Don't Get Offended
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
"Don't get offended" may be an important message for you to assert to yourself to avoid losing your cool; but if you find yourself telling someone else not to get offended after saying or doing something offensive to that person, there's a good chance you are using this argument in a self-serving manner rather than the spirit of enlightened rationalism.
In other words, don't use "don't get offended" as an excuse to be a douchebag.
However, assuming one has an understanding of the status quo, and a desire to change it, "getting offended" can be a useful, and rational, response. (I include the quotes because there is an amount of subjectivity in what various people label as "getting offended".) In particular, such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change.
So, while this article presents itself as a highly rational and neutral argument, embedded within it is actually a deeply conservative point of view.
I don't see where the article says that you have to accept what the world looks like once you figure it out. Figuring out that the world is f--ked up and deciding to try and change it based on that knowledge is, it seems to me, perfectly consistent with what the article is saying.
such responses can serve to educate other people about behaviors which perpetuate the aspects of the status quo which the expresser desires to change
The article talks about this, under the heading of using "getting offended" to manipulate people. It's different because you are choosing to act offended to accomplish a goal, rather than involuntarily responding to something by being offended, even if it hinders you from accomplishing a goal.
There doesn't need to be any disingenuity there, it can be an honest response even though it is a logical choice to display that response.
Exactly.
The article is from lesswrong.com, where everyone focuses very much on figuring out facts, and less so on most of the other things that matter in life. In addition, by "facts" or "what the world looks like" they mean scientifically verifiable facts first and foremost. I don't think a lot of people would have a problem with the "status quo" if by that phrase you meant F=ma or E=mc^2.
In fact, I would say that the article (and the lesswrong.com community as a whole) subscribes to a radically progressive point of view, where any and every social institution (and our emotional attachments to them) should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny based on facts. The author will probably take issue with your assumption -- "assuming one has an understanding of the status quo" -- since, in his/her opinion, whether or not you actually have an understanding of facts is exactly what we're trying to figure out in the first place.
I'm not sure whether having such a hyper-critical point of view is actually better than having a conservative bias -- after all, there are other things that matter in life -- but in any case I think you missed the context.
At least the first part seems like a perfectly fine goal. You can't know what needs fixing if you don't know what's broken. Even if you know what you want something to look like, you can't know how to get there if you don't know where we are.
Less Wrong is a place where folks try to discuss things with a high degree of technical accuracy. For example, if a respondent were to disagree with the linked article, they would try to avoid making an outrageously stupid claim such as "Implicit in this statement...[is] accepting the status quo"--which is in NO WAY implied by the article--and then smugly toppling the argument that no one made. Derailing conversations like that is a waste of everyone's time.
I imagine a world, the world I would like to live in, where people didn't attempt to manipulate disagreements or indeed policy discussions by appeals to emotion. I want to live in a world where it's taken for granted that you can advocate for a position through a calm meeting of minds. I'm an extremely emotional person and can reconcile the search for unbiased truth--which includes my actions and the polices of my communities coming to reflect that truth--with living an emotional life just fine, since emotion is not the opposite of reason that many people try to claim it is. Mainly the people I see making this claim are those who would like to substitute emotional manipulation for making a rational case.
There's a very important distinction between "ought" statements and "is" statements. Getting offended is a fallacy if it causes you to miss that distinction.
In practice, if you're blinded by outrage, you won't even be able to judge what to be outraged at, and then you'll be played for a fool.
If someone appears to be irrationally offended by something you said or did, you make a mental note not to say or do that to them again. If the offense appears to me to be irrational and no discussion of why it's offensive takes place, it doesn't change my overall behaviour. It doesn't change my belief that my action wasn't offensive. It makes me think that person is irrational.
To change someone's attitude to something you need to discuss it with them. You need to demonstrate to them why the attitude they hold might be harmful. Taking offence doesn't do that.
LessWrong has another great post on this topic, which makes a point similar to yours and explains exactly why getting offended is useful: http://lesswrong.com/lw/13s/the_nature_of_offense/ .
I like to ask if people operate by (or will operate by having seen the link) Crocker's Rules[0], which tells me whether or not they take responsibility for their own mind. (Looks like it's mentioned in the comments on LW too.)
This reminds me of esr's recent commentary about a controversial piece of advice.[1] Can you see past preconceptions, and either engage reality as reality, or even hypotheticals as hypotheticals, and not respond on a purely emotional level? Emotions are fine; I like my emotions, I just try not to be ruled by them as much as I can, especially the less productive ones. ("Speak the truth even if your voice shakes.")
Not necessarily true. There is one -- and only one -- "hot button" issue that absolutely makes me fume. And my position on it comes after a lot of careful, introspective thought.
For all other issues, nothing would really upset me.
So you're saying you disagree with (IMO) the central assumption in the article?
> People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue.
Most people have such a Blue vs. Green issue. I'd wager that if you wanted to commit social suicide you could easily manage to offend over 95% of your friends by simply choosing your trolling topics carefully (without name-calling). But that hardly means you should dismiss your friends.
> nowadays it's just too easy to dismiss it as "trolling",
I suggest Gulliver's Travels, if you haven't read it. It's still very current.
As for esr, he's saying much more than that. He's claiming that, after you have read Derbyshire's article, you're supposed to answer "no" to those 5 questions. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in there.
I answered "yes" to the 5th question, i.e. I concluded the author is probably racist, but that doesn't imply my answer is result of my emotions clouding my judgement. It could simply be that my definition of "racist" is different from esr's. Interestingly, someone mentioned in the comments that Derbyshire admitted elsewhere being a "racist and homophobe, but a tolerant one".
I should clarify that I don't think someone's "I'm offended" level completely measures their rationality, it's just a useful indicator. (They may have a Blue v. Green issue that just hasn't come up yet, or they may fail hard in the many other ways humans can be irrational, or my "this person is offended" detectors might be screwy.) I agree with the assumption that many, and probably most, seemingly rational people can become quite seemingly irrational when prompted with the right subjects. Or as Tesla put it, "The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." Blue v. Green dynamics, and generally group identification, are pretty embedded in our neurological makeup, and to me only seem connected to "being offended" in the way that such a mind state makes it easier to fall into those (and other usually undesirable) modes of thought.
I think all bridges can be burnt given enough time, but not all of them through trying to offend alone. With close friends who share your mental structure of finding it hard to be offended, let alone difficult to express it without a trace of irony, it takes other methods to destroy that friendship. The act of incessant trolling by itself could work depending on the person, regardless of if that person finds anything said offensive or not, simply because if I spend all my time trolling them, then I'm not worth their time.
I read Gulliver's Travels around the same time as "A Modest Proposal", I agree it's still relevant and insightful. I also think you're right about esr's post having a problem by not defining "racist", and leaving the reader to do it themselves. (There are many definitions out there.) But I do think people who define "racist" as including something similar to "citing statistics that don't paint a pretty picture of all the various races, where such a pretty picture would show that such a simple observable never correlates with anything negative, and giving reasonable advice assuming those statistics are accurate" are in error, regardless of the accuracy of the statistics.
Certainly a person will end up taking their experiences with another person into account over time, but I don't see that it is particularly problematic to usually give people the benefit of the doubt (sure, if you don't know a person and they are screaming "fire", maybe still take a second to look for smoke before jumping off the bridge, and so on).
I see some potential for me just reading your comment too narrowly.
One of the best decisions I ever made was to try to take people at face value, and not second guess them or discern imagined motivations (which is usually where we get our sense of offense from in the first place). Not naively, but as a conscious and knowing choice.
Recognizing that good people sometimes say and do bad things. That none of us were born with an instruction manual to life - we're all just trying to figure it out in our own way, and figure out how to extract a bit of happiness out of it. It leads you to a compassionate view of people.
But that doesn't mean you have to like everyone. Nor agree with the disagreeable. Far from it. And I certainly don't bat 1.000 when it comes to practicing it. But it's a sound approach that I think has made me happier.
As a side-effect I also find I am more effective, particularly as there are many people who try to put you off kilter by deliberately causing offense as a tactic in negotiation or just everyday interaction. Where it's an inadvertent style of theirs it means I find it easier to defuse things, and when it's (unpleasantly) deliberate it removes that tactic from their playbook and resets things.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gwx/how_to_not_get_offended/
Not sure whether this addition will be any help to people who are seriously determined not to "let go", though.
Getting offended only works to win an argument if a large enough group of people already agrees with you.
"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."
Occasionally, even now, my "useful habits are shut down", like the article says, for an entire day when someone makes an insensitive or rude comment.
But by logically evaluating the words of the offender, I have often seen that they are the result of ignorance, or plain thoughtlessness rather than an innate lack of respect. Hence, now, when sometimes people say things that I perceive as being culturally insensitive or even mildly racist, I have learned to either let go, or calmly but firmly point out the bias involved in their wording, which has led to a better understanding and rapport between me and the people I interact with here.
Including that sentence doesn't make the fact that it is undisputably a two-ways street go away.
If it's an honest mistake, sure, don't get offended. But if the person does it on purpose, then we're talking about something else altogether and there's no reason to simply "don't get offended". In the later case I'm not offended by what I'm hearing (the person who's going to make me feel inferior ain't born yet) but I'm offended by the fact that the person is trying to be offending on purpose.
There's a very easy way to be sure, you simply gently ask something like: "Are you trying to be offending?"
On the other hand, you always have control over whether you will be offended by what somebody else say, even if they are trolling to an extreme, trying to get a rise out of you. You can decide to let it roll off your shoulders or you can rise to the bait. And the other person may not even be intentionally baiting you.
I have no control over my TV?
Hypothetical you[1] are in a group at a party, talking about current events. Naturally, same-sex marriage comes up. Not wanting to offend people you don't know, you simply say you hope the Supreme Court makes an intelligent decision.
If a member of your group is a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I believe there is a good chance they will get offended, even though you didn't say anything offensive. How could you control that?
1. By hypothetical you, obviously I have no idea what your real beliefs are.
I'm not sure we are actually saying anything different. I just don't think that, in the end, I have any control over somebody else. I can influence. I can change my behavior. But the way they are ultimately going to react is, effectively, completely out of my control.
2. Any person you deal with is also a human and has the same ability to control their reaction to anything.
Therefore, someone's reaction is 100% their choice, just as it is yours. We all have this ability, few of us exercise it. However, it is not my own fault that someone else doesn't exercise this control.
> "Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. [...] When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others."
- Epictetus
Do you actually have any support for that statement, other than as an article of faith? I am honestly not aware of any scientific evidence for it.
-The idea of 'temporary insanity' or 'diminished capacity' in our legal system. When invoked, it normally asserts that a situation was so overwhelming that the subject couldn't react as they normally would. The 'heat of passion' and all that. This implies that generally, we can control our reactions to most things, and uncontrollable reactions are the exception.
-The field of cognitive behavioral therapy, which does has scientific evidence of effectiveness [0], see cites. Perhaps 'control your reaction to anything' is less-than-supported in the case of CBT, but combined with point 1 that should be more than enough to get you started.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy#Ev...
Fundamentally, my point was that there's no scientific basis I can imagine for the idea of free-will, in humans or anywhere else. There's simply no physical law that enables it. (It is, of course, an immensely useful fiction, but that's not my point, which was rather that the entire question of "how to behave rationally" seems to rest on an irrational basis.)
I think there's a level of practice and analysis that has to happen: someone goes out of their way to make a cutting remark and you can recognize, with practice, that they're manipulating your emotions, or projecting their own feelings, or whatever. And of course some people are more naturally resilient than others.
However, it is obviously the case that the reaction is based in part on the stimuli, in a fashion that can be somewhat predicted for the individual. The choice of what stimuli to apply, therefore, can give you some measure of control over the reaction even as the ultimate reaction is determined ultimately by the individual.
You run the risk of becoming a source of cheap entertainment to them, like small children who poke a dog with sticks through a fence. If they do this to you in front of others — especially if they do it subtly — they can cause other people to see believe that you are unreasonable, unreliable, or overemotional. And, if you are in a competitive situation where your loss is their gain, they may be able to cloud your judgment with anger so that you make mistakes, making them better off.
So even when people are trying to offend you on purpose, it isn't always beneficial to let them.
It's a funny situation. You get people who are so vehemently for their cause, but when challenged are the first to act like victims.