A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness

In a community of people who could potentially work together to reason about possible world futures, being disrespectful - which is a more endemic sin here than being "mean" - causes people to change their LW goal set from, say, "save the universe from rogue AIs", to "save the universe from rogue AIs, and discredit person X at any opportunity." And it's not even being trite or irrational. If you know that someone has a low opinion of you, and shares it freely with others; then advances in that person's career may hinder your advance in your own. In a small world of people doomed to encounter each other over and over at different conferences and events, displaying open contempt is stupid. It hurts the entire community.

It helps you hold off on proposing diagnoses. As tempting as it may be to dismiss people as crazy or stupid, this is a dangerous label for us biased creatures. Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do.

Yes, this parallels why I've been finding hostility in argument increasingly disturbing lately. Insofar as people are rational and honest, they should expect to agree on questions of simple fact, and insofar as they differ on questions of value, then surely they should be able to reach some sort of game-theoretic compromise superior to the default outcome. If you can anticipate disagreeing even after extended interaction, something has gone horribly wrong. I read people's snarky swipes at the psychological motivations of their opponents, and it almost hurts---don't they see the symmetries of the situation? Instead of rushing to call the other mad, why don't they just jump to the meta level and ask, What do I (think I) know that they don't? What do they (think they) know that I don't?

Really, it should all be so simple. Figure out what questions you want to investigate, and update your model of the world based on incoming evidence, including the arguments of others. If you end up disagreeing with someone, just say: I think you're mistaken about these-and-such specific issues because of such-and-these specific reasons. That's it. That's all you have to do. Anger and indignation aren't helping you acquire the map that reflects the territory, so what would be the point?

I suppose I've lost a little bit of my humanity along the Way. What could be more traditionally wholesome than a delicious bout of righteous anger? But on reflection ... it's just not worth it. The sanctity of my map is too important. I'll get my kicks some other way.

I want to ask, why are people mean in the first place? I think before we try to "fix" some behavior we should make sure we understand it first. Otherwise we might be like the social reformers who try to fix "broken" institutions without understanding their reasons for existing.

To a first approximation, meanness seems to be the deliberate cause of offense. (Although I wonder if I'm suffering from the man-with-a-hammer syndrome here.) Anyone have other ideas?

I believe "nice," makes an excellent default, and I think these arguments are good ones, well-presented. Not-niceness is sometimes an effort to signal intelligence, I think; it's not particularly effective at that.

It's important, too, though, to recognize when niceness doesn't pay the utilitarian bill:

1. Trolls. In any environment, people interested in reactions occasionally wander in. These people should be banned and ignored. Shunning is not a particularly nice thing, but even polite feedback is feedback. Do not feed these.

2. The ineducable. Suppose a person asserts that the Monty Hall problem results in a 50-50 chance of switching or not switching. One or two efforts to educate nicely is good. Additional efforts are wasted and unproductive.

3. Evil. Deliberately dishonest people are far rarer than alleged on internet fora generally, but it happens. Shaming people who are genuinely bad actors is fine with me, thanks.

4. I've probably missed several. Assistance welcomed.

Overall, I'd say LW is a particularly civil corner of the internet, and I've spent time at some uncivil places. The other side of pro-niceness posting is that assuming unkindness or bad motives is not a good default for the reader; assume the other person's directness isn't not-nice.

I'd also say that I think niceness is more important for persuasion on the net than it is in person; people who know you personally might assume more internal niceness even you're sometimes a condescending, sarcastic, know-it-all. (Really.) That sort of instinctive goodwill towards one's fellow man is tougher to generate without a handshake.

Being mean to someone who is not themselves being mean or manipulative is often not just counterproductive and self destructive (due to the reasons you mentioned), but also the result of personal weakness and lack of control. Meanness usually results from one of the following situations:

1. We feel angry and speak impulsively, entranced by our emotion.
2. We speak carelessly and don't realize the potential emotional consequences of what we are saying.
3. We are consciously and knowingly trying to hurt another person.

In case 1, our anger reflects a personal weakness in that our emotion prevents us from behaving level headily and making sure that what we say really promotes our interests. In case 2 we are speaking without awareness of the consequences of our actions, and hence again put our interests at risk. Only case 3 has a shot of being (at certain times) a good strategy, but in that case we must ask why we are consciously and knowingly choosing to hurt another human being, and whether such an action is ethical and justified.

I VERY strongly agree with this post in general. I do have one objection though.

Most importantly, in my experience, fully recognizing that people are in general crazy and stupid has been the major enabler of positive interaction with them. The members of our community are prone to judging and condemning most people for behaving badly, and most people will continue to behave badly if judged, but if accepted as stupid and crazy and treated kindly they will be more likely to improve.

To me, of the other points 7 and 8 seem particularly important.

Good question to ask yourself: When have you thought "that would have ended better if only I'd been a more mean?"

Also, niceness is infectious. An individual entering a community is inclined to take on the tone and demeanour of established members. Even an established member may alter their demeanour to reflect that of others.

The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning.

Another possibility is The Grim Aesthetic -- an aversion to certain attitudes and practices that might be associated with cultures of deliberate "niceness".

(Though even if those excesses are distasteful, that's no reason not to be nice in the ordinary sense.)

Agree, second, and applaud.

I've mostly thought of this as a matter of economy. To quote something I wrote quite a while ago, elsewhere:

In general, the things we don't like, don't want, won't tolerate vastly outnumber the things we do like, do want, do find acceptable. To enumerate them all would be a huge waste of time. And to name, for instance, only one thing we don't like - that is just getting started on the enumeration.

So, we communicate more efficiently by saying what we like, what we want, what we prefer, how we'd change things for the better, and so on.

Being rude is essentially being negative, with an additional effort to deliberately violate the conditions of felicity of whatever form of conversation is being used.

You could also cite (though I can't dig up a link right now) those studies recently published claiming that feeling rejected lowers people's IQ by a substantial amount.

Not an appropriate thing to do when you're trying to leverage collective intelligence; and if your aim isn't to leverage collective intelligence, why are you wasting your valuable time and talents posting on a public forum ?

Another reason is the Meta-Golden Rule: "Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors."

My experience with a forum that has adopted this policy to an extreme in the last couple of years was that whenever local social norms strongly prescribe against any behavior that falls short of active niceness, the result is a suffocating atmosphere accompanied by a severe decline in content quality (because attempts to set higher standards are perceived as "rude" towards the people lowering the standard). (If that matters, the forum was themed around game graphics creations.) "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything" was probably their most oft-cited slogan. There were multiple suggestions of basically making it socially taboo to post your stuff in a picture thread without praising recently posted creations, and some posters made it a habit of theirs to make entire posts consisting of thanking 15-20 people individually and telling them how much they loved their creations. The overall group rationality could have benefited from moving away from this extreme of niceness, in my estimation.

Fortunately, LW is in no danger of ending up like that any time soon. In fact, what is most refreshing about discussion going on here is that it's low in both active niceness and active meanness. There's this third category, entirely distinct from the other two (in fact, in a way, completely off the spectrum), that is characterized by neutrality, or reluctance to make either positive or negative general assessments of the other users or to express either appreciation or contempt. It is my belief that, overall, it is better to strive for this sort of neutrality than to try to move the community in the direction of either niceness or meanness (particularly when neutrality approximates the initial state).

The dangers of a tendency towards meanness are obvious, so I'm not going to bother with those; my main concern is that excessive pressure towards active niceness makes for a bad user experience for the less naturally empathetic folks (the kind experienced by people required to plaster a big smile on their face for the customers) and shoves completely unrelated things into the discussion, especially things that have the potential to stir up drama.

A lot of what we consider to be polite behavior is really just a series of strategies for assuring the other party that yes, we come in peace; no, we're not trying to claim higher status; yes, their needs, desires, and fundamental rights as a human being are taken into consideration, their contributions are valued and their emotional needs are attended to, plus an inordinate number of similar claims. If the goal at hand is to send forward a purely factual message on an unrelated topic in the most efficient way possible, all of this becomes diplomatic filler which can and should be cut down upon. Honestly, I can't see why we'd bother with all that unless the priors for the other party being hostile are abnormally high.

(Disclaimer: Again, I'm not suggesting that LW has any chances of ending up so far along the "niceness as community norm" axis. My perception of this community is that it is very balanced in that regard, and has thus reached an optimum (although I will not contradict any experienced member who says otherwise). The main point of this post was to elaborate on the problems of warm-fuzzy-prioritizing communities in general.)

Of course, the real benefit of a "nice" atmosphere is that it attracts more people and grows the community. This could be worth sacrificing accuracy for: 100 people with 99% accurate beliefs is worth more (in reality) than 50 people with 100% accurate beliefs.

That was a very nice post.

I have been trying to inculcate this same trend on another forum I frequent (Richard Dawkins' Forums). Most of the respondents are horrible crass toward the ideas and beliefs of others on that forum (well, the crass towards the ideas and beliefs of theists), when it might be the case that the theist is there to try to figure out whether he/she should give up their faith.

Although, since adopting a be nice to strangers policy on that forum, I have noticed that the vast majority of theists who come to Richard Dawkins' forums are simply out to preach and tarnish Richard's scientific works.

I still maintain that we should remain nice (at the very least polite) to these people, as it will not give them further ammo to charge atheists with being "Mean, grumpy people who have no morals because they don't believe in God"

On this forum, I have made an effort to use the same strategy, mostly because I am here to learn from others who seem to have more knowledge than I, and I don't wish to step on others' feet.

I do understand however, that when in a group of intellectuals of copious skill and knowledge that social graces can be neglected due to an intense focus upon the information and knowledge in question. I have learned to grow a thicker skin when I am told that an idea of mine is wrong, because it might well be wrong, and the faster I learn why it is wrong, the faster I may replace the inaccurate knowledge with accurate knowledge. I think it is this latter piece of information that most people forget when in crowds of highly intellectual effective people.

And, because of this, I always try to take into account that another person may not be thinking this way when I make an attempt to correct or query them about a fact or knowledge that may be in error.

But being mean is a lot of fun.

(Speaking of which, browsing the comments is less enjoyable since the karma changes left me unable to downvote.)

There's another side of this coin.

Something I've been thinking about lately is that it seems like in most situations you are better off interpreting other people's actions and statements charitably.

React to comments as if the emotional content was meant in the best possible interpretation.

I find that I generally do this without thinking about it. Thus, the reason I was a little surprised to find this post on LW.

The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning.

Another part is that the norm 'be nice' can be used to mean ends far more effectively than crude rudeness. Rejecting the norm and then actually being nice (for reasons along the lines of your 9) tends to be a lot, well, nicer.

Why and How to Debate Charitably is sorta related

Reason five has got to be the best one.

However, you have to remember a few basic things, like the fact that being nice can be a waste of time (I love the fact that this community doesn't entertain "thank you" and "good job" as comments on their own), and that not everyone's definition of nice is the same. Monosyllables really -are- confusing when too much goes non-unpacked (un-unpacked? disunpacked?) inside.

Finally, re the aside on spelling, if there were an automatic "niceness checker" available the situation might be different, but as things stand poor spelling is a signal for laziness.

Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do. Conveniently, both these words (as applied to people, more than ideas) and closely related ones are culturally considered mean, and a general niceness policy will exclude them.

I am having a hard time parsing this passage. Particularly the beginning:

Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do.

And, when you refer to "Both of these words," are you referring to crazy and stupid*?

Good post because it's so relevant to this kind of forum. I also really appreciate your initial admission that actually niceness or kindness may have some degree of logical irrelevance in a forum of this nature.

Your list of positives associated with being nice I find a little bit unsatisfactory because I'm not sure how much the core idea really stands up to rational argument. For example, your list is quite un-axiomatic. Many of the items could be categorized or framed under one of the coexistent items, for example, 4 into 3, 1 into 5, and so on. As another example, it seems like niceness in popular society largely derives from religious influences and cultural tradition. IMO this is an indication of the kind of morality philosophy which goes into niceness, which has very little to do with any kind of hard rationalistic analysis. Of course it's good to be nice... I think this is obvious to most human beings, and forms a kind of staple ingredient for all cooperative societies. But if you can't see that, is it really the sort of thing that can be logically justified?

It's a bit like logically justifying that evil is bad... it's more a matter of moral philosophical definition and interpretation, not as much of an empirical or rationalistic justification.

In my experience, people who are particularly nice in debates and discussions (as opposed to mere conversations) are usually those whose opinions are either the bland dogmas that everyone accepts without thinking, or the ridiculous nonsense that only crackpots believe. In both cases, niceness is used as a defense against criticism: No one wants to be the strident jerk who has to tell the nice person how wrong he is.

Reason five has got to be the best one.

However, you have to remember a few basic things, like the fact that being nice can be a waste of time (I love the fact that this community doesn't entertain "thank you" and "good job" as comments on their own), and that not everyone's definition of nice is the same. Monosyllables really -are- confusing when too much goes non-unpacked (un-unpacked? disunpacked?) inside.

Finally, re the aside on spelling, if there were an automatic "niceness checker" available the situation might be different, but as things stand poor spelling is a signal for laziness.

What you are saying is fairish, except for one thing: the ad hominem is not a fallacy in itself. At least not in all situation, as your statement would imply. There's a generous literature on the "un-fallaciousness" of the ad hominem, and here's a good start: http://www.dougwalton.ca/papers%20in%20pdf/87AdHom.pdf

Another thing and I'm off: what you are evincing here are better called "pragmatical" (as opposed to "pragmatic") considerations. One could misconstrue it as "dealing with pragmatics" ... which it doesn't.

Good post. I do agree that being courteous and friendly is a great thing.

Your parenthetical point about spelling deserves longer development; otherwise I'd delete it, for fear of distracting.

EDIT: I turned the bulk of this comment into a top-level post, hoping for a broader response to a question that's important to me.

This reminds me of the early Less Wrong "agreement movement".

I really am confused by your 'commonsense notion' of niceness. Nice in common usage is very close to being a synonym for boring. Describing someone or something as nice usually sounds like damning with faint praise. I'm afraid I don't feel I've learnt anything from your post.

I think that the rejection of emotional reasoning is, in short, retarded. We aren't computers. We're smelly, sexual, squishy, awesomely alive and emotional humans. Logic is really useful, but it can be incredibly boring. What's important is your relationships to your environment; that includes the people around you, nature, dogs, birds, ETC. Just as a person with really good ideas can be hard to get along with, a person with terrible ideas can be awesome company. What is more important? to me it's obvious. BE NICE, not for any reason except that the highest power is LOVE. Trying to attach logical reasons for being nice is like attaching logical reasons to being angry: it works, but it's pointless. When someone's angry, they're angry- reason can override emotions sometimes, but should it? Obviously when decisions need to get made, or we're trying to figure out objective truth (whatever that means- you mean reality that exists outside of my experience of it? That happens?), reason should be accentuated. In personal relationships, emotionality deserves full respect. You have to avoid machine consciousness... Maybe you're trying to program an AI, but are you trying to BECOME an AI?