. Many people claiming vast amounts of power knowledge and wisdom are flat out wrong, but not all of them are. And even if you could distinguish between the two perfectly, being genuinely better at a lot of things doesn't make someone inherently safe: in many ways it makes them more dangerous, either because they can use superior skill to manipulate you, or because sometimes doing the wrong thing because it feels right to you is long better than doing the right thing because someone told you to.

I'm not ruling out "just don't interact with people who are sufficiently beyond you (especially if they won't spend time proactively valuing you in ways you haven't actually earned)", but "only interact with your exact equals" can't be right either- it removes the best people to learn from. 

Note: I'd be excited to frontpage and curate a post similar-to-this. This particular post feels a bit too embedded in a live conflict for that to feel right to me. 

I recognize that it's pretty hard to write a post like this without examples and the best examples will often necessarily involve recent conflict / live-politics / be-a-bit-aiming-to-persuade. I'm sure shipping this out the door was already a sizeable chunk of effort. But I think there could be a hypothetically idealized split-into-two posts version, where one post simply outlined the model, and the other post applied it to recent events.

I think that the first red flag, and the first anti-red-flag, are both diametrically wrong.

… here’s a non-exhaustive list of some frame control symptoms …

1. They do not demonstrate vulnerability in conversation, or if they do it somehow processes as still invulnerable. They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.

This seems good, actually? Why should anyone be interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview? What’s so great about your opinion? (General-‘your’, I mean; I am not referring to OP specifically.) It seems to me that the baseline assumption should be that no one is interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview, unless (and this ought to be expected to be unusual!) you manage to impress them considerably (and even then, such conformance should not be immediate, but should come after much consideration, to take place at leisure, not in the actual moment of conversation!).

More generally: attempting to think deeply and without restriction about the ideas of others, and to change our minds, while actively being subject to social pressures in a live interpersonal setting, is extremely failure-prone and almost always unnecessary. It is sometimes inescapable, but usually it’s completely avoidable.

To the extent that this post encourages doing such things, it is encouraging exactly the opposite of rationalist best practices.

(For a related point, see this Schopenhauer quote [LW(p) · GW(p)].)

I once had a long talk with a very smart man who was widely perceived as deeply compassionate and kind, but long after the talk I realized at no point in the conversation he had indicated being impacted by my ideas, despite there being multiple opportunities for him to make at the very least small acknowledgements that I was onto something good.

Why is this the slightest bit surprising, or at all a bad sign or “red flag”? Why should this man have been impacted by your ideas? Aren’t you making some wildly improbable assumptions about how impressive and “impactful” your ideas were/are? (And even if they were impactful, rightly this man ought to have delayed any “impact” until due consideration, as noted above.)

Likewise, why do you assume that he had any good reason to think that you were onto something good? Maybe you weren’t onto anything good? Most people usually aren’t onto anything good, so this, again, ought to be the default assumption.

It took me a long time to realize this because he’d started out the conversation by framing me as special, telling me it was unusual to find someone else who had the ideas I did, that I must have taken a different path.

This seems not at all to contradict the preceding. “Unusual” and “different” does not mean “good” or “worthy of consideration or respect” or even “makes any sense whatsoever”.

So if frame control looks so similar to just being a normal person, what are some signs that someone isn’t doing frame control? Keeping in mind that these are pointers, not absolute, and not doing these doesn’t mean someone is doing frame control.

1. They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.

This seems bad, actually. It seems to me like a sign of insecurity and unjustified submission. I, for one, have no interest in having my conversation partners signal that they’re vulnerable to me (nor have I any interest in signaling to that I’m vulnerable to them).

Rather, it is right and proper that two people should meet as equals—each willing to defend his view, each confident in his own reason and judgment; open to the possibility of his interlocutor having interesting things to say, but expecting to have this possibility prove itself, and not assuming it. In other words: “Speak, and I will listen; you have no special power over me, nor I over you; our minds are free, and we face each other with unfettered reason.”

I see two independent ideas in this post

Insidious Inception

• People communicate thoughts into each others minds
• This can be direct *"I do not want to date you"*
• Or indirect *"Sorry I'm too busy this week" with no effort to find a different time*
• Saying A to indirectly communicate B can:
  • Obscure an intention that would be obvious were B said directly
  • Make it harder to refute B, because the idea that A -> B needs to first be established
  • Delicately communicate B without indirectly implying something that would have been implied had you said it directly

Core thoughts

• You have ideas that are small and do not effect your base perception of reality, we call this trivia/facts/knowledge.
• You have other ideas that are big, and construct your reality in the way that's hard to appreciate without medication/psychedelics/hippie workshops. We call this worldview/identity/schemas.

Mixed to form a very third idea:

The norms of healthy communication can be especially abused by someone doing this "insidious inception" to add or alter someones "core thoughts". If someone is doing this to you (deliberately or otherwise), using the norms of healthy communication you use normally to get people to stop doing things you don't like may not work, and instead make you vulnerable.

To connect the concepts here with some existing work: the special case of “frame control” where the result is self-doubt is also called “gaslighting.”

Here's some notes I took about the first some minutes of Gaslight (1944) (SPOILER alert. It's a very good movie, and somewhat relevant).

When he grabs the letter out of her hands he's like "Oh uh I was just worried about all the unhappy memories it's reminding you of". It's weird, it's a double move: on the one hand, most obviously it's a lie to cover up that he's worried about something else, but also it reveals that he's positioning himself as hyperconcerned about her. He doesn't excuse it by some selfish motive like "I became super curious about the letter" or "Your talking is annoying me" or whatever. Further, his supposed concern is about her "unhappy memories", positioning himself as an agent who takes it as a salient variable to track, what's going on with her memories and emotions; and implicitly, that he's an agent in the position to affect and manage her relationship with her memories and emotions.

And in the next breath, he explicitly tells her to forget all that unhappy stuff. He says "While you are afraid of anything, there cannot be any happiness for us"; "You must forget her". This sounds sort of innocent, especially in the context of concern, but it's ambiguous between a mere description/prediction of what will make them happy, vs. a threat of e.g. leaving or withholding happiness from her if she doesn't follow his orders. It's also just an obviously extreme (and implausible) statement when considered explicitly / from a third-person perspective, but in a way that could slip by as merely being high-intensity because the situation is high-intensity, rather than itself being a crazy statement.

Her only response is to say "Well, not [to forget] her, but what happened to her". Which, now that I think of it, makes the extremeness look intentional: by making an extreme statement and command, her corrective reasoning doesn't correct far enough. She'll remember her aunt, but has still tacitly agreed to forget what happened to her aunt; and this constitutes a step towards buying in to him being appropriate to give her orders about what to do with her mind.

He gives her his mother's pin as a gift, but then immediately takes it back. "You are inclined to lose things Paula." "I didn't realize that." "Oh just little things." It's a subtle dashing of hope; supposedly she's special enough for him to give her his heirloom, and he loves her and wants to symbolize her specialness, but then he "realizes" that she's unreliable; it's her fault, so *in opposition* to the motions of his naive love for her he has to maturely handle her. He's staying in the frame of concern that he'll keep the pin for safekepping so she doesn't lose it. He probes with a strong claim, and then when she notes her surprise, he "clarifies", which is in effect a subtle retreat, to a weaker and more difficult to verify claim ("just little things"); it's just on the edge where it's reasonable to trust someone's report, since maybe they noticed something you didn't, and it's hard to falsify. He's using her feedback about when she notices that his claims are implausible, to calibrate where and how far he can go in each case.

"There, now you'll remember where it is." "Oh don't be silly, of course I'll remember." "Oh I was teasing you my dear." More probing and walking-back. He reasserts his proposition about her forgetfulness, by implication ("now you'll remember [and you wouldn't otherwise]"); and then he pretend to not have actually been doing so; and he also implicitly asserts that she can't tell when he's teasing her.

"You've been forgetting things. Don't worry, you've been tired." "Yes that's it, I've been tired." He gives her an explanation that she can be sure will be accepted by the shared narrative; thus defusing the tension of the falsification of her experience without her having to directly contradict his false report; and thus walking her further into committing to agreeing that she's unreliable.

He took the broach, causing her to believe she'd harmed him, then when she accepts that she's been forgetful and is spooked and sad / guilty, he comforts her, pretending it's just that she's tired. It's a smokescreen for him: he appears to be comforting, when he knows he can keep the ruse up, and that she'll now believe the ruse and won't suspect him. And really what's happening is that he's dispelling her localized, specific confusion---her confidence that something weird just happened because it contradicts her memory, her concentration of epistemic force in time, her attention on the details of a context in which a trick is in fact being played on her and she's noticed and is trying to form a coherent hypothesis---he dispels that by giving her an explanation which tacitly still assumes that in fact what happened was that she was forgetful.

"Don't worry." More telling her what to feel. "It's not valuable." Knowing that she wasn't worried that he was worried about the monetary value; then when she apologizes more because it's his family hierloom, he doesn't contradict her. That way the positive transcript---what he actually said out loud---reads like he's being forgiving and saying that she doesn't owe him, the negative transcript shows that he's letting her insist that she's at fault, harmed him. Reminds me of a dinner guest insisting on helping clear the table and the host super-insisting it's fine; the guest is sometimes in a sense insincere. He sets it up so that it's she, not he, who brings the true harm of losing an heirloom into the conversation; subtly this reinforces that she's worse than he's letting on, and it's only his generosity that's keeping them together, despite what she would know if only she checks to see that she's bad.

"It hurts me when you're ill and fanciful." After confronting her, challenging her to assert---while he's staring her down, after being cross with her and denying he's cross with her---that she is actually perceiving that the maid despises her. "I hope you're not starting to imagine things again." "You're not, are you Paula?" Either she's starting to imagine things again, or the maid despises her; the former is a catastrophized version of the obvious other hypothesis, that she's imagining / mistaken about just this particular thing. By catastrophizing, he removes reasonable options---either deny her husband's narrative based on an uncertain perception, or else admit to being teetering on the edge of losing her mental continence.

"But my dear, I thought you were only being polite, why didn't you tell me you really wanted to see her?" Right after he just yelled at her to get her to say no. He silences her, and pretends that he's left communication channels perfectly well open if only she would just use them in the obvious way.

He lets her infer that she forgot he's taking her out, lets her stew in that for like 20 seconds, talks about something else, then tells her it was indeed a surprise.

Et cetera.

(Damn, that dude really likes jewels.)

As an East-Asian, this post bring tears to my eyes. Even though my human brain did trigger a flag to beware of such "rational belief".

This pretty much describe a traditional East Asian community, where frame controllers floods around to preserve "culture" and "social hierarchy". One notable signs of such subtle frame control is when you find most situations as "should do something" rather than choices.

I want to express some strong appreciation for the post including not just some indicators that frame control is occurring but also some indicators that frame control is NOT occurring, and also for trying to mitigate the likelihood that this concept will be misused in the future. I also appreciate that the comment section is full of people absorbing the concept and also working to set bounds on it and make it safer. I appreciate the epistemic environment that gives rise to this kind of caution.

First of all, this is an excellent and important post. I wanted to add some thoughts:

I think the core issue that is described here is a malevolent attempt for dominance via subtle manipulation. The problem with this is that this is anti-inductive, e.g., when manipulative techniques become common knowledge, clever perpetrators stop using them and switch to other methods. It's a bit similar to defender-attacker dynamics in cyber-security. Attackers find weaknesses, and these get patched, so attackers find new weaknesses. An example would be the PUA community "negs" that once became common knowledge lost all effectiveness.

In social dynamics, the problem happens when predators are more sophisticated than their prey and thus can be later in logical time [LW · GW], e.g., an intelligent predator that reads this post can understand that it's vital for him to show some fake submissive behaviors (See Benquo comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]) to avoid clueing in others of his nefarious nature. So he can avoid being "checklisted" and continue manipulating his unsuspecting victims.

But even though this entire social dynamics situation has an anti-inductive illegible nightmarish background, there is still value in listing red flags and checklists because it will make manipulation harder and more expensive for the attacker. Sociopaths hate/are unable sometimes to be submissive. Hence, they need to pay a higher cost to fake this behavior than benevolent actors, which is a good thing! But still, you always need to consider that a sophisticated enough sociopath can always fool you. The only thing you can do is increase the level of sophistication required by being more sophisticated yourself, and for practical purposes, it's usually good enough.

what are some signs that someone isn’t doing frame control? [...]

1. They give you power over them, like indications that they want your approval or unconditional support in areas you are superior to them. They signal to you that they are vulnerable to you.

There was a discussion on the Sam Harris podcast where he talks about the alarming frequency at which leaders of meditation communities end up abusing, controlling or sleeping with their students. I can't seem to find the episode name now.

But I remember being impressed with the podcast guest, a meditation teacher, who said they had seen this happening all around them and before they took over as the leader of their meditation centre had tried to put in place things to stop themselves falling into the same traps.

They had taken their family and closest friends aside and asked them for help, saying things to this effect: "If you ever see me slipping into behaviour that looks dodgy I need you to point it out to me immediately and in no uncertain terms. Even though I've experienced awakening I'm still fallible and I don't know how I'm going to handle all this power and all these beautiful young students wanting to sleep with me."

This kind of mindset is a norm I'd love to see encouraged and supported in the leaders of the rationalist community.

One fairly central reaction I had to this post is not so much about the specific phenomenon of frame control but rather about the general observation that it's quite common for the aspects of an abusive situation that are worst to experience to NOT be the same as the aspects that are most clear-cut bad and easiest to convey objectively to another person.

This seems true; I have heard multiple people with objectively horrifying stories of abuse report that actually they don't really care about the objectively awful parts that their friends are horrified about, but instead they are really fucked up by some stuff that's much harder to convey. (Probably in some cases that's the same general phenomenon described in this post and in other cases it's some other interpersonal fuckery.)

I have also heard people report that they experienced a situation as abusive and NOT have any clear-cut objectively awful behavior to point to. It makes perfect sense that this would happen in some cases - because the abuser is savvy enough about what people will object to to avoid those things, or because the abuser is actually trying to be good by following the ethical rules they know but is not managing to also be good in less legible matters, or for some other reason.

...It is also my experience that when humans make not-fully-objective reports about the beliefs/behaviors/words of other humans they disagree with and/or have some kind of adversarial relationship with, it is extremely common for such subjective accounts to be distorted in some way. For this reason, when I hear about an accusation of wrongdoing, I usually try to zero in on the objective claims being made, because (assuming I basically trust that the reporter is intending to be truthful) those are much less likely to be distorted or interpreted through a lens I think is unreasonable.

But this means that it's very hard for me to tell, as an outsider, when illegible wrongdoing has occurred. (I was going to say "illegible harm" but actually accusations of interpersonal wrongdoing are much stronger evidence of harm than of wrongdoing per se; I only need a very basic level of trust in someone's honesty to conclude they were harmed by a situation they're describing as abusive.) Indeed this feels kind of epistemically hopeless to ever evaluate from the outside?

I don't really know what to do with this thought but it felt important to note.

Great post. I agree with your analysis. I especially like the part about how it often doesn’t help to try to judge the frame controller’s intent.

FWIW, in the “Looks like I’m boring Aella” scenario, assuming I perceive the speaker to be overly aggressive in their frame control attempt, my move would be to politely disagree, except with a noticeable attitude of not buying into the frame that there’s anything wrong with me looking at my phone. I would reply with a tongue-in-cheek “No, this is all interesting stuff. Please continue.” where my voice is cheerful and encouraging but I’m still just looking at my phone.

The comments here seem less charitable have more pushback than I would have expected, especially given the post’s score. Maybe because the thing being named is kind of “high stakes” or dangerous/scary or could potentially lead to witch hunts, etc. Personally, I have experienced “frame control”-type dynamics (at unfortunately high personal cost), and there is a truth being pointed to here that I feel is important to validate. The purpose of the post, it seems to me, is to help people be more able to protect themselves and others.

“Frame control”[1], or whatever you want to call the thing this post is gesturing at, is, in my experience, extremely difficult to talk about. For each example of “X is frame control”, there is a counterexample where something that looks nearly identical happens harmlessly. And the other way around too. So any objections to specific written examples are, in my opinion, legitimate, and it’s good to be careful not to blanket-label any particular X as “definitely frame control and therefore bad”. (IMO the post was careful not to do this.)

The epistemics are super hard, because the thing being pointed to is subtle and there isn’t really a recipe for identifying it. Different people are affected by things in different ways, so one person may feel/be “frame controlled” in a certain context while someone else doesn’t/isn’t. And, being able to identify frame-control-type dynamics doesn’t by itself say anything about what can or should be done about them. (When I encounter someone who I realize affects me in this way, I tend to avoid ~completely.)

There is also something about online vs in-person interactions. Far more “frame control”-type stuff happens irl, because communication bandwidth is so high, feedback loops are so fast, and because much of the time, the level that this kind of dynamic operates on is not directly conceptual/verbal. This can make it hard to talk about at all, and especially hard to talk about online.

In my experience, I can’t determine whether someone is doing something “frame control”-y by their words alone — it’s also about their tone/cadence/prosidy/etc, what they emphasize or ignore, their body language, their presence, the social context, my history with them, the whole deal. (And, it’s not about those things by themselves, either, but rather about how I’m being affected by them, and how the person responds to signals from my end, etc.) The same words coming from different people (or from the same person at different times) can have very different, even opposite effects. So for a person interested in identifying when something like this is happening, it’s necessary to primarily pay attention to how you feel, rather than to e.g. what someone's words are, whether the person seems reasonable or well-intentioned, etc. (With regard to that, I have found this checklist to be helpful.)

----
[1] I almost want to just say “manipulation”, but maybe Aella wanted a less loaded term, and one which doesn’t come with strong connotations of intentionality and/or malevolence. As others have pointed out, focusing on intention w/r/t this stuff is usually a distraction, since even if everybody decides someone’s intentions are good, harm/manipulation/gaslighting/deception/etc can still be occurring. I’m happy to use “frame control” or other terms; throughout this comment I’ve tried to hedge w/r/t terminology.

1. They consistently reroute pressure away from them. I once sat in on a dojo where I watched one of the students point out an error the teacher had made. The teacher then responded by asking the student a question that investigated what was behind the pointing out, what was really about them that caused this? The resulting discussion then was entirely about the student, and as far as I can tell everybody else forgot about the mention of the error. 

Once while talking to my then-therapist, I made an offhand remark about how I listened to headphones a lot and was afraid they would damage my ears. She wanted to explore the psychology of that remark, I objected that it was a reasonable concern grounded in physics, and she said ~that that was irrelevant, the fact that that thing was more salient to me than other true things meant it held emotional significance for me, and she was interested in that significance. I don't remember if anything useful came of that discussion, so it probably wasn't amazing, but I think her overall model was correct and it was a reasonable thing to pursue, and that it was safe to do so in that context because she had absolutely no stake in anything except my emotional state. 

People criticize therapy for being toothless. I think there's a lot to that criticism, but also that the lack of teeth opens up the ability to do things like "investigate a question's emotional salience independent of its truth" in ways that would be dangerous if the investigator had any stake in the answer (the way the dojo leader did). Why people are bringing up a particular criticism is interesting and potentially worth the time to investigate, it's just not a replacement for ground level truthseeking.

And there's a particular trick you can pull where someone brings up a factual question, you make it about their emotions, and then treat doing so as favor for which they are in debt, all while ignoring the factual issue they actually wanted addressed. 

I think this post was valuable for starting a conversation, but isn't the canonical reference post on Frame Control I'd eventually like to see in the world. But re-reading the comments here, I am struck by the wealth of great analysis and ideas in the ensuing discussion

John Wentworth's comment about Frame Independence [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

The most robust defense against abuse is to foster independence in the corresponding domain. [...] The most robust defense against financial abuse is to foster financial independence [...] if I am in not independent in some domain, then I am necessarily dependent on someone else in that domain, dependence creates an opportunity for abuse.

Applying that idea to frame control: the most robust defense is to build my own frames, pay attention to them, notice when they don't match the frame someone else is using, etc. It's "frame independence": I independently maintain my own frames, and notice when other people set up frames which clash with them.

[...] When we can't rely on "frame independence", we want to have a variety of people around providing different frames, so that it's easy to move between them

Romeo Stevens on hungry ghost dynamics among teachers/spirtual-communities: [LW(p) · GW(p)]

People coming to a teacher often are looking for someone to fix everything wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. 

Bad teachers can encourage this dynamic. [...] They don't undermine seeker's tendency to look to them for all the answers. I've seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time.

Matt Goldenberg expresses a model about frame control and leadership:

• Frame control is probably necessary for good leadership.  A good leader is a Kegan 5 individual who can find the ontology that they can use to educate and motivate Kegan 4 and Kegan 3 underlings in an organization that will allow them to correctly respond to current conditions, and then help them to change that ontology as the conditions change.
• But frame control is also the thing that Kegan 4.5 sociopaths use to control the narrative in cults and moral mazes.  It allows them to get all of the credit, take none of the blame, and keep less powerful or sophiscated people in the dark about their games, and even happy to give them more control and power.
• A well aligned Kegan 5 leader aware of the possiblity of capture by sociopaths, and skilled in frame control, is one of the best defenses against sociopaths, moreso than any specific communication rules, although rules like e.g. transparency of communication are helpful in this regard, as is Malcolm's norm around honoring distrust.

Duncan Sabien notes:

often the frame controller is themselves stuck in the frame.  They either don't know another kind of frame could even exist, or rely on it for their own self-image or self-worth or something.

Which Kaj Sotala elaborates on:

Like there were moments when I said something, and they immediately claimed I had said something else, and I could tell their claim to be false because we were having a conversation in text form and I could see my own previous words right above their last message. But at times when our conversation was not in text form and I didn't always remember what exactly had been said, the strength of their conviction would often make me doubt myself and wonder whether I really had told them some nasty thing they were claiming that I had said. (It did not help matters that my memory is often poor so there were occasions when they did genuinely point out something that I had misremembered.)

Me, on minor vs major frame control and "abusers can also be victims" [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

Lots of relationships and minor interactions have low-key frame control going on pretty frequently. I think it's useful to be able to name that without implying that it's (necessarily) that big a deal. I find myself wanting separate words for "social moves that control the frame", "moves that control the frame in subtle ways", "move that control the frame pervasively in a way that is unsettlingly unhealthy." 

This is harder because even the most pervasive frame control appears on a spectrum. A romantic partner or family member can consistently weave a frame that is slightly unhealthy, but that doesn't hold a candle to a cult that systematically eliminates all your mental defenses.

[...] One of the most important, sad lessons I had to learn about this is that the person weaving a frame, or controlling, or abusing you, can be weak. Society taught me scripts for handling powerful, high status abusers who needed to be whistleblown.  And society taught me scripts for handling predators who were... clearly villainanous. But it turned out the people I needed to be aware of were legitimately victims in their own right.

Anna Salamon's top-voted comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] essentially is a high level review of the post. If it hadn't yet been written I'd have wanted someone to write it for the review.

I like this post fine for conversation-level discussion; it’s got some interesting examples and anecdotes and claims and hypotheses, seems worth reading and helpful-on-some-points. I don’t as much like it as a contribution to LW’s “vetted precedents that we get to cite when sorting through political cases”, because I think it doesn’t hit the fairly high and hard-to-hit standard required for such precedents to be on-net-not-too-confusing/“weaponizable”/something.

[...]  

I am uneasy about the fact that many of the post’s examples are from a current conflict that is still being worked out (the rationalist community’s attempt to figure out how to relate to Geoff Anders). IMO, we are still in the process of evaluating both: a) Whether Geoff Anders is someone the rationalist community (or various folks in it) would do better to ostracize, in various senses; and b) Whether there really is a thing called “frame control”, what exactly it is, whether it’s bad, whether it should be “burned with fire,” etc.

I would much rather we try to prosecute conversation (a) and conversation (b) separately, rather than taking unvetted claims about what a new bad thing is and how to spot it, and relatively unvetted claims about Geoff, and using them to reinforce each other.

[...]

Hammering a bit more here, we get to my third source of unease: there are plenty of ways I can excerpt-and-paraphrase-uncharitably from the OP, that seem like kinds of things that ought not to be very compelling, and that I’d kind of expect would cause harm if a community found them compelling anyhow.

[...]
I like that you’re writing about something early-stage! Particularly given that it seems interesting and important. But I will wish you would do it in a way that telegraphs the early-stage-ness and lends momentum toward having readers join you as fellow scientists/philosophers/naturalists who are squinting at the phenomena together.

I'm not done with the post yet, but this part really jumped out at me.

Second point is a doozy, and it’s that you can’t look at intent when diagnosing frame control. As in, “what do they mean to do” should be held separate from “what are the effects of what they’re doing” - which I know is counter to almost every good lesson about engaging with people charitably. 

I think you're right in a narrow way but mostly wrong here. The narrow way in which you seem right is that (someone's intent) and (someone's impact) are indeed separate quantities. But someone having good intent—or someone seeming to have good intent, if one can generally discern this with above-random accuracy—means that their actions are more likely optimized to have good effects, and so these two quantities are generally correlated. 

In this section, your language conflates two possible scenarios (by my reading). In the first, we condition on "leader X seems to have good intent." In the second, we condition on "me and my friends are talking about how leader X is deeply flawed and perceptive, and the things he did that hurt people were either for their own good, or an unintentional byproduct of him genuinely trying to do good." The second scenario is very different. 

In the first scenario, we surely have P(bad frame-controller | leader X seems to have good intent) < P(bad frame controller | leader X does not seem to have good intent). 

In the second scenario, P(bad frame-controller | leader X is flawed but seems well-meaning, [other red flags]) should still be less than P(bad frame-controller | leader X is flawed but does not seem well-meaning, [other red flags]), but I think that the probability of something bad going on should be high either way. 

And so as far as I can tell, intent does matter for the beliefs you arrive at, and I am very very wary that this post claims otherwise in. "Frame control" has the potential to be an argumentative superweapon.

This all might sound pretty dark, like I’m painting a reality where you might go around squinting at empathetic, open, caring people who have zero ill intent whatsoever and trying to figure out how they are ‘actually bad.’ And this is kind of true, but if only because “I am an empathetic, open, caring person with zero ill intent” is exactly the kind of defense actual frame-controllers inhabit. 

Surely we have P(awful frame control | They seem like an empathetic, open, caring person with zero ill intent) << P(awful frame control | They do not seem like an empathetic, open, caring person with zero ill intent)?

The vast majority of good people with good intent aren’t doing any significant kind of frame control; my point is just that “good person with good intent” should not be considered a sufficient defense if there seems to be other elements of frame control present.

But then you back off the original claim that you can't look at intent, and merely say that good intent is not sufficient to conclude that they aren't doing this horrible frame control. OK. I agree. But this feels like a motte and bailey. 

Rereading the portion in question to make sure I'm not missing something, you write:

And so, when evaluating frame control, you have to throw out intent. The question is not “does this person mean to control my frame,” the question is “is this person controlling my frame?”. This is especially true for diagnosing frame control that you’re inside of, because the first defense a frame controller uses is the empathy you hold for them.

I think "be on the lookout for ways people can weaponize your empathy" seems wiser to me than "throw out intent."

Why is frame control central to this post? While it explains frame control well, the focus seems to be about people consciously/unconsciously harmfully manipulating one another. How to avoid being manipulated, gaslighted, deceived, etc is an important topic to discuss and a valuable skill to have. And this post offers good advice on it (whether or not it intended to). But it could’ve done so without bringing up the concept of frame control.

Someone shared this link with me re: group conversations about interactions with the Monastic Academy. So much resonance with the examples of frame control you share re: lack of reciprocation and vulnerability, refusal to collaborate with other perspectives, reframing or dismissing harm, controlling parameters of engagement in a way that creates unequal power dynamics, so on and so forth. Your example of making claims that exclude 98% or people (re: save the world narratives) but highly effective on the other 2% is especially relevant!

Some examples of frame control I've seen recently are: Have been attempting to engage the Monastic Academy in a mediation process since since last May re: abusive, unsafe, nonconsensual risks, and unethical treatment by the organization. So far they've indicated some willingness to engage in conversation after many attempts of reaching out were ignored and after I told them I'd be going public with my experience (at some point soon.) They then provided a list of affiliated persons whom they are personally and professionally connected to with no mediation background for said process. Have also tried to engage me in unmediated conversations despite explicit instructions from a legitimate 3rd party mediator (whom I insisted on using per the recommendation of another former member and with whom I had no prior contact before this issue) that outline mediations steps including no direct contact between parties, have expressed resistance to other coorganizers about my boundaries and desire mediation, and it remains to be seen if they will in fact choose to engage or not. I hope so as this would actually be the first real commitment and step in the direction of actually addressing harm and attempting to learn and do better! Another thing that is currently happened is that Soryu has actively ignored requests for conversation from multiple women who've been hurt by sexist and unethical organizational practices but recently reached out to a coorganizer who identifies as a white cis male expressing care and a desire to talk about his concerns whom he seem to regards as the "leader". All in all these behaviors and other current responses towards many attempts to engage the org in legitimate paths towards accountability, growth, and restoration/amends making only seem to point towards it being a "cult" or at the very least a deeply dysfunctional and unethical organization. Sadly, as I'd much rather see groups be open to growth, transformation, transparency and making amends for past harms. Only time will tell.

Then again perhaps I'm frame controlling right now and by saying I don't trust them and I will only engage with them directly via the support and presence of a nuetral third party mediator with many decades of experience dealing with misconduct and repair work in spiritual communities. There are certainly times and places where it seems helpful to attempt to bring one into one's frame such as when an organizations behavior repeatedly leaves former members traumatized and with cPTSD. In that case sharing ones frame might be critical to interrupting patterns of harm - but also may not be received at all in situations where frame control is part of the abuse. But then again someone can also just repeatedly ignore your frame of reality too. (I.e gaslighting, denial)

Why am I saying also this here - partly because I am affirming that yes frame control is used as an abuse tactic and I think you've done a good job of breaking down examples (including the fact that we all engage in some level of frame control) I think it's helpful and I hope won't be missused. Secondarily I want to continue to let folks in this community know that their are legitimate risks and reports of abuse happening within the Monastic Academy which displays many of the same characteristics as Leverage ( just so you know some of us are reading your posts and others about those dynamics and feeling a lot of resonance) The MA is actively recruiting in the rationalist community and that very much utilizes frame control - and doesn't not according to my frame warrant anyone's trust. I think they honestly believe what they are saying which makes the deception all the more tricky. I hope sharing my own experiences will serve both as a PSA and as encouragement to others out there who are attempting to break out their own experiences of frame control.

A few days ago I had a Zoom call with an insurance agent, they probably take lessons how to do this.

First, his secretary called me, "hey, you have an account at this financial institution we cooperate with, do you also have a life insurance?" Not interested, but she keeps pushing, and at some moment I am like: yeah, given that they are willing to talk online so I don't have to walk anywhere, it will not take that much time, I guess maybe they will tell me something I don't know and make me change my mind. Okay, feel free to call me.

Then the guy calls me, and starts with (I don't remember the exact words) something like: "So, what do you need me to help you with?"

Frame control: It's not him begging for my attention; suddenly it's me needing his help. The audacity!

Then some more things, but that was the usual manipulative stuff that typically happens when you talk to an insurance agent. But this one thing stuck in my mind as a completely outrageous reversal of reality. (I didn't comment on it, but I gave him a bad point in my mind, and a few more bad points later, I ended the call. It was probably all completely predictable and I am stupid for wasting my time like this.)

I wonder if "negligence spectrum" would be a good way to think about frame control.

Here is what I mean by negligence spectrum:

• On one end of the spectrum is doing something (harmful) intentionally. For example, you're walking down the street, see someone you don't like, and intentionally bump into them, causing their coffee to spill.
• On the other end is a genuine mistake. For example, you're walking down the street, and for whatever reason you bump into someone accidentally, causing them to spill their coffee.
• Then in the middle, there is negligence. For example, you're walking down the street with your headphones on, staring into space, and losing focus.
• There are of course varying degrees of negligence. For example, you're walking down the middle of the street, er, sidewalk actually, with your headphones on, your head down staring at your phone watching a video, and you bump into someone. That would be more negligent than the bullet point above. And it would be even more negligent if you did the same thing on an electric scooter.

It seems to me like examples of (harmful) frame control would fit pretty nicely on this negligence spectrum, and that the more negligent it is, the more we should consider it bad and impose social punishments.

A different thing that is relevant is judging how impactful the frame controlling is. Ie. even if someone has nothing but good intent and isn't even being negligent, if they are having a harmful impact on someone by controlling that person's frame, that is also worth bringing up. "Hey, you probably don't realize it but you are doing this thing that is having these negative consequences."

I guess I'd recommend viewing the situation through multiple frames. For example:

- How does the situation appear from a maximally generous point of view?
- How does the situation appear from a maximally suspicious point of view?
- After consideration, what is the best overall point of view? Is it one or the other or a combination of both?

Perhaps this is already what you meant, but even if it is, I think there are benefits to being explicit

Maybe "DARVO" is one side of frame control behavior? 

[I feel like the following question might be triggering, not sure. It references your childhood. The triggering I expect is maybe something like, the question conflates / juxtaposes two things that are similar, but importantly very different, such that if the distinction weren't kept solidly in mind, there'd be strong psychic forces pointing in opposite directions? Idk.]

Anyway: I notice that you say:

But a key aspect of frame control is reframing harm as good

And also, from https://knowingless.com/2018/09/21/trauma-narrative/ :

And then I realized that that’s what my father had done to me – he’d given me the ability to experience life with such ongoing lightness, and what he’d done had been worth it. All I’d been through had been worth it. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change my life at all. This pain was mine, now, chosen by me, held by me deliberately, and nothing about it was wrong.

Prima facie these seem in tension. What are the differences between harm reframed as good, vs. harm... "reclaimed as good"? A reaction I had reading your "reclaiming" was like, there's something off, it mostly seems desirable, but also there's some loss of integrity / preciseness or something, or like, the pain wasn't fully interpreted / honored, or the pain probably had some further telos, or the pain was subtly ignored, and that ignoring has something deep in common with someone being frame controlled into trying to ignore harm or think it's good.

ETA: maybe the thing supposedly being elided, is the concept of justice.

I don't want to use the word "steelman" since Aella might not agree that this is a better version of her post.

But here's a post that I would have strongly agreed with, if Aella had written it.

----

When presented with criticism, we can think of a range of possible responses.

At one end of the range is acceptance: "Oh wow, the fact that you think I'm doing bad things is strong evidence that I'm actually doing bad things, so I'll think hard about this and try to change."

At the other end is denial: "No, I'm not doing bad things and you're wrong to suggest that I am.  You should think about what mental errors you are making that is causing you to think that I am wrong."

Most reasonable people will respond differently to criticism depending on the evidence.  Some people are especially receptive to criticism, and will tend toward the "acceptance" end of the range if the criticism is delivered with confidence, even if the evidence provided is weak.

But some people have discovered that they can win any argument by responding to all criticism with confident denial.  We can call these people "frame controllers".

It's difficult to communicate negative feedback to frame controllers, because they'll just reflexively deny it.  People who are very receptive to criticism may find it unpleasant to communicate with frame controllers at all, because frame controllers spend a lot of time saying "no, it is you who are wrong and bad" which leads to a lot of stressful self-examination.  If a person is very receptive to criticism, it may take some time for them to realize that the problem is actually the frame controller, and not some sort of pervasive pattern of wrongness in their own mind.

(Aella is an example of a person who is very receptive to criticism, and therefore she has to take extraordinary measures to avoid interacting with frame controllers.)

We should recognize the reflexive "no, it is you who are wrong and bad" message as an epistemic antipattern, and we should be vigilant against it.  If we notice someone persistently sending this message with high confidence and no evidence, we should document this antipattern publicly.

In the meantime, everyone should try to be vigilant about which criticisms they accept.  Strong criticisms should require strong evidence and not just strong confidence.

And to be clear, a lot of this is true. Frame control breaks your reality down to fit another one, and while I view this as poisonous, the act of breaking down your frame can have huge benefits - similarly to how forcing a child to sit through school might break their creativity but give them the ability to reliably perform boring tasks. 

I don't think similar is the right word here. In the normal school setting a good teacher has frame control within his classroom. 

A key difference between your dad as you describe it is that the standard school teacher has a certain scope within which he has the societal authority to control the frame. On the other hand there no clear limit to the scope of what your dad can control about you. 

In disfunctional cult contexts the power to control the frame is also not scoped but everything has to happen under the frame of the cult and there's limited contact with people outside of the cult. When it comes to cults, it can be a mistake to give too much weight to the leader. Osho didn't commit the biggest bioterror attack on the US at the time, his right hand did. 

Given that Leverage seemed to got dissolved after different internal groups were in conflict and had different narratives, it seems to me like Geoff himself did not have enough frame control over it to get everyone to the same narrative so had to dissolve the group because it was his only way to end the internal conflicts. Reducing those complex group dynamics to problems with one person is not helpful.

Frame control is an effect; very often, people who frame control will not be aware that this is what they’re doing, and have extensive reasoning to rationalize their behavior that they themselves believe. If you are close to a frame controller and squinting at them to figure out “are they hiding intent to control me,” you often will find the answer is “no.” 

I wonder if you can infer de facto intent from the consequences, ie, not the intents-that-they-think-they-had, but more the intents they actually had.

In particular, a lot of motivated cognition often makes people not "believe" that the beliefs they explicit hold just-so-conveniently lead to giving them greater power and status, etc. But usually the degree of this reality warping isn't absolute.

I'd be interested in dispassionately examining potential frame controller's actions and noting whether their actions and justifications just so conveniently happen to always lead to them getting large personal gains at little personal cost, while incurring large costs (especially autonomy) of others.

I found this very informative, but I think I can contribute to this discussion from the opposite direction. The problem of having too little frame control is also something that exists. Both extremes are bad.

On one end you are pushing your frame on a person, without trying to account for their current value system. In fact if you do it gently, slowly and find a pathway they would want to talk then it becomes moral. If I know the right buttons to push, the right arguments, the evidence, the life experience that could get a friend to adopt the values, beliefs that I hold. I can "guide" him to the state I want him to inhabit. A lot of this can be legitimate communication. 

You clearly marked out the boundaries where it becomes immoral, hurtful, and wrong. But imagine a person who respects other people's frames to the extent that he takes up the frame of the person he talks to, he finds it easy to relate to the person. For example, even if he was an atheist, when talking to a religious person he will assume god exists and proceed with such assumptions.

People like that can be seen as too flexible, not having any character, it can affect how attractive they are. They tend to not climb social hierarchies, accumulate power and influence. People like that can have trouble recommending software, movies, lifestyles because while they love some aspect of these behaviors they wonder if it is their place to decide for them. They are careful to provide the facts and let the other person come to their decision regarding what decision to take.

I think when discussing frame control it is useful to also look at the consequences of a community where it has a lot of stigma associated with it.  Since you clearly hate people who abuse it, you are sensitive to people who misuse it and might be blind to the other extreme.

I think people in carceral environments get pretty good at doing this. "Games Prisoners Play" is a good, but not exhaustive book that I think shows this off.

This seems somewhat related to the concept of Karpman's Drama Triangle: https://www.bpdfamily.com/content/karpman-drama-triangle. It describes three negative ways of relating to people: the persecutor, the rescuer, and the victim. This roles are named after how people perceive themselves and how they perceive others in their relationship. These are roles you can take on or that you can be cast into.

The persecutor is obviously an unhealthy relationship style and the one most immediately associated with what you have written here. They are the classic bully -- "I'm right, you're wrong". One of the other comments mentioned an "assertive" style, which I think maps to this role.

The rescuer isn't named because they rescue the other person, but rather, they are trying to be the other person's savior. They are the source of truth or good or joy or whatever in the other person's life. The natural and unhealthy implication of someone being the rescuer is that they are better than the other person, which means the other person must be worse. These are the people who are trying to "fix" you, or doing things "for your own good". One of the other comments mentioned a "receptive" style, which I think maps to this role.

Finally, the victim isn't necessarily being harmed by the other person so much as they see themselves as a victim. This is the hardest to understand in the context of your post, but I think it's still applicable. When someone is "frame controlling" in the context of the victim, they're saying "I'm blameless". A victim needs a perpetrator, so if they're blameless, you must be to blame. The persecutor makes everything your fault because of your faults (the focus is on the other person to avoid thinking about themselves), the victim makes everything your fault because they can't accept responsibility (the focus is on themselves).

Karpman's Drama Triangle seems like it has some amount of overlap with what you're trying to describe here -- unhealthy ways of relating to other people. Maybe it's helpful to consider "Frame Control" in this context? You talk about general behaviors, and maybe by tying it into personalities / roles it would help understand the different forms it can take.

There is also healthy versions of these roles.
* Persecutor -> Challenger, Assertive
* Victim -> Survivor, Vulnerable
* Rescuer -> Coach, Caring

Also important is that everyone exists in each of these roles at different times in different relationships, but people tend to have one role that they naturally fall into. For me, it's Rescuer / Coach (hopefully more of the latter). From what you describe, Aella, it sounds like for you it's Victim (and hopefully Survivor for your healthy relationships!).

Does this seem to be in line with what you are describing?

Important topic. Needs some editing. At the very least, do not name Geoff, and possibly no one specific (unless the book editors want to expose themselves to a possible lawsuit). Also, links to Twitter and Facebook posts will not work on paper.

Perhaps there is a solution for both: quote the relevant parts of the Twitter and Facebook posts in the article, with names removed.

The problem, i.m.o. is that there is nothing innately wrong with attempting to influence someone else's frame. The problem is when people try to coercively undermine others.

Imagine you have a friend with a toxic framing, is it frame control to try and influence them to change their frame to be grounded? Implicitly? Explicitly?

Reading this it comes across to me as though you realize that this is a problem in the post, and are trying to defend it with a "you know it when you see it" arguement.

At risk of sounding absurd, this seems analogous to saying a) talking is bad, because people can use it to say nasty things. b) well it is not always bad, but it kind of might be, and then c) if someone is a bad talker we can burn them with fire.

The concept seems hugely at risk of being used as a way to just invalidate people you disagree with. To give an example if you are devout Christian maybe an Atheist trying to pursuade you that God does not exist is in your eyes exhibiting coercive frame control, and visa versa. Ironically, the concept of frame control as articulated seems well suited to be used for frame controlling! E.g. "that person trying to teach you science, they're just here to frame control you!"

Ultimately, is do not think I understand what this post aims to achieve. What does this add separate to stating: 1) bad faith agents exist, and are hard to identify.

2. to guard against them i) ensure that you centre yourself, and ii) pay carefully attention to what you feel, why you feel it, your current frame, and the pressures on that frame. Along with iii) do not let yourself be isolated from those around you who ground you.

The text provides examples of how very small messages contain whole lot of subtext.
This is true but  these are very hard to decipher for me. And I have a suspicion that others with high social intelligence are not very good either. 

I generally abstain from finding the Straussian meaning of everything a person says. 
There is a lot underneath a person's message with many unknown unknowns.
Instead, it is much better to have strict guidelines for yourself when communicating (although they are enforceable over text. It all goes by the wayside during conversation). It might be costly to me in many situations but they provide sanity by removing ambivalence.

Alexey's blog on follow up (https://guzey.com/follow-up/) states, it is acceptable to remind someone 2 times and occasionally 3 of your message.
I have adopted this to ask girls out. If she mentions she is busy, you could ask her out again. but not the 3rd time, except in rare situations. 
This has also protected from the guilt of nagging someone.

We should be able to create such rules for many types of social interactions that are not context dependent. 

Whenever there is a negative personality trait mentioned (various ways people hurt others psychologically unintentionally), I start thinking if I am one of the perpetrators. Psychological Hypochondria if you will. 
It is very difficult to diagnose oneself of vague sensibilities and behaviors. And hence, much more difficult to correct.

I'm not seeing any difference between pressure and aggression these days.

(1) Thanks for writing this, it seems very important.

(2) This:

Ultimately, checking in with how you actually feel is the answer. I don’t mean to imply this is easy; it’s often really hard to know how you feel, and maybe it changes often and frame controllers put in a lot of effort to obfuscate this. But in the end, careful attention to your own sensations are your saving grace.

I think there's something basically irreplaceable about checking in with how you actually feel; e.g. it's thankfully harder for frame control to hack, ISTM, though checking in is also hard to do (e.g. because you "actually feel" like the leader is truly important and that you'd follow them anywhere even if it "superficially not actually" hurts a lot).

I want though to raise a flag for it not being a sufficient answer, and for more theorizing about how frame control and related things work, and how to navigate around them, and such. Like, it feels like there's a specific missing technology here.

years ago I was at a large group dinner with acquaintances and a woman I didn’t like. She was talking about something I wasn’t interested in, mostly to a few other people at the table, and I drifted to looking at my phone. The woman then said loudly, “Oh, looks like I’m boring Aella”. This put me into a position

From that description I sympathize with the woman more.

I've thought about this post a lot, and I think one thing I might add to its theoretical framework is a guess as to why this particular pattern of abuse shows up repeatedly. The post mentions that you can't look at intent when diagnosing frame control, but that's mostly in terms of intentions the frame controller is willing to admit to themself; there's still gonna be some confluence of psychological factors that makes frame control an attractor in personality-space, even if frame controllers themselves (naturally) have a hard time introspecting about it. My best guess is that some of the core tactics of frame control, for example taking advantage of people's heuristics about what's valuable in social behavior to sneak harmful behavior under the rug, is a strategy for elevating the frame controller's self-esteem, which they 1) stumble into by random chance or imitation of other frame controllers or whathaveyou, 2) find rewarding enough to compell them to keep doing it, and 3) never get called out on it because people are generally scared of questioning the virtues the frame controller is relying on to elevate their social standing. (This is also one reason it'd be hard for frame controllers to introspect about them getting into the habit of using the strategy to start with, in addition to the fact that their reliance on this strategy becomes a pillar of their self-esteem.) A concrete example of a virtue-heuristic a frame controller might take advantage of is the idea that people should be honest; I once dealt with a frame controller who subtly made people feel bad all the time for not highlighting all the tiny ways they were constantly signaling to each other in conversations, and got away with it because the idea that being honest is good is taken as a sacred virtue (because in many/most contexts it produces value!), even though subtle signaling in particular stuff is so utterly pervasive and foundational to how humans relate to each other socially that to aspire to never slip it under the rug is not only impossible but very stressful and humiliating. Other behaviors we treat as like, sacredly virtuous can be used as smoke-screans for attempts to gain status by pointing out behavior that's actually reasonable but has a faint unvirtuous aspect too, honesty isn't the only sacred virtue here; the important thing is just that it's the type of thing people feel uncomfortable with claiming to be bad, actually, thereby keeping both frame controllers and their victims from analyzing what's going on, and keeping the frame controller in a positive feedback loop wrt their abusive behavior.

Its extremely hard to effectively argue against your post by its very definition, because doing so would invariably force the commenter to either accept your frame, or fight back with their own attempt at frame control, and doing either simply proves your point. For all its worth, it is a brilliant piece of memetics.


So I will reduce my response to two points:

I notice I cannot think of a way to resist the Frame Control attempts you listed (1-16) without either forcing the other person into your frame, and thus performing rather robust Frame Control in return, or running for the hills. And since most people cannot survive as monadic hermits, and have to interact with others, this feels like we inevitably end up Frame Controlling one another. I cannot recall knowing any people who did not do any Frame Control, overt or hidden. In fact, just about ever person I know, no matter how empathic or rationalist, FCs most of the the time, and only desists if the wrestling for Frame becomes obviously inconclusive. The difference is not in how much they try to Control, but rather how precise their Frame is.

I notice I cannot think of a way your points on Non-Controlling (1-5) could  be effectively used in a realistic context, other than extremely rare particular examples in 1on1 interactions with a SO or your child. If we did this, and only this, I cannot think of a way how we could prepare a child to exist in the Society and physical Reality (both of which have rigid and controlled frames that the child cannot resist without deadly consequences). I also do not see a way to have a romantic relationship with no Frame Control, unless it is a very, very loose definition of an open relationship in which people just accidentally align in their needs from time to time.


DISCLAIMER: Im also a person likely prone to Frame Control (masculine identity , ADHD, extrovert, emotionally robust), and come from a culture in which strong Frame Control is considered valuable/high status. This might, or might not be biasing my views.

They don’t laugh nervously, don’t give tiny signals that they are malleable and interested in conforming to your opinion or worldview.

This sounds not-quite-right as pointed out by others, but I feel like I kind of recognize it. It's natural for people to adapt to others or be influenced by others, like shifting their accents, adjusting to others' preferred communication styles, or taking an interest in something because your friend is enthusiastic about it. It can be odd to meet people who don't do that. And if someone you interact with regularly shows zero inclination to being influenced/affected by you (for example when you speak they just pretend to acknowledge it and then proceed to ignore everything you said, brushing off your concerns without trying to explain it to you instead of e.g. trying to understand what you're saying or modifying their explanations based on your questions) or it happens only when they feel like it, then it can feel like you're not really a person, just an object or plaything in their world? It's not necessarily malicious though.

My current takeaway from this is to recognize that adjusting/adapting to others is a thing that people may or may not do, so we can notice when someone isn't reciprocating and decide on a response, rather than thinking the problem lies with us and continuing to make things worse.

A more general version would be that it is a choice to follow "social rules" like being polite, listening to your coach, or reciprocating when someone helps you. If the other party isn't acting in good faith (e.g. rude salesman, abusive coach, con man), then you can choose not to follow the rules (and deal with the consequences, whatever they may be).

Thank you for sharing. Definitely a real but hard-to-pin down thing.

Your story about communal bonding vs handling emergencies was clearest for me as a recent dealt with a relatives' significant other who was doing this constantly. I labelled it "passive aggressive" in my head. That may a prime sub-aspect of some of this frame label. 

If I were defining it, passive aggression is when someone acts against their subject in ways subtle enough that it makes the punishment clear to the subject, but also is not overt enough to allow the subject to respond overtly.

I think it's toxic, and always try to bring passive aggression into surface, actual, adult discussions, instead... which pretty quickly either resolves the problem or weeds out passive aggressive people.


There are also interesting questions with *moderate* amounts of frame control though. I think most people want people close to them to be... relatively similar to them. That's a natural desire. When one is choosing who to associate with, this isn't a huge problem because if someone has super dissimilar values, you just don't associate with them. 
But if one is *stuck* with someone... e.g., marriage, children, family in general, or even relationships where years have already been invested ... I think one can understand the motivation for trying to shift a person's thinking to become more similar (even if that's not good.)


By the way, frame control is also a "pickup artist" term -- where the idea is to not give in to the girl's frame at all (e.g., in particular, promiscuous sex is shameful) and be so confident in one's own frame (e.g., promiscuous sex is fun!) that the person buys into the new frame.

This piece caught my eye since it is still being discussed a bit - I also don't think anything is too old to talk about. 

I think it is largely incorrect - and I don't typically say that things are incorrect, if they seem like good-faith efforts. This doesn't seem like a good-faith effort. I'll explain why I can tell it's not, and also, why we can still know it's wrong anyway, without judging the intent of the author. 

For one thing, I think when people name names, and use them as negative examples, then these are put-downs, which are in general, not true. 

Throughout the post, Aella uses Frame Control in the context of abusers and manipulative people, which is also all in the negative, even when it's not naming names. However, "Frame Control" itself is not defined in the negative, and is explicitly described in the neutral sense. This is why I think the basis of the post is incorrect. I often see cases like this used intentionally to be able to use it as a pretext for labeling of other (non-malign) behavior as evidence of treachery or simply to make people anxious - this entire post reads a lot like things you'll see in other media about things like "mansplaining" or "sea-lioning" or other similar things. 

You can't actually construct a useful framework built around something you define in the negative, which this is. 

"Frames" are defined as the context of the conversation and all of its assumptions, which is said could be good, but is often used by someone else to manipulate you in deceptive ways. This could only be as pernicious as it is argued it is if it were actually inherently easy to fool people, which it is not. Furthermore, it has its own assumptions which I believe we can dismiss as untrue. (This is really merely the idea that false information can somehow flow into the conversation unnoticed, be believed in, and cause large changes to the belief-structure of the conversants before they have time to notice and-or update). I don't find that idea particularly compelling, and that gives me confidence that I don't think anyone really needs to worry about Frame Control. 

Here is also a quote that I find fairly easy to dismiss off-hand: 

A related strategy is pushing the painful update button. I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you learned and grew, and it was really painful to do so. You had to face some hard truths, let go of how you saw yourself, and maybe even do a bit of surrendering your ego. This is legitimately good!

No, actually. I never have. I've never had a painful update. This is one of those things that I have never believed in - the so-called "hard truths" - and find kind of absurd, frankly. This is also one of those things that if you say to me, "You're lying! You definitely have had a painful update!" I can laugh at that, and say "Actually I would know better than you about my own life, and also I think you're lying." This is why I think that this post was not written in good-faith. I don't think that someone could honestly say the above.

Your whole career seems to be repeatedly exploiting morally-grey areas to become famous/wealthy/powerful and occasionally playing the victim card. It's shady. You seen to launder a ton of your personal grievances through well-written blog posts that to a large degree people listen to because you are a smart rationalist porn star with an aspirational narrative who can talk her way out of any overton window.

It's a good post but you also have an agenda with the leverage/paradigm thing and you aren't being clear about it. Most people here are only going to notice the object level. It's just really bad to tie your personal narrative/brand into an ongoing issue and present it as a really compelling object-level framework. It's distorting and just pretty frustrating. You're quite significantly altering the narrative, it's not really clear that you should be, and half of this stuff should be dealt with in a court house anyway.