Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

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themodelplumber

That's a really fun article, thanks.

Since it links to information hazards [0] it makes me want to write up my experiences with psychological damage, ethics, and how they relate to information hazards. Someday it'd be fun to write about.

There are some information hazards out there that are really, really deep, scary, and also funny, once you realize how easy they make it to e.g. manipulate people without using any of the typical tricks, or even to bring decades-old relationship problems to an end in a single conversation. (Or how they make it obvious that a powerful thing to do is let yourself talk...to yourself! Weird insights abound)

For example you can effectively direct people in a given context by identifying the cues they give you for the type of information-consumer they are.

Some people will read that and hear "leadership" or "NLP" but it's quite different.

For some it may be as easy as noticing that they talk or write in metaphor, or they focus more on "we" than "me" in specific ways.

This can then be mapped to a set of low-energy, high-stress perspectives that the individual values in different sets of ways. Once you tease out those ways...well, this is information hazard, it's the option of turnkey psychological damage in a very straightforward way, and it's a huge ethical thing.

I thought it was weird that I had to learn about ethics to get a certain certificate to teach people about personality typologies, but then it really hit me later on.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard

> There are some information hazards out there that are really [...] funny [...] once you realize how easy they make it to e.g. [...] bring decades-old relationship problems to an end in a single conversation.

What do you mean by this?

Conversations are constructed out of the same perspectives that generally form the respective personality characteristics of those involved in the conversation.

These conversations can then be isolated around sets of perspectives, such that they can be said to inherit a type. The derivative relationship, then, also has a type.

Once you understand the type dynamics of relationships, you can say "ah ha, this is relationship-type X", and design conversations to alter the relationship by consciously presenting various perspectives, for example, as opposed to the usual responses you'd give. These perspectives change the type of relationship directly, without even needing to compromise your end goal, if there is one other than the general "peace / enjoyment / good times".

Normally people do not do this consciously, and the result is an unconscious conversation-drive with various possible outcomes which are kind of samey over time given the same relationship type.

We all have some set of unconscious soapboxes which we tend to return & stand upon, in that way. And so the same types of relationship problems tend to repeat themselves (as do the awesome parts, fortunately).

With more consciousness and more of a design-style approach, you can take a teetering relationship and bring it back from the brink, or turn a difficult negotiation into one that's nearly impossible for you to lose. You can do this in a single conversation.

In most cases this kind of dramatic, high-stakes approach isn't needed, however (most days your average person making conversation will tend to converse with those they broadly get along with) and such interventions also don't come without significant energy cost, so there's no real wisdom in doing this kind of thing full-time.

But just to say it's a valuable tool in the toolbox, so to speak, is a huge understatement. It directly informs deep philosophical issues in ways that offer high tractability, and yet most people still have no idea that this is a thing.

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