On manipulating others

Those sort of explanations are never true.

Something like them is true of me in this case. Obviously I don't think my case is normal. If I didn't have lots of experiences of successfully manipulating people (mostly in high school, when I didn't care deeply about ethics) then it would indeed be silly for "I'm just handicapping" to show up on my radar as a hypothesis. Still though Jonii's hypothesis has enough merit that it at least describes some people (e.g. myself), and I don't get the impression he was suggesting it as the default explanation, so the strong reaction to the post seems misplaced. Might I suggest that you seem to be treating this issue as a pet cause, and are thus getting overly emotional about it, at least rhetorically? Your message is more or less correct but you sound like a moral crusader.

Never use "I'm too good at something to win" or "I only lose because other people are so bad". Those sort of explanations are never true. Not ever.

Related

That's a nice heuristic, but unfortunately, it's easy to come up with cases where this heuristic is wrong. Say, people want to play a game, I'll use chess for availability, not because it best exemplifies this problem. If you want to have a fun game of chess, ideally you'd hope you did have roughly equal matches. If 9 out of 10 players are pretty weak, just learning the rules, and want to play and have fun with it, you, the 10th player, a strong club player, being an outlier, cannot partake because you are too good(with chess, you could maybe try giving your queen to handicap yourself, or take time handicap, to make games more interesting, but generally I feel that sorta of tricks still make it less for fun for all parties)

While there might be obvious reasons to suspect bias being at play, unless you want to ban ever discussing topics that might involve bias, the best way around it, that I know of, is to actually focus on the topic. Just stating "woah, you probably are biased if you think thoughts like this" is something I did take into consideration. I was still curious to hear LW thoughts on this topic. The actual topic, not on whether LW thinks it's a bias-inducing topic or not. If you want me to add some disclaimer for other people, I'm open to suggestions. I was going to include one myself, that was basically saying "Failing socially in a way described here would at best be very very weak evidence of you being socially gifted, intelligent, or whatever. Reasoning presented here is not peer-reviewed, and might as well contain errors". I did not, because I didn't want to add yet another shiny distraction from the actual point presented. I didn't think it would be needed, either.

This actually was one of the things inspiring me to write this post. I was wondering if I could make use of LW community to run such tests, because it would be interesting to get to practice these skills with consent, but trying to devise such tests stumped me. It's actually pretty difficult to come up with a goal that's actually difficult to achieve in any not-overtly-hostile social context. Laborious, maybe, but that's not the same thing. I just kinda generalized from this, that it should actually be pretty easy to run with any consciously named goal and achieve it, but there must be some social inhibition.

The set of things that inspired me was wide and varying. It just may be reflected in how the essay was... Not as coherent as I'd have hoped.

How about this:

Evolution programmed us to avoid doing things that others perceive as unfairly manipulating. -- Because then the other people get angry and punish the unfair manipulator.

Intelligent people are more aware of their own motives. This makes them more likely to label their hypothetical actions as "manipulation", because they better see how the action contributes to getting what they want. -- A less reflective person would just do the action contributing to getting what they want, on impulse, and then deny any connection.

a) Intelligent people suffer from the illusion of transparency, just like everyone else. They are likely to believe that if they see the "manipulative" aspects of their hypothetical behaviour, other people would see it to. So they abstain from the behavior, to avoid making others angry. -- But in reality they are miscalibrated; most people would not notice anything unusual.

b) People are adaptation executers, not utility maximizers. Hesitating to manipulate other people unfairly is an adaptation we have, and for the average person, the advantage is beneficial; it allows them to keep good social relationship. For an introspective person, this adaptation may become harmful, because it forbids too wide range of human interaction. -- But the intelligent people follow this adaptation even when it decreases their utility, because people are not utility maximizers.

To me, this explanation seems credible.

Then, of course, I tell myself that rationalists should win, so if my sense of detecting manipulation is miscalibrated, I should calibrate it better, and stop using the "manipulation" label with all its bad connotations too widely.

But many people don't do this. Because people are not automatically strategic.

(Meta: I use a lot of LW keywords in this comment, to make you - the reader of this comment, and a member of LW community - more likely to agree with me. At the same time, I also do sincerely believe everything I wrote here. At this moment, am I manipulating you or not? Should I modify the comment to remove all the applause lights, and make you less likely to agree, probably even less likely to understand precisely what I mean, just to get rid of the feeling of guilt for manipulating you? My decision is no, but there was a time when I would have decided otherwise.)

The entire "selfish gene" concept is that it is the genes that must be selected and therefore the genes that are selfish. If a gene for altruism results in 10X as many humans carrying that gene as humans not carrying that gene, because those humans work better together towards large scale mutual benefit goals, than that gene wins and humans find themselves willing to give up their lives before they have children.

When has evolution ever caused individuals to pass up personal advantages?

When doing so advantages your siblings/parents/children more than twice as much as it disadvantages you (or your grandparents/grandchildrens/aunts/nephews/etc. more than four times as much, etc.)?

This I agree with completely. However, it sounding like power fantasy doesn't mean it's wrong or mistaken.

even by accident

BTW, does anyone know a reliable way to avoid manipulating people by accident? I generally use stuff to the effect ‘Are you sure? I don't want you to feel obligated’, but I'm worried that in certain cases that may backfire.

Most people with natural skill in manipulation would use it.

Same with being smart, as it is another way to manipulate people. Being smarter, you can often win an argument and get your way even when you're wrong because you're just better at arguing the point.

But upon realizing the asymmetry of power, some people actually do make it a point to refrain from pressing their advantage. Moral preferences such as fairness and autonomy come into play,

Benefits compared to what? The main issue in any (personal, business or whatever) relationship is presumably opportunity cost. Convincing someone to make you their agent (and take 95% of their income from a groundbreaking novel they've written) benefits both of you financially compared to it not being sold. But it benefits them less than selling it through someone more fair-minded.

Also, manipulation does not just exist in providing incentives: it can involve misleading people on facts/reasoning, or psychologically tricking them into acting against their own interests.

Go one step farther. Do that compulsion to agree and be mellow with people you don't agree with mean you're a dishonest jerk who's trying to manipulate them, or does it mean you're not feeling comfortable with disagreeing with them (for instance because you feel like they'd reject you if you did, which might be painful, or because you do not want to hurt their feelings, or because you feel like you don't have the social status to do that). Don't necessarily assume you're evil.

For instance I know I hate lying mostly because I am feeling insecure enough to think I wouldn't get away with it. This stems from a difficulty to put myself in other's shoes. If I know how and what I lied about, then surely I can imagine many ways in which they'll eventually uncover my lie.

Another reason why I may come to dislike social relationships is because I harbor few illusions about human motivation and drives. Most interactions with people can be interpreted as manipulation to get your way, if you try hard enough to see it that way. My issue with that is, however, that I don't want to have such a relationship with others. I naively crave a natural, hassle-free relationship where I'm being liked and like others unconditionally. So whenever I think in terms of what strings I need to pull to move others, I feel bad about it because I don't want to have a relationship with puppets, I want to have a relationship with real people. Yet, I can't exactly believe relationships are magical in that way - nothing is for free or unconditional, and there are definite winning and losing moves in social relationships. So I'm torn between what I want (not over analyzing stuff and just getting along with people) and what I believe (that if I don't do that, then I may fail at being adequately social).

Having spoken with you in person (unaware that this was a consciously chosen practice) my experience was mostly that it was cognitively burdensome and that I was mostly worried for you. I suspect this isn't what you're shooting for! (I also classified it alongside my "Will is a troubled genius" model, which may or may not be what you're going for.)

My personal experience is that I tend towards terrible self-destructiveness when I don't get enough human warmth, so this strategy would not be a good debiaser for me. But if you can make it work... actually, this seems like a good thing to get external feedback on whether you make it work. Have you?

Oh, yes, that is basically my understanding: We do social manipulation to the extent it is deemed "fair", that is, to the point it doesn't result in retaliation. But at some point it starts to result in such retaliation, and we have this "fairness"-sensor that tells us when to retaliate or watch out for retaliation.

I don't particularly care about manipulation that results in obtaining salt shaker or a tennis partner. What I'm interested in is manipulation you can use to form alliances, make someone liable to help you with stuff you want, make them like you, make them think of you as their friend or "senpai" for the lack of better term, or make them fall in love with you. What also works is getting them to have sex with you, to reveal something embarrassing about themselves, or otherwise become part of something they hold sacred. Pretending to be a god would fall into this category. I'm struggling to explain why I think manipulation on those cases is iffy, I think it has to do with that kind of interaction kinda assuming that there are processes involved beyond self-regulation. With manipulation, you could bypass that and in effect you would lie about your alliance.

It is true many social interactions are not about anything deeper than getting the salt shaker. I kind of just didn't think of them while writing this post. I might need to clarify that point.

True. However, it's difficult to construct culturally neutral examples that are not obvious. The ones that pop to my mind are the kind of "it's wrong to be nice to an old, really simple-minded lady because that way you can make her rewrite her will to your benefit", or "It's allright to try to make your roommate do the dishes as many times as you possibly can, as long as you're both on equal footing on this "competition" of "who can do the least dishes"".

I'm not sure how helpful that kind of examples are.