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Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

"After all, what's offensive to one person may not be so to another, and they may end up offending you by mistake."

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?"

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You can only control yourself. As such, you will never be able to control whether somebody else gets offended by something you say. You certainly can (and ought) to try not to offend, but, ultimately, you have no control over it.

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.

So, my remote is broken, and occasionally turns off the TV when I try to change the channel, but usually the channel changes. Also, the volume goes up or down by a kind of random amount, but usually in the direction I poke.

I have no control over my TV?

1. You as a human have the ability to control your reaction to anything.

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

> 1. You as a human have the ability to control your reaction to anything.

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.

There are a few paradigms I can think of off the top of my head that support 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...

I don't think the law can be submitted as scientific evidence. (One generally hopes the law is informed by scientific evidence, but even that isn't a given.)

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.)

That depends greatly on what you mean by free-will.

Leaving aside the conscious choice question, we can certainly say that a person makes a choice about their reaction to stimuli (within the range we're talking about) because the reaction is determined by their makeup - that's not at issue.

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.

I can't control having my feelings hurt when people go out of their way to do so. I can't rationalize my way out of it. Sometimes I just have to feel emotions I don't want to feel.

Sure, but the fact that you don't break down crying (or go on a killing spree) when someone goes out of their way to hurt your feelings shows a level of control already.

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.

I'm sorry. I read it a couple times, but I'm really not understanding your analogy. Perhaps you can tell me how you would actually control somebody getting offended. Let's take an example:

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.

In the same way that when I push "volume up" it doesn't always go up, when you adjust your language to minimize offense it doesn't always lead to no offense. Sloppy control is still some control - I fully agree that you don't have perfect control; the comment I replied to said "no control", with the "no" italicized. I don't mean to just be pedantic; it seems central to the larger discussion. If I genuinely have no control over a system, it makes no sense to judge my actions in light of its effect on the system. If I have some control over a system, it makes sense to judge my actions in light of its effect (or expected effect) on the system.

There is certainly a symbiotic effect. And I agree, I need to be empathetic to the person I am interacting with, and, as a result of that empathy, change how I present myself. But these are all things I need to do.

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.

Hm, how would you differentiate qualitatively between control and influence? I think we're likely just disagreeing about words here, but I'm curious as to how you're using them.

> 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".

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.

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