Comment by Ian Maxwell (ian-maxwell-1) on Failures in Kindness · 2024-07-23T13:28:05.402Z · LW · GW

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

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