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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

> Heck, my upstairs neighbor complained about my music on the weekend during the day without introducing themselves and not diplomatically.

Tangential (and probably just a perennial old guy complaint), but it seems like people have forgotten how to do this. If you have an issue with something your neighbor is doing, then go talk to them. Don't leave an aggressive note. Don't let it boil over until you're so upset you can't talk to them rationally. Living next to other human beings is a negotiation. You can't make a set of rules that cover every possible scenario and then ask police to enforce them. Just go talk to people!

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Honestly I think the loss of humans just talking to others is the primary cause of most of our modern problems.

Probably from too much experience that they need to expect to be in a fight, so they adopt an aggressive posture from the start.

That's me. If I know that neighbor is doing something unreasonable, like leaving his garbage bags in the common hallway or listening music too loudly, I suspect he's just an antisocial asshole and the conversation will be rough at best.

Whenever I think that I remember that I've been the recipient of snarky notes about this or that and while it's possible I'm an irredeemable reprobate, I'd prefer rather to think that like most people I'm sometimes not as considerate as I might be and open to polite feedback.

I can't help but wonder if a large part of this is the advice of "pick your battles, don't engage with others you disagree with, you're just wasting your energy" and similar being applied far too broadly.

In a marriage, picking your battles is probably good advice. But being too picky about battles, in general, seems like passivity that tends to lead to resentment and explosive drama.

There is picking your battles, and then there is avoiding all forms of conflict completely. The latter can just lead to battles down the road that could have been mildly uncomfortable situations at an earlier stage.

What makes you think that there has been a recent loss of "humans just talking"? Seems like a fairly subjective position to take when I, as a younger person, feel incredibly connected to a lot of society via online communication.

I have also however, never had a good experience knocking on neighbors doors. If someone is being incredibly inconsiderate, like say blasting music at 1am, then why would they be more considerate if I knocked on their door?

A fully grown adult living in an apartment complex should be able to know that sound travels, they have already made the decision to be inconsiderate. Are they supposed to change their mind because I appeal to them face to face?

It's not. Most of our problems are caused by wealth inequality, racism, and amoral politicians.

The risk of a confrontation escalating makes dealing with such things myself a very unattractive option, especially if it's a stranger. I've had a simple, polite request to turn down the thumping music at 1 AM end with me blocking punches, retreating to my unit, and calling the cops. Better to leave it to people who do such things professionally.

> Better to leave it to people who do such things professionally.

I empathize, esp if you're of the generation (like me) where we've grown accustom to distance in time and space via async messaging.

Having said that, I would respectfully push back: negotiating everyday conflicts of life with others (who are most often strangers) is NOT something we should allow to be overly professionalized. Yes, it's true that some extroverts find this easier, and that's a privilege we don't all have. But we can't pass this to landlords and tenant associations and governments to do, while we stay at a fully-intermediated distance. We need to learn and grow in how we relate to one another, ESPECIALLY now that the distance of the internet is working against us and causing our social muscles to atrophe.

Anyhow, I'm not trying to be argumentative -- I almost feel like I'm pleading here. It will be really bad if we "specialize" in this way. Losing our ability to navigate everyday conflicts with one another, and deferring it to higher powers, that's the worst sort of "vendor lock-in" I could ever imagine for a society.

Fwiw, I am a collectivist who values institutions, so I don't share this from a hyper-individualist perspective that distrusts these actors <3

I agree. I think it's good to ask a neighbor if they seem the type to be amenable to it, otherwise better ask them if they've seen a cat wandering around.

I had a neighbor who was an out-of-work hot-head who shouted at everyone and had his own posse of low-lifes. The guy BBQed right next to the wooden fence (in violation of fire codes) using absurd amounts of lighter fluid and charcoal that seeped into my unit directly above. I tried asking them to move it but they just ignored me. I tried a second time and then him and his posse surrounded me, mean mugged me, and tried to start a fight. I asked the property management to do something, they tried, and they took out their bad experiences on me passive-aggressively. I finally got out of there because it was a horrible situation.

Ah shit, that sounds like a fuckin rotten experience. Sorry you had to go through it.

i always wonder, when I have fantastically social failures like that: how could i tune the knobs to make this go better with this specific type of person, who sees me in this way... like if I did this 10 more times with 10 more hot-heads, I wonder what I'd learn about what he responds better to. I'm sure there are parts of who I am that I can't talk around, but still. And not that I have the nerve to keep putting myself in that situation...!

Anyhow, makes me curious from a distance, but to be clear, I'm not judging that there's anything else you could've done :)

The only way I think would've been to be another village tough or a low-life posse supplicant. The dude was out-of-work, drinking, smoking, and not doing anything and taking out his angsty frustrations in life on everyone else, including his kid, his wife, the mailman, the apt manager, and anyone else that walked by who wasn't a part of their gang.

If you wouldn't come back with a gun yourself to resolve the issue, it's a dick move to call someone else (a cop) to come over with a gun.

If you're making phone calls for armed response because someone is playing music, the problem might be with you.

I'm pretty sure they called the cops on their neighbor because they were getting assaulted ("having to block punches"), not because of the music.

It depends on the context. If someone lives in multi unit housing and repeatedly blasts music or does it at odd hours in the middle of the night, I would assume the probability of them being anti social and not conforming to expected behavior to be very high, such that I might feel more comfortable with police dealing with them.

If it’s a once in a while thing where they’re celebrating or whatnot and it sounds like they’re unintentionally disturbing others, then it’s probably worth talking to them.

Saying "be prepared to pull a gun, or don't ask your neighbor for anything" seems like a false dichotomy. Isn't that the very reason societies develop laws and governments? To not have people using violence to get their way? Instead agree to follow a code, and standards, and to not adjudicate transgressions of those codes with individual-on-individual violence?

I didn't say anything about pulling a gun, just that if you aren't willing to arm yourself and re-engage, it is a dick move to call someone else armed to come over and do it for you.

It has nothing to do with violence. The correct move is obviously to not re-engage, personally or by proxy.

> Isn't that the very reason societies develop laws and governments? To not have people using violence to get their way?

Quite the opposite. Laws are enforced exclusively via threat of violence, and the only thing that distinguishes the government from any other leadership organization is a claim to legitimate use of violence.

This is one of the most insane comments I've seen on hacker news. Police are there to enforce the law. The only reason they have guns is to defend themselves or the lives of others. If I ask you to turn down your music at night, and you refuse, it's not legal for me to enforce noise ordinances myself, so I call the people who do such things for a living.

> Police are there to enforce the law.

When I see statements like this I wonder if we experienced the same 2020.

I still haven't seen what your suggested course of action is?

Alright, let's say I have a neighbor playing loud music at 2am. I walk down, ask nicely if they'd turn it down. They ignore me. What then? What am I supposed to do from that point?

You seem to feel your options are escalate to violence (or the implied threat of same) by calling the cops, or just deal with the loud music.

I personally am with Asimov: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. It has little to do with whether you employ the violence/threat yourself, or call a man with a gun over to do it for you.

The correct course of action in almost all circumstances is "do nothing".

There are some good reasons to escalate a situation. I'm not of the belief that a noise disturbance is one of them.

You start by saying "you feel your options are limited to X or Y" and then go on to say "X is the last refuge of the incompetent, do nothing" implying there is some other option besides Y when you do nothing?

So your real response is: when confronted with someone who refuses to engage with you on the level of a decent human being, just take it. This doesn't seem like the way civilization works to me.

You've edited in a nice little tidbit about "well sometimes you've got to escalate" but failed to provide where that delineation is for you. Loud music isn't it. What about gunshots? What about children screaming loudly? What about someone breaking in to your neighbor's? When is it OK to escalate?

I didn't say to do nothing, or to just take it.

Correct. You simply avoided answering the question, which implies you'd 'do nothing, and take it'

> There are some good reasons to escalate a situation. I'm not of the belief that a noise disturbance is one of them.

This mislocates the point of escalation. The first point of escalation occurs when you arrive and the resident doesn't say the words "I'm sorry about that" followed immediately by turning the music down. The second more serious point of escalation (if there happens to be one) occurs when the police arrive and the same thing happens. In both cases the epicenter of escalation is within the person who won't turn their music down when lawfully required.

Everyone else has behaved reasonably and within the law and so can't meaningfully be said to have escalated the situation.

No, having armed people show up to force them to turn down the music (by first threatening violence with their armed presence, and then applying actual violence if that doesn't work) is the point of escalation. Armed law enforcement is not a reasonable response to loud music, full stop.

I've actually written about this very issue before:

https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...

I actually do think people should take your point seriously, even as I disagree with your conclusions. When you make a law you are always doing it with the implied violence you highlight. The law itself is an escalation, in a sense. If someone refuses to follow the law, then society has to ask itself what it's willing to do about it. If nothing, then the law is meaningless. To make the law is to decide that you're willing to enforce consequences for violating the law. And furthermore (and probably much more important, in the long run) you're willing to enforce even harsher punishments on those who refuse to accept sanctions for violating the law.

A society should be careful not to have too many laws; on an individual level one should understand clearly what it means to want something to be illegal (and what it means to refuse to obey the law, should you find yourself in a situation where you might be tempted to do that).

That's why you introduce yourself to all of your neighbors to your unit when you move in. I tend to bring them some food or something when I do it. That way they're not a "stranger" and their first context of your face isn't you complaining at 1am. You should consider it next time you move somewhere.

What I've found is that people who aren't being respectful are rarely the kind of people to curb their behaviour after a nice chat. I had a neighbour that would incessantly play loud music (in a building where noise was prohibited in the lease), and I politely explained that it was easily heard and disruptive, and asked if they'd please turn it down or use headphones. They said sorry and agreed to, but then didn't make any changes. Next time I knocked they didn't come to the door, and another day I heard them yelling about how they choked some guy out and wanted to kill them - so all my future complaints just went to the landlord till eventually the tenant was evicted for harbouring a criminal.

With that said, I still agree that it's worth just talking to them as the first action, in case they are just a nice normal person who doesn't realize how poor the soundproofing is.

Unfortunately, the risk of retaliation may be too high. While the likelihood may be low, the magnitude of the consequence is great.

The sooner you do it, and the more joviality you can approach it with, the less mad they will be. Hence the parent's admonition to not "[...] let it boil over until you're so upset you can't talk to them rationally."

I'm referring to the irrational, perhaps insane neighbor, not someone who behaves normally.

It seems like this comment is based on either an incorrect image of how this conversation ought to go, or a problematic prior about how inclined one's neighbor might be to violent retaliation.

In most cases, I'd suggest mitigating this risk through your style of interaction, not your initial choice about how to interact at all. GP was just suggesting a normal human interaction. If "retaliation" is a risk after your initial overture to a neighbor, you have done it very wrong.

Maybe a bad prior, but one that arose from personal experience.

If you haven't had to spend the night wondering whether your neighbor was going to barge in and murder you, waiting for the moving truck to arrive in the morning ... Well, I suppose you might not share my priors.

On the other hand, I'm not sure what could have been done to prevent it. My neighbor's list of grievances was largely imaginary. His tales of how he wanted to kill his pets seemed earnest enough to make his personal threats equally disturbing.

The asshole blaring music and doing burnouts is very unlikely to respond positively to a suggestion they stop doing that. If they were reasonable people and considerate of others they wouldn't be doing that in the first place.

I suspect that if you polled the long term residents of the area they would have similar negative perceptions of the car club. It's just that they don't have the power to effect change or don't have the attitude that they can effect change.

> If they were reasonable people and considerate of others they wouldn't be doing that in the first place.

Respectfully, you're probably giving yourself too much credit here (and your neighbors not enough). It's almost certainly the case that you (and me and everybody else reading this) has done something that annoyed a neighbor. You either just didn't realize it or you were tired or stressed and slipped up. But the odds are exceedingly good for any of us that we've had our music too loud, or our stomping was bothering the people downstairs, or we parked somewhere that annoyed somebody else.

If you'd react reasonably when called out for any of these behaviors, then give your fellow man the benefit of that doubt.

Again, it's not a question of what the most likely reaction is, but how grave the worst reaction would be.

You hold at least one insurance policy? If so, you understand the rationale in at least one domain.

This doesn't actually make sense. Of course it matters how likely the outcome is. We all routinely engage in behaviors for which the worst possible outcome is certain death and we do so because that outcome is rare enough that the benefits outweigh the risk.[0] The base rate matters a lot.

[0] Many of these activities, like, say, driving a car, are probably orders of magnitude more dangerous than, ahem, talking to your neighbor.

Perhaps I should have said it more carefully. One should care about the distribution of outcomes and their magnitudes along multiple axes of impact, plus potential mitigation options.

All this leads me to conclude that sometimes calling the police is the right thing to do, even if the likelihood of retaliation is low.

>The asshole blaring music and doing burnouts is very unlikely to respond positively to a suggestion they stop doing that. If they were reasonable people and considerate of others they wouldn't be doing that in the first place.

You'd be surprised just how oblivious people are. I lived in an apartment building where a fire escape connected my bedroom window to another window that faced min about 7 feet away. People in that apartment would have parties featuring folks hanging out on the fire escape a few feet from my head and keep me awake. I finally opened the window and said very nicely, "hey guys, any chance you could move inside? I have to catch a bus to work at 7am tomorrow morning?" They were completely shocked that they were even bothering someone else. I never had a problem after that and the party stayed indoors. Not everyone will respond so well, but a surprising number of people don't realize that they're bothering others.

Yeah but these people are going through great effort and expense to be annoying. They're not likely to change. And indeed, TFA shows that they're well aware of the problem and have no plans to change.

And I think this comment is based on never having encountered a toxic neighbor yourself, and underestimating the significance of a single bad apple.

This is a really raw theory but it seems to me like many people don't have conflict day to day in their lives. Yet they see outrage in the news and on the internet all day every day. This trains people to think that any difficult situation will become a big conflict. Which leads to shitty behavior that actually causes conflict instead of talking like humans.

I never chock up to malice what I can perceive as ignorance. My neighbors who are being loud probably don't know they are being loud (to me) because they have never been in my apartment hearing them.

Yes! Invite them over and figure out what volumes are acceptable. If they're not aholes, they'll probably be okay with it. Get them a beer or coffee even.

I agree. Jumping to the nuclear option or being passive-aggressive/aggressive-aggressive isn't neighborly. It could be a loss of reasonable perspective, they're depressed/angsty/acting out, controlling, or don't understand how to negotiate.

Wouldn't a better option be to introduce ourselves and invited to go to their place to see how loud it is and calibrate so it doesn't bother them for the day and also the night?

One thing to consider, since this post is about Texas...visiting your neighbors with a complaint in a strong castle doctrine state can be intimidating.

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