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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans engage in conversation.

If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care to make.

How many pro-choice people do you think are persuaded by the people screaming "murderer" outside of Planned Parenthood?

People have a limited amount of time to deal with all of the issues in the world. If you can't explain your argument in a calm, rational manner, people who are on the fence will shut you out.

See what Howard Dean's screaming did to his campaign.

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   How many pro-choice people do 
   you think are persuaded by

Symmetrically, how many pro-life people do you think are persuaded by the people screaming "woman-hater/sexist/misogynist" outside of Planned Parenthood?

   If you can't explain your 
   argument in a calm, rational 
   manner,

You overestimate the efficacy of explaining in a calm, rational manner. As a university teacher with > 10 years experience, I can tell you with extreme, and reliably reproducible experience, that explaining in a calm, rational manner is also typically overrated. Year in, year out, I tell my students to test their coureswork before submission to ensure it compiles, year in, year out, I tell my students not to cheat etc etc ... and year in, year out, a large number of students ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational advice.

What screaming (or the university equivalent: bad grades) achieves is not so much conviction, but communicating urgency. How to react to urgency a different matter.

A second social function of screaming (re-)producing simple us/them group identities.

people often don't do what's best for them. But that's a separate issue from trying to convince someone to join your cause. If you're representing advocacy group X and you're being melodramatic and throwing a tantrum, rather than pinpointing the issues you want to solve and proposing solutions, I'm much more likely to think that said group is composed of adult babies making childish complaints and unworthy of respect or attention. You'd be essentially leaving it to me to independently discover if there is any value in the group, rather than taking the opportunity to inform me yourself.

They are not trying to convince you to join their case. Neither group. You are unlikely to be in position to do anything about their cause and even if they convinced you, you would likely remain passive.

Both are attempting to force change or prevent change. For all values in calm rational discussion pleasant discussion, it does not bring change. It makes you pleasant, but does not really bring results where real stakes are in question.

Everyone will give you lots of advice and requirements etc, and it's completely impossible to follow even a tiny fraction of it.

> ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational advice

That's quite one-sided...

Screaming is useful for warning something about something that's obviously going to negatively affect them. Like walking in in front of a train, or how cheating will make them fail a course because the screaming person will be the one failing them.

When it comes to more abstract concepts, the average person will ignore the screaming lunatics and side with the person that appears sane at first glance, even if they're really the crazy ones.

>Like walking in in front of a train

Agreed.

>or how cheating will make them fail a course because the screaming person will be the one failing them.

Completely disagree. In my life, there have been plenty of people for whom this is not effective. Screaming is good for urgent events that will have immediate and serious consequences. Failing a course is a long term consequence.

Also, beyond a certain frequency, screaming loses effect. I once transferred to a school that had lots of screaming and heavy corporal punishment. It was very clear: The screaming and punishment had virtually no effect on the students. It would reduce them to tears, and once the tears were gone, the behavior continued. In my prior school the frequency of such disciplinary measures was much lower, and almost always was more effective because it was rare.

So activists who are always screaming are destined to being ignored (this being only one of the reasons).

100% agree, and I'd like to draw out a thread that is highly relevant to the original title. Most damage is done by large groups of people who want simple solutions to complex situations (like, eg, characterising a debate as having precisely two well defined sides).

There are some situations in life that are genuinely complicated (eg, running the logistic system that gets food from farms to houses). I think it might be flat-out impossible to communicate a complicated solution to a large crowd. The best I've ever seen a large crowd do is pick someone who looks like they might be able to tackle the problem and then the collective accepts whatever they get - good or bad.

Realistically, people piping up with some variant of "this simple solution will fix the problem", on topics where they have no actual skin in the game, are the problem. They undermine complicated efforts to resolve situations. Moderation, balance, compromise and attempting to deal with the complexity forthrightly come together to give much better results than using silver bullets.

   characterising a debate as 
   having precisely two well 
   defined sides

I see this as a reaction to complexity: if a subject is too complicated to grasp, comprehend and communicate all relevant subtleties, a common reaction is radical simplification down to two options, with a strong preference for one side.

"An interesting article in The Atlantic talks about studies showing that liberals think in terms of fairness while conservatives think in terms of morality. So if you want to persuade someone on the other team, you need to speak in their language. We almost never do that. That’s why you rarely see people change their opinions...

...If your aim is to persuade, you have to speak the language of the other. Talking about fairness to a conservative, or morality to a liberal, fails at the starting gate. The other side just can’t hear what you are saying."

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/02/15/how-to-persuade-the-other...

Excellent article, thank you. Thinking back to a few discussions i've had regarding the current political landscape with 'the opposition', this (albeit oversimplified) method checks out.

Thanks again. Of course Adams has his own political bias but at least he appears to be trying to bridge the gap here.

> liberals think in terms of fairness while conservatives think in terms of morality

i don't think this is a very accurate characterization. for one thing, fairness itself is a moral value. however, i do think liberals and conservatives tend to have different moral systems. in broad strokes, liberals tend to have more of a utilitarian perspective, while conservatives tend to be more deontological.

Jonathon Haidt has actually done some great scientific work on the real differences between liberals and conservatives. This is a shortish version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc There's also some more detailed and longer versions if you poke around on YouTube a bit, plus a book you can buy if you're really interested.

I don't think your characterization of either side is particularly accurate. Neither side is utilitarian, and both sides are plenty deontological, just with different rule sets. Both sides are rationalizing deeply-held instinctual beliefs, or the lack thereof.

I'm not sure Scott Adams has really grasped moral foundations theory. It explain the differences in the moral systems used by American liberals and conservatives - it does not claim that liberals lack a sense of morality.

His abortion example strikes me as particularly off-base. Again, it's not that US liberals don't care about morality. Of course liberals think murder is wrong! They just don't consider a fetus to have the moral standing of a human.

Anyway, some direct links regarding moral foundations theory (though I highly recommend Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind):

https://www.moralfoundations.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

> What screaming (or the university equivalent: bad grades)

Grades are both an expensive signal, and an adjustment to an incentive gradient: Opportunities to send the signal are limited, and their use is constrained by both written and unwritten rules.

Giving someone a bad grade and a way to do better redirects whatever value they place on grades into doing what you asked. It's like a performance bonus, or cheese at the end of a maze.

Screaming, however, is nearly pure signal. A relatively cheap signal, if overused. The only expense is trading off your reputation, in exchange for immediate attention. If you're screaming at The Outgroup, you have no reputation to lose, so there's no value to the signal.

To get the people outside Planned Parenthood to listen, you'd have to incentivize them the way grades incentivize a student--or at least give an expensive signal that you're worth listening to.

Are bad grades actually the equivalent of screaming? Or are they a simple consequence of students' actions?

That screaming produces group identities I don't doubt, but it seems unlikely that once you've converted them into them, you will be able to convince them of much.

> and year in, year out, a large number of students ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational advice

I would point out that they probably remember your advice, it's just not "connected" to the part of their brains that does the driving under stress of deadline.

I find you can make a lot of true predictions by extending the "system 1/system 2 thinking" model into a complete disjunction: that everyone is, internally, one person who listens and talks and learns social mores; and then another person who acts and reacts and learns by doing; and that—other than sharing a body—these two internal people have nothing in common and you should assume that any lesson that's been imparted "through" one of them has absolutely not been imparted to the other.

I.e., if you tell someone something, they'll be able to tell you what you said, and it will affect what side of a debate they engage in in the future, but it won't affect their behavior in the slightest, except insofar as they verbally precommit to doing something in a way that then forces doing-them to do it.

And, if you get someone to, say, play a video-game simulation of some complex system that imparts a particular lesson about that system into them, then they'll still verbally argue on the "wrong" side regarding how that system works, until someone essentially forces them to sit down and have their "social mind" go over the experience their "doing mind" just had, explaining it to themselves to convince themselves. (Some people probably do this "narrating themselves observing their doing mind" by default to some degree; these people are probably measurably better at some meta-skill like learning or teaching.)

> People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans engage in conversation.

Absolutely nailed it. If you're unpleasant/uncivilised to deal with then the content of your argument becomes irrelevant because a decent portion - and perhaps even the majority - of people won't want to have anything to do with you.

Being obnoxious is another class of communication where good content is masked by bad delivery, the same as if you fail to communicate and explain your point clearly: again, the message gets lost. People switch off and disengage.

Good manners really do oil the wheels of communication on difficult and contentious topics even if it means the process takes longer than you'd like.

It also depends hugely on context. A well placed "you might have a point but you're acting like a dick" might bring a discussion back into civility, but then you also get people trying to shut down a discussion that they find uncomfortable by focusing exclusively on criticizing incidental word or phrase choice.

And then there's King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

Sometimes you need to make waves in order to advance a cause.

Now that doesn't mean you should be uncivil (like screaming "you fucking moron!"), but it can be a fine line to walk. So it's understandable that tone policing itself can become a controversial topic.

It's proportionate to the cause.

If we're talking about the Jim Crow south, that's one thing. King even wrote a whole essay about how white moderates 'tone policing' the civil rights movement needed to get on board or get out of the way. And he was right. Emmett Till's lynching had just happened, they were being categorically denied rights, and then getting fucking attack dogs unleashed on them, churches firebombed, etc, when they spoke up.

Some of the noisier people on twitter and in our workspaces in 2018, however... their net effect is giving talking points to Sean Hannity. At least 80% of America is turned off by their rhetorical excess.

King's body of work was productive. He was after results, not after feeding his own ego or outrage.

The problem isn't any different in 2018 than it was in 1955. The MAGNITUDE is different, but the magnitude is always different.

In 1955 there was a higher murder rate and a higher rate of disease. Just because both are lower in 2018 doesn't mean we don't continue to invest significant effort into working on both murder and disease.

In 1955, Jim Crow laws were appalling and inhuman. Lynchings were accepted by large segments of society. In 2018, we still have strong systemic bias in police forces that handle black criminals with a significantly higher rate of violence than white criminals leading to many preventable deaths. And we still have a justice system that punishes black criminals more severely than white criminals, affecting community cohesion and health.

These are still serious problems that need significant effort into solving. That is 99% of what the noisy people on twitter and in your workspaces are talking about. But Sean Hannity and Co pick up on the 1%, or misintepret the 99% and present it as some rhetorical excess about feelings and safe spaces and outrage.

No. It's still about human lives.

1) You're trivializing just how bad things were, a little bit.

2) I'm not arguing that racism doesn't exist. I'm arguing that the outrage-addicts are ineffective, and that they suffer from a bias towards slacktivism and purity-gating.

Contrast with King and especially LBJ. Making change requires building bridges.

> King even wrote a whole essay about how white moderates 'tone policing' the civil rights movement needed to get on board or get out of the way.

It's that very letter, isn't it?

"I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is ... the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice"

The Dean Scream stuff was a dirty tricks attack by his opponents. If he didn't scream they'd attack him for something else, loker being too calm (see Jeb Bush's 2016 campaign). If you libe your life trying to avoid giving your unethical enemies anything they can twist into an attack, you'll paralyze yourself.

> See what Howard Dean’s screaming did to his campaign.

I totally agree with everything you said, except this isn’t a fair or good example of what you’re talking about at all. That meme was a manufactured attack. Dean was rallying, and if you watch it in context, there’s nothing there. The clip was taken out of context to make him look irrational. You can do that to pretty much any politician with videos from rallies.

> If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", ... I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care to make.

This is a good reason not just to avoiding debates with screaming people, but also to ignore them.

People are sometimes wrong. Happens to the best of us. Other people give us feedback. The screaming person who responds to feedback by more screaming... is more likely to be wrong.

In theory, one could first spend a lot of time debating patiently and politely with as many people as possible, weigh the arguments, and determine what is most likely to be true. And then, start screaming at people, to spread the message quickly to many people. But in practice, people who are screaming now were most likely also screaming yesterday.

People outside of Planned Parenthood screaming "murderer" aren't try to convince, they're trying to intimidate.

Howard Dean's scream wasn't. The scream was no louder than the audience: it was merely isolated by a directional mike.

Tone policing is to do with (objecting to) not what they say, but how they say it, so I think what you give aren't examples of it at all. What you say about behaviour makes sense, but I don't think you read the wikipedia link to learn what tone policing actually is, as you're complaining about something else entirely.

Or more succinctly put - context matters.

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