A Modest Proposal Concerning Clinical Research Samples

Tags

no one listen to me about anything, ozy blog post, science side of tumblr

[I have literally no qualifications to have an opinion on this and everyone should take it with many grains of salt.]

If I ran the world, there are two things I would do to make research on human beings more representative and have higher sample sizes.

First, there are lots of cases where there are multiple treatments for a particular condition, but there isn’t any really solid evidence about which one is the best. (Autism treatment, of course, is an example close to my heart, as is antidepressants.) Right now, people are prescribed a variety of treatments, but the data is pretty much useless, because maybe doctors who have rich patients favor Treatment X and doctors who have poor patients favor Treatment Y and then it’s no surprise that people who get Treatment X fare better.

Instead, we should use this as an opportunity to run a randomized controlled trial! If you’re depressed, your doctor should press a button and get a random SSRI to prescribe you. There would be no extra burden on the patient, because you could use the information about effectiveness and side effects that should be in the patient’s medical records anyway. Result: enormous sample sizes with plenty of real-world validity.

Research should of course be consensual, so the patient can opt out and rely on their doctor’s clinical judgment. I think this should require signing a consent form that says “I UNDERSTAND that there is no clear evidence that one treatment is better than another. I UNDERSTAND that my doctor’s clinical judgment may be influenced by many factors, including but not limited to advertising from pharmaceutical companies.”

This would be easiest, of course, to do in a country that, unlike the US, has a national health system. But I think it would be possible in the US as well.

Second, we would recognize that participating in human-subject research is a necessary part of contributing to society, the same way that jury duty is; everyone has to participate in creating science that benefits everyone. Researchers with an academic affiliation, or who are sponsored by a researcher with an academic affiliation, have the right to pull a random sample of people from the voters’ or drivers’ rolls. If they wanted to research a subpopulation of people, they could send out questionnaires (with an online option, because we are in the 21st century here); only the people who are eligible for the study need show up at the study site.

People would have a right to refuse to participate in any studies with an actual risk, such as drug trials, weight loss studies, or studies which involve sensitive issues like violence or stigmatized traits. However, certain studies would be certified by the institutional review board as minimal risk: for example, spending an hour talking with an interviewer about household chore division or filling out a new personality instrument or having your blood pressure taken before and after you watch a video about puppies. IRBs are currently absurdly strict about ethics, so I expect they will not certify anything as minimal risk unless it is actually minimal.

Once again, the result is studies with large, random sample sizes and a complete end to psychology actually being the discipline of Introduction to Psych Student Studies.

Advertisements

Hogwarts House Primaries

Tags

ozy blog post, sortinghatchats, utilitarianism it works bitches

[Edited after publication for clarity.]

I used to get into a lot of really frustrating arguments about normative ethics where the person I was talking to and I were just talking past each other. When I found the Sorting Hat Chats system for classifying personality types, I originally just thought of it as being another elaborate fiction-based classification system, which is another one of my guilty pleasures. Sorting Hat Chats is divided into primary and secondary houses. While the secondary houses are just a new gloss on the standard Hogwarts houses, the primary houses are an inexplicably good system for classifying people’s opinions about normative ethics and scrupulosity. Now, instead of going “okay but that thing is wrong, why are you still arguing about it,” I go “ah, Ravenclaw primary” and move on. So I thought I would write up my understanding of the system somewhere more permanent than Tumblr.

(Note: Sorting Hat Chats house primaries only vaguely resemble the Hogwarts houses they are named after, and it is best to put aside your preconceptions about the houses when considering this system. Similarly, no knowledge of Harry Potter is required to understand the system. While this is my personal understanding of the system, I do not claim to know what the creators of the Sorting Hat Chats system intended and may very well be misunderstanding their original intent. I think it is fairly unlikely that this system covers literally all possible orientations towards normative ethics, but as-is it is useful enough that I think it’s worth sharing.)

Ravenclaw Primary. There is an infallible single-question test for identifying Ravenclaw primaries: “is normative ethics boring and/or completely disconnected from any actual moral reasoning you do in your everyday life?” If your answer is “yes”, you are not a Ravenclaw primary. If your answer is “no”, welcome to Team Ravenclaw.

Ravenclaw primaries believe that you should figure out what the right thing to do is through logic and reason. They often have a particular fondness for moral philosophy and ethical thought experiments. Ravenclaw primaries are particularly likely to identify as utilitarians, Kantians, and virtue ethicists. Other sorts of primaries only rarely identify as these categories unless they have to regularly talk to Ravenclaw primaries. For some reason, Ravenclaw primaries have a particular attraction to Catholicism and Judaism; I suspect I would know a lot of Ravenclaw primary Muslims if I knew more Muslims.

Please note that “Ravenclaw primary” is not the same thing as “moral realist.” Many Ravenclaw primaries are not moral realists, although they have a distinct tendency to fall into the “error theorist in metaethics class, utilitarian in normative ethics class” bucket. A Ravenclaw moral non-realist can be recognized by (a) the fact that they really really care about the difference between error theory and noncognitivism and (b) their insistence on trying to come up with some ethical system from first principles anyway.

It is commonly assumed that all effective altruists are Ravenclaw primaries. This is not actually true, although we do have a lot of them.

Gryffindor Primary. Like Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries care about principles. Unlike Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries tend to follow their hearts and their intuitive sense of what goodness is; they don’t view moral intuitions as raw material for a systematized moral system, but as justifications in themselves.

It is common for Gryffindor primaries to pursue certain values, such as justice or kindness or freedom or the flourishing of others or their family or their own happiness. It is also common for Gryffindor primaries to feel a strong intuitive sense that one should follow certain rules, such as letting everyone speak freely or avoiding blasphemy or being loyal to your friends.

Gryffindor primaries are perfectly capable of systematizing; a Gryffindor primary who intuitively values the greatest good for the greatest number will probably use a lot of numbers to figure out what the greatest good for the greatest number is. However, when it comes right down to it, when asked to justify their beliefs, a Gryffindor primary will go “because it’s WRONG”. When pressed, they will say “because it JUST IS. It’s OBVIOUS.” Occasionally they will engage in circular reasoning like “you should pursue beautiful things because they are beautiful!”

Not all Gryffindor primaries have an ethical system that involves caring about people. Oscar Wilde and Patti Smith are both excellent examples of Gryffindor primaries who are devoted to beauty and art.

I am a Gryffindor primary.

Hufflepuff Primary. Unlike Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs care about people. They believe in the inherent worth and dignity of individuals, and want to engage in moral behavior because they have empathy for others. (A Ravenclaw, on the other hand, would start wondering how you could measure worth and dignity, and a Gryffindor might decide they’re pursuing the principle of INHERENT WORTH AND DIGNITY FOR ALL HUMANKIND! without ever really caring about individual humans.)

Hufflepuffs are perhaps best modeled with the idea of circles of concern. Some Hufflepuffs have very small circles: perhaps they care about their family, or their friends, or themselves, or anyone who happens to be personally suffering in front of them at this moment. Some have larger circles: they care about a community, or people who have suffered the same thing they have suffered, or people who also practice their religion, or their country. Some Hufflepuff primaries’ circles embrace all of humankind, or all sentient beings, or ecosystems.

It is common for Hufflepuff primaries to have multiple circles and to care more about people in the inner circles than people in the outer circles. A Hufflepuff primary of my acquaintance occasionally comments that they care equally about their spouse and the entire continent of Africa.

In my experience, effective altruist Hufflepuff primaries often have a formative experience that causes them to have empathy with animals or people in the developing world: for example, they may have visited a developing country, gone to a museum exhibit that included an exhibit of rice equivalent to how much a person in the developing world eats in a day, or viewed a Mercy for Animals factory farm video.

Slytherin primary. Of the house primaries, Slytherins are the most likely to be parsed as amoral. The Slytherin primary cares about individuals: they almost always care about themselves; they may also care about their friends, partners, coworkers, or family. (Interestingly, some Slytherin primaries generalize this and agree that everyone else should care about their families too, sometimes promoting this principle at some cost to themselves; my father, a Slytherin primary, threatened to quit his job if one of his employees was fired for missing work because his child was in the hospital.)

A rough guideline for distinguishing Slytherin primaries from Hufflepuff primaries is that Hufflepuff primaries naturally care about groups (“my family”) while Slytherin primaries naturally care about individuals (“my dad, my mom, my sister, my husband, my child”). Hufflepuff primaries also tend to be more other-centered (“I care about you because you’re suffering”), while Slytherin primaries tend to be more self-centered (“I care about you because you are one of the six people I have chosen to care about”).

Most Slytherin primaries are not particularly altruistic. They sometimes engage in activism or charity donation if it’s in their own interest or the interest of the individuals they care about: for example, a trans Slytherin primary may advocate for trans rights; a Slytherin primary whose partner died of cancer may raise money to fight cancer. A small number of Slytherin primaries may take up altruism for reasons expressed eloquently in the following quote from Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men:

All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!

It can sometimes be hard to determine someone’s primary. A Ravenclaw primary may behave similarly to a Hufflepuff primary if they’ve been reasoned into it; a Gryffindor primary who believes in the principle of helping people close to you may be difficult to tell apart from a Slytherin. But in my experience, if you question why someone believes what they believe thoroughly, you can almost always classify them into a house primary.

Why is this useful? First, you will avoid frustrating arguments because you are aware that other primaries differ from you. Slytherin primaries can recognize that altruism is psychologically important to other people and, while they don’t have to understand it, they do have to accept it. Ravenclaw primaries can avoid patiently repeating thought-experiment-based arguments to people who respond with “huh, that’s confusing” and then keep doing what they were going to do anyway. Gryffindor primaries can stop having arguments that end in “YOU SHOULDN’T DO WRONG THINGS BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG, WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND.” Hufflepuff primaries will stop explaining that, you see, these people are people and they suffer and you should have empathy for them.

It can also help you strategize about how to convince someone to adopt your values. In my experience, philosophical arguments tend to only move Ravenclaw primaries. Gryffindor primaries respond best to Secular-Solstice-style attempts to make doing the right thing seem grand and beautiful. Hufflepuff primaries respond best to things that trigger empathy, such as Give Directly Live. Slytherin primaries… look, if you can appeal to their self-interest, do, but most of the time you’d be better off locating a Ravenclaw and leaving the Slytherin to do their own thing.

I also think the primaries have very different kinds of scrupulosity, and tactics that work to address one primary’s scrupulosity issues are incoherent or useless with another primary. Sorting Hat Chats calls scrupulosity issues a “burned primary.” I’ve noticed miscommunication particularly with Gryffindor and Ravenclaw primaries, perhaps because they’re the only ones I’ve seen burning around me.

Burned Ravenclaws lose faith in their ability to find the truth at all. They may be troubled by moral nihilism, the inability to understand everything that’s going on in the world, or the fact that any action has many unknowable consequences and you’ll never be able to know for sure if you did the consequentially right thing. I’d add that Ravenclaws often have guilt issues if they adopt a moral system they can’t live up to; that’s relatively treatable through persuading the Ravenclaw to adopt a more livable system.

Burned Gryffindors are no longer able to trust their own internal compass to point them to what’s right. The burned Gryffindor sometimes develops a coping mechanism, such as relying on a person or a system to tell them what’s right; this can allow them to function, but often makes them feel depressed and soulless, and does not fail gracefully if the person or system abuses their power. Some worry that every moral claim anyone makes is actually correct and spend hours worrying that perhaps they’re doing great evil by watching a movie that at least one person on the Internet disapproves of. In my experience as a recovering burned Gryffindor, the solution is not to try to come up with less demanding rules or force yourself to stop listening to random people’s moral claims by force of will; instead, it is to get in touch with your own felt sense of morality, whatever that is, and fiercely defend your ability to make moral decisions for no other reason except that it is right.

I have not personally encountered a burned Hufflepuff or Slytherin. (The Slytherins do need to cut it out with the “have you considered becoming a Slytherin?” approach to scrupulosity issues though.) According to Sorting Hat Chats, a burned Slytherin feels it is too dangerous to have loved ones or value anyone but themselves, while a burned Hufflepuff aches to be allowed to have a community and care about more people but for whatever reason feels this is not possible. I’m interested in burned and formerly burned Slytherin/Hufflepuff opinions on how correct that is, as well as burned and formerly burned Ravenclaws and Gryffindors who want to add new experiences to my analysis.

Entitlement, Covert Contracts, Social Libertarianism, and Related Concepts

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

One of my most unpopular opinions is that “entitlement” is actually a useful concept.

It makes sense that people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to it. “Entitled” is one of those words (like “patriarchy” and “rational”) that it is useful to have in your mental toolkit but if you ever find yourself using it you need to rephrase your argument. More on this later; it ought to show up later in the essay but I wanted to put in “I know that there are good reasons for you to hate the word ‘entitled'” in the forlorn hope that this would keep people from writing angry comments before they read the post.

I think that entitlement is a useful concept when thinking about the interplay between these three concepts:

1. Basic rights and expectations for any relationship.
2. Boundaries and needs you have in some specific relationship.
3. Needs that are completely unreasonable.

There is a very common model of social interaction which you might call “social libertarianism,” beloved by poly people, sex-positive people, and assholes who don’t want to get called on being assholes. Under social libertarianism, people have sets of needs and boundaries, and the goal of social interaction is to find someone who can fulfill your needs and whose needs you can fulfill, without violating either side’s boundaries. The only misdeed is to deliberately violate another person’s stated boundaries. No set of needs or boundaries are right or wrong, but some may be incompatible with other people’s. If you enjoy screaming curse words at other people, then all you have to do is find someone else who likes having curse words screamed at them, and the problem is solved.

Social libertarianism often comes from a good impulse. Many people generalize from “I would be unhappy in this sort of relationship” to “everyone who is in this sort of relationship is unhappy and being exploited and a victim of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here.” Social libertarianism has built into it the idea that people are different from each other, an insight which is all too often forgotten. If you’re the sort of person whose perfectly happy relationships get accused of being unhappy and exploitative and only existing because of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here, there’s a natural tendency to embrace social libertarianism.

But I don’t think social libertarianism works as a model, because it is in fact actually possible to be an asshole.

For example, if I were friends with someone and they decided to tell me my hair was ugly, my blog is stupid, I would never fulfill any of my dreams, and all my friends secretly hate me, I would not say “I see I have not set the boundary with you that you don’t get to insult me at all my most vulnerable points; my mistake, in the future please don’t do that.” I would say “never darken my doorstep again.” This is because it is actually wrong to insult your friends. I don’t have to set the explicit “don’t insult me” boundary; it is understood. Similarly, I might specify that a car I’m selling is red, but I wouldn’t specify that it has wheels. All cars are supposed to have wheels. It’s a basic expectation.

There are actually quite a lot of these in relationships. “Don’t share people’s private information without their consent.” “Don’t forbid someone from being friends with someone else just because you don’t like them.” “Don’t tell people they are bad people for having a feeling.” Spend a few hours reading any advice column or relationship advice book and you will discover hundreds of basic rights you never knew you were respecting. (Years later, I remain boggled at More than Two spending at least a page patiently explaining why it is wrong to veto a partner’s relationship because it makes them too happy and that makes you jealous.)

I realize the concept of “unspoken rules that are wrong to break” is going to give some of my more socially phobic readers hives. To which I say, as reassurance: this is literally all stuff you learned in kindergarten, it’s “play fair” and “don’t hit people” and “be nice.” Most people get through life fine without ever being confused about this stuff. Some people are actually ignorant, particularly autistic people and people who grew up in abusive or fucked-up homes: I myself was confused until relatively recently about why I shouldn’t share other people’s private information. But if you are, most people will forgive you if you apologize, explain yourself, and don’t do it again. There’s a difference between a mistake and malice, and “don’t treat people’s mistakes like they’re deliberate attempts to hurt you” is one of the basic expectations for any relationship.

On the other end, sometimes people have expectations that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. For example, if I don’t watch myself, I tend to expect that if I just do everything right then everyone in the whole entire world will like me. So I feel a lot of social phobia: if someone dislikes me, it means I have done something wrong, and I need to self-flagellate about my wrongness and carefully search all of my actions until I determine what horribly wrong thing I have done.

I do think, in a sense, my social phobia is a form of entitlement. (Not everyone’s social phobia is entitlement, of course. Probably most people’s isn’t. But mine is.) You can tell, because sometimes I get fed up with the whole self-flagellating/navel-gazing business and instead start being unreasonably angry. “How dare you dislike me!” I think. “I am a good person and I deserve universal adoration! I should come up with the most cutting insult possible so that you will regret your decision to have any negative opinions about me whatsoever.”

Like most entitled thoughts, this line of thought is a reasonable thing to want. Being disliked feels bad; that’s why we have a bunch of social rules about not explicitly saying when you don’t dislike someone. It’s natural to want to avoid ever having to experience this unpleasant thing. The problem is when a natural desire turns to an expectation that the world should be this way.

Also like most entitled thoughts, when you actually explain it it is balls crazy. Like, pretty much the only way it would be justified to think this is how people work is if you lived on a desert island for your entire life and learned about people solely through your copy of the Sims 2. Everyone has flaws, which means that everyone is going to be disliked for their flaws by someone. Sometimes people dislike each other for silly reasons: some people are going to dislike me no matter what I do because my writing style grates on them, or I remind them of their horrible ex, or they think my name is pretentious. Even if I were absolutely perfect in every way and somehow managed to talk everyone out of disliking me for silly reasons, horrible people exist. I’m not going to get Homophobe McNazi to like me, which is okay, because Homophobe McNazi’s approval would fill me with shame.

One very common form of entitled thoughts is “covert contracts,” a concept which I learned from the Red Pill and intend to rescue from the horrible misogynists who currently own it. A covert contract is when you make up a deal inside your head where if you do something, then in return someone else will do what you want, and then never tell the other person that this is the deal.

Examples of covert contracts: “if I never disagree with you then you will like me.” (This one I am annoyingly prone to.) “If I do the dishes then my housemate will sweep the floors.” “If I refer you to my company, then you’ll do really well on the interview and impress my boss with your good judgment.” “If I spend lots of time trying to solve your personal problems, then you will be my friend.”

The problems of covert contracts are many:

• The other person might not even want the thing you’re giving them. (Maybe your housemate doesn’t care about the dishes. Maybe your attempts to solve other people’s problems are actually busybody meddling.)
• The other person has literally no idea that this contract exists, and therefore will only fulfill it by coincidence or telepathy.
• You didn’t give the other person a chance to say “no” and they might not want to take this deal. (Maybe they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to do well on the interview. Maybe your housemate really fucking hates sweeping.)
• The other person thought they were getting a favor for free and is going to be really annoyed at you when they discover that you in fact made a deal with them under false pretenses of doing a favor.
• Sometimes the contracts are just balls crazy. (If someone likes you on the condition that you never disagree with them, you don’t want to be their friend.)

The solution here is twofold:

1. Do nice things when you want to do nice things for their own sake, not because you expect to get something out of it.
2. If you want to make some sort of exchange (dishes for sweeping, referral for good interview performance, therapy for friendship), tell people about it ahead of time and give them the chance to say no.

(In Guess Culture, exchanges are often not explicitly discussed, but instead negotiated some other way. I am not Guess Culture enough to give advice about how to negotiate this, but I would suggest that your implicit contracts should definitely avoid the pitfalls outlined above.)

So hopefully at this point you can see why I think “entitlement” is a useful concept which identifies a specific class of distorted thoughts that cause harm to oneself and others. Why, then, is the term “entitlement” so universally despised, at least by the non-asshole population?

Two reasons. First, some people say that people are “entitled” when the thing they are is “sad that they can’t have a desirable thing.” It is true that it’s very unreasonable to expect someone to date you even if they don’t want to, but you still get to be sad that they don’t want to date you! It is okay to be sad about the way the world is! This is an awful misuse of the term and people who do it should be hung up by their thumbs.

Second, and more perniciously, it is used to cover up arguments about which of the three categories– basic expectations, expectations that can be negotiated, and completely unreasonable expectations– something is in.

Recently I was watching an old John Oliver clip about the NCAA’s refusal to pay its players. An NCAA spokesperson characterized the student-athletes protesting not being paid as “entitled athletes”. You notice he didn’t say what the student-athletes felt they were entitled to, because saying that would immediately reveal that his position was bullshit. Student-athletes think they should get paid because they are destroying their bodies to earn other people millions of dollars. No fucking shit they’re entitled to it. This is one of those “basic expectation” things. If someone is profiting off your labor, then you are entitled to a cut of it, and you are certainly entitled to not have all of your possible employers form a cartel for the specific purpose of ensuring you don’t get paid.

But if he just says “entitled athletes,” then everyone is like “ah, yes, entitled athletes, hooking up with cheerleaders without condoms and getting drunk and vandalizing buildings” and they fail to notice the bit where the student-athletes’ complaint is actually totally reasonable.

This happens all the time.

So I would suggest never using the word “entitled” without following it with the word “to”. Very very few people think they are entitled to literally everything they want. “Entitled” by itself should sound to you as strange as saying “in love” by itself: in love with whom? Entitled to what? And given people’s perfectly reasonable objections to the term, even if you personally use it in your thinking, it might be best just to never use the word at all, instead replacing it with something like “so-and-so has a distorted thought that they deserve Thing.”

Keep Your Identity Large

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

In his famous essay Keep Your Identity Small, Paul Graham argues that the reason arguments about religion, politics, and programming languages get so heated is that they’re parts of a person’s identity. It isn’t just about the merits of this or that policy or this or that programming language, it’s about who you are as a person. Therefore, he suggests, to be less stupid, avoid identifying as anything: be “a person who uses Lisp sometimes” rather than “a Lisp programmer.”

I disagree.

The problem is that, as Sarah Constantin writes:

Dasein [identity] is what you do when you assert what it means to be human, what it means to be you, what it means to be a member of your community.  Dasein is self-definition.  And, in particular, self-definition with respect to a social context. Where do I fit in society? Who is my tribe? Who am I relative to other people? What’s my type?

These are really basic psychological needs for a lot of people. As Sarah writes later, identity is about self-expression, self-definition, self-assertion. Of course, not everyone shares these needs: not everyone needs to know who they are and where they fit into the social fabric. There are a lot of different kinds of minds. But having a self-model, a sense of yourself, is a legitimate need for many people.

Of course, if you have that need, and you try to eliminate your sense of identity, your brain isn’t just going to let you go about not having a basic psychological need filled. Probably you’re going to have an identity anyway, you’re just not going to be consciously aware that you have it. And that means you can’t take any steps to compensate for the ways your identity might be biasing you. You can’t take a step back and say “hey, I know I get emotional about programming languages because I identify as a Lisp programmer, so I should take a step back and deliberately notice the good parts of this other heathen programming language.” Instead, you just say “Lisp is the best language for all purposes! You should believe me because I don’t have an identity as a Lisp programmer so I’m objective!”

It is always dangerous to have a self-image as being objective, because all too often one acquires the self-image before one acquires the objectivity.

Of course, the criticisms Graham says still apply: if people’s identities are getting wrapped up in an argument, it’s really hard to have the argument in a remotely civil and enlightening way. So how do we minimize the harm of having an identity while still getting the benefits?

Identify as things that aren’t based on empirical claims. If you identify as a libertarian, then you’re signing on to a bunch of empirical claims, like “the minimum wage is bad for poor people” and “environmental regulations cause more harm than good” and “police officers abuse people’s civil liberties.” If it turns out that actually police officers are totally nice to black people everywhere, this might be a threat to your identity as a libertarian, and then you’re going to have flamewars about the subject.

Compare this to an identity as a baker. I am really having a hard time thinking of empirical claims related to being a baker. “Bread is yummy”? “It is a good use of one’s time to knead things”? “Being paleo is maybe a bad idea and maybe a reason for creativity in the use of gluten-free flours”? But “baker” serves all the same purposes of self-definition (you are a person who can make really delicious cakes) and understanding oneself within a social context (you are a person who feeds people such as Ozy delicious cake). A baker self-identity is free epistemically.

Identify as things you want to preserve. Many effective altruists are concerned about values drift. They start out valuing altruism, become an investment banker so they can donate more money, and wind up valuing $300 sushi dinners and designer ties. Fortunately, identity tends to keep things fixed. That’s awful for facts– you want to be convinced by new evidence– but great for values– you want to keep your own values and not other people’s. Therefore, it can be useful to identify as an altruist, or an artist, or a family man, or an ambitious person, or a hedonist, or some other value you wish to preserve.

There’s a failure mode here. It’s very easy to have an identity as a good person, and then when people threaten your identity as a good person you lash out at them in the same way that Lisp programmers lash out when people suggest Lisp isn’t the best programming language. This can lead to results even more disastrous than bad arguments about politics. So if you’re going to identify as a good person, it’s really really important that your definition of “good person” isn’t “a person who always does the right thing” but “a person who notices their mistakes and tries to fix them.” A similar concern applies to artists, family men, and so on: it’s important to make sure that your definition of artist is not “a person who makes great art” but “a person who values their art and puts a lot of effort into it.”

Keep your identity large. Don’t just identify as a Lisp programmer. Identify as a poet, a mother, a Communist, a Jew, a weightlifter, an altruist, and a Lisp programmer.

If the only identity you have is Lisp programmer, then it’s terrifying to think about not being a Lisp programmer. How will you know who you are? How can you relate to other people? On the other hand, if you have a lot of identities, you have something to fall back on. Even if you have to switch programming languages, your children still exist, you can still benchpress twice your body weight, you still light Shabbat candles, and you still spend an absurd amount of time explaining that your preferred economic system wouldn’t have any gulags at all not even a little bit and capitalism has killed more people than socialism anyway. Your sense of self in a social context remains secure. You can admit the flaws in Lisp or that prices are an elegant means of solving coordination problems, without threatening who you are as a person– because who you are as a person isn’t grounded in just one thing.

Atheists With A God-Shaped Hole

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post

[This post was prompted by Ryan, a Patreon backer. One Patreon backer who gives $5 or more will be selected each month to prompt a story or blog post about a topic of their choosing.]

I’m an atheist with a God-shaped hole inside my heart.

A lot of people take their God-shaped holes to be arguments in favor of the existence of God. C. S. Lewis argued, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

But this is quite silly. Of course there are desires that exist without satisfaction. Some people want to fuck catgirls. Other people want to be catgirls. Still other people want to never die. I myself want to fly. Indeed, C. S. Lewis is talking about desires without satisfaction right now, he has just decided to make up a story about how they can be satisfied really. By this argument, I could prove that all tomatoes are green because, you see, the red ones are actually green in some other world.

But the interesting thing about one’s God-shaped hole is that it often is filled. Many religious people find that their God-shaped holes are filled through prayer, meditation, religious services, service to others, reading their holy books, having mystical experiences, etc. I will call this category “spiritual experiences”, to be as broad as possible.

There is, of course, nothing supernatural about spiritual experiences, because there’s nothing supernatural at all. Spiritual experiences are a thing that brains do. If you take LSD, you can get them somewhat consistently. I myself had a mystical experience at a Cobra Starship concert once, which was very instructive, because while previously I might have converted due to the intensity of my mystical experiences I am pretty sure that God, however mysterious Her ways, does not talk to people in the form of mediocre dance-pop bands.

So, given that spiritual experiences aren’t supernatural, there is no reason to believe that they ought to be the sole property of believers in the supernatural. Spiritual experiences are a human thing; an atheist is as entitled to them as anything else.

Of course, this is easier for some atheists than others. There are lots of spiritual experiences that can be easily transferred to an atheistic context. Taking long walks in nature. Listening to music. Volunteering at a soup kitchen. Listening to music. Reading poetry. Meditating. Attending a UU church. Certain kinds of BDSM and New-Age-y sex stuff. Being a member of an atheist Alcoholics Anonymous group who turns over your life to the Group Of Drunks.

But there are a lot of desires it’s hard to meet in a secular context. You can’t trust that the universe is being governed by someone who’s watching out for you, that even if something’s going wrong now it is all for the best in the end. You can’t talk to someone extraordinarily powerful who loves you and wants what’s best for you. You can’t resign yourself to the will of a deity who doesn’t exist.

I used to pray. I don’t pray anymore.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with praying as an atheist. You’re basically talking to yourself. If that comforts you, it’s a quite harmless habit. And the sense of guidance one often receives while praying is– like all spiritual experiences– naturalistic. I find that, when I sit quietly and really think about my problems, I often know what I want to do about them; it’s just that in everyday life I am lazy and grouchy and prone to despair, and that makes it difficult for me to do the things I know damn well I want to do. As a religious person, it is easy to think of that knowledge as a grace from God, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it really is.

But I found, over time, that when I prayed as an atheist I knew that God wasn’t there.

For a surprisingly long time, that wasn’t entirely an impediment. It was less satisfying to say “God, forgive me” and know I am talking to myself, but less satisfying is not the same as not satisfying. There was still comfort.

I found that, as I settled more into my secularism, my values changed. Prayers for intercession I did not pray even when I believed; it seemed to me that an omniscient God knew his affairs better than I did. But then I could not praise the beauty of the world without thinking of the senseless suffering in nature, the parasites and the predators and the children dying before they ever lived. Some suffering, perhaps, is a result of human choices and free will; other suffering, perhaps, offers an opportunity to develop virtue and strength. I can see this argument for human suffering. But I cannot see what sort of virtue is developed by a wolf eating a fawn alive, nor how the wolf is exercising its free will if you gave it no other way to eat.

I also developed an ethic of, morally, standing on my own two feet: I desire to do what I want and not do what I don’t want; but because I am a frail human, I often do things the other way around. It grew strange to ask Christ for forgiveness. If I choose my own moral code, my own desires, as the measure against which I test my actions, then the person who is sitting in judgment about me is myself. There is no point in asking for forgiveness from God, because I am concerned about the violation of my own ethics and not his, and anyway he doesn’t exist. My habit of prayer, I worried, reinforced an attitude of failing to take responsibility for my own beliefs.

And then one day I realized that the number of modifications I had to make to prayer to make it work implied that I ought not pray at all. And I stopped, not without sadness.

For me, what helped was finding alternate ways to meet my spiritual needs. I’ve found Secular Solstice to be a tremendous help. I missed singing and ritual with a bunch of people who share my values, and now I get to do that. (Unfortunately, Secular Solstice– in the Bay Area, at least– is still far too white Protestant for my tastes. More call-and-response, please.)

I think part of the reason Secular Solstice works for me is the story.

Secular Solstice has a lot of what one might call mythological elements. The universe does not love us and does not hate us; it is pitilessly neutral in our little struggles. There is no guarantee that we will win. But there is also no guarantee that we will lose. And through courage and rationality and love and all of the other virtues, we have won great victories: the eradication of smallpox; the invention of science; the reduction of the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, over the past two hundred years, from four-fifths of the world’s population to one-tenth. And each of us can play a role, even if small, in advancing these victories: we can eke out a little more knowledge, help people who would not otherwise be helped, support others so they have the strength to keep going.

For me, that fills the same emotional role as the great Christian mythology of Fall and Redemption and Salvation. It fills my God-shaped hole. It also has the virtue of being true.

I do not believe that the myth that moves me will move everyone else; we all have different emotional needs. Perhaps there is no true thing that will fill some people’s emotional needs, and their choice is between half-believing lies and being quite unsatisfied. But I think it’s worth investigating.

Meditation For People Who Hate Meditating

Tags

dbt, ozy blog post, rationality

[content warning: exercise]

I hate mindfulness. Hate it, hate it, hate it. The ten minutes I spend meditating is easily the least pleasant ten minutes of my day.

Unfortunately, I am also a borderline, and mindfulness meditation is the one consistent element in every successful treatment for borderline personality disorder. So here we are.

Over the past few months, I have learned two useful things about meditation that make it a horrible and helpful experience instead of a horrible and pointless experience.

First: meditation is not relaxing. Well, evidently it is relaxing for some people, because every time I read about meditation there’s some asshole being like “I love meditation! I’m so relaxed afterward! It really gives me some time to myself! It’s so important to take some time away from your busy schedule and just be.” This always fills me with seething hatred. I don’t support this seething hatred, mind you. I hope that people who feel relaxed from meditation find their bliss and reach all their goals in life, those fucking douchebags.

For me, meditation is like weightlifting. While exercise can be fun, when you are on your last rep of squatting The Heaviest Thing, you are probably not relaxed and thinking about all the awesome time you’re taking for yourself. You are probably like “oh god, oh FUCK, why am I DOING this, I am ACTUALLY CLINICALLY INSANE, I am NEVER GOING TO EXERCISE AGAIN.” But then throughout the rest of your day you are smarter and more energetic, you can carry in all the groceries by yourself, and you feel happier– if only because, no matter what happens for the rest of your day, you are never going to squat anything again.

(Unfortunately, unlike weightlifting, meditation does not give me a sense of accomplishment at beating my previous successes, a surge of endorphins kicking my anxiety in the ass for hours afterwards, or sick biceps. If this state of affairs changes, I will write a new blog post.)

Meditation is like weightlifting for your brain. It feels absolutely miserable in the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. Just like when you lift weights you’re training your ability to pick up heavy things and put them down, when you meditate (at least for the kind of meditating I do for my BPD) you’re training metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to think about and control your own thinking. Which is skills like:

• recognizing that just because you think everyone in the world hates you doesn’t mean that everyone in the world actually hates you
• realizing that worrying about whether your train is going to be late will not actually cause your train to be on time, and then actually not worrying about it instead of making yourself miserable for no reason
• focusing on the movie you’re watching or the stupidly expensive cheese you’re eating, instead of your to-do list or the dumb thing that someone said on the Internet
• noticing when you are compulsively refreshing Facebook and not doing that
• noticing when you feel the urge to go to and then compulsively refresh Facebook, and then not doing that

So, useful shit, especially if you are a person like me whose brain is naturally like a toddler with a kazoo who has eaten nothing but sugar in the past 24 hours and who has just been taken to a grocery store.

Training metacognition does not have to be fun or relaxing! In fact, it might be wildly unpleasant, especially if you are on Team Emotionally Dysregulated People With Monkey Minds. It’s okay. All those people who enjoy meditation are a great object of loving-kindness meditation.

Second: if the specific reason that your meditation is wildly unpleasant is that you normally block out all your emotions because you feel super-terrible all the time and then once you meditate you are aware of how super-terrible you feel all the time and you try to return your mind to the object of meditation but that just makes you feel worse and worse and then it starts building on itself and then you start crying and have a panic attack–

Well, that happened to me a lot, until I tried a technique from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.

When you start noticing you feel like shit, but before you get to the part where you start crying and have a panic attack, just refocus your attention on the fact that you feel like shit. Make that your object of meditation. Try to notice as many details as you can about it. Where is it located in your body? What physical sensations are associated with it? Observe your thoughts about it.

You want to approach this with an attitude of acceptance and compassion. That means that instead of being all like “ugh, why am I feeling miserable, I’m supposed to be relaxing, this is the worst, I’m so unhappy, I never want to do this again” you want to think “welp, this is what’s happening in my brain right now, I guess. I feel terrible. I hurt all over. That is what’s happening in this moment.” That’s the acceptance bit. And you also want to try to feel a sense of care and concern about yourself: like you’re a little wounded bird that’s in a lot of pain. It’s not a good thing that you’re hurting. It’s actually really bad. You are in pain, and that totally sucks, and you wish that you weren’t.

If your pain gets worse, keep observing it. If it gets better, you can refocus on your breath or your mantra or sending lovingkindness to beings everywhere or whatever your object of meditation is, and then once again when your unhappiness starts distracting you from your object of meditation return to paying attention to your unhappiness.

This is training the skills of self-compassion and actually feeling your pain instead of numbing yourself out. If you’re having this problem, those are probably pretty important metacognitive skills for you to have! (I know it seems like “feeling pain” is a terrible skill, but (a) you are still miserable if you are miserable and constantly distracting yourself from your misery (b) knowing that you’re in pain is necessary to be able to make plans to fix your pain. You can still distract yourself if you need to, but having this skill just means you distract yourself when you think it’s a good idea instead of all the time.) So you shouldn’t be upset at yourself if this is happening; it’s a great opportunity to practice.

(I had the worst time Googling for solutions for this problem, by the way. So I hope this manages to get in the top ten Google results for “adverse effect” “meditation” in case it helps someone else.)

 

An Emotion Regulation Technique That Works For Me

Tags

bpd, dbt, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[epistemic effort: I tried this and it worked for me, but different people’s brains work differently]

Some people theorize that borderlines experience a dialectical dilemma of unrelenting crisis and inhibited grieving. Basically, borderlines both have constant overwhelming emotions and self-destructive behavior, and also avoid emotions that they are frightened of or overwhelmed by. Although these seem like opposites, in reality they are mutually reinforcing: an emotion that is avoided often reappears as a different, overwhelming emotion. This is one of the reasons borderlines often have emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the situation, like feeling ashamed when someone hurts you, or getting angry at people they mistreat.

So that made me wonder if trying to experience emotions I’m avoiding would make me have fewer overwhelming emotions. And the answer is yes!

If I’m experiencing one of my usual overwhelming emotions– anxiety or shame– I identify the trigger of the emotion. For instance, recently, I was feeling a lot of shame about how much of my life I’ve spent being depressed instead of doing anything that was more fun or improved the world. Then I ask myself whether the emotion I’m feeling makes sense. Does it make sense to feel shame about how much of my life I’ve spent depressed? Not really! I don’t expect anyone to reject me for this. And I don’t think it makes me into a fundamentally bad or evil person, particularly given how many of my thoughts were about fun things I didn’t get to do. Not doing fun things does not make you evil.

What emotion would make sense?

Sadness. Loss. Grief.

There are years of my life I spent doing nothing but refreshing social media. There are opportunities I didn’t take advantage of and won’t get again: interesting classes I barely passed or never took, professors I didn’t talk to, college events I never went to. There’s a big gap in my resume I’m not going to be able to fill. There are skills I could have acquired, friendships I could have made or nurtured, experiences I could have had, and instead I spent the time being depressed.

That really sucks.

Next, I figured out how to act in accordance with the justified emotion. In the case of my sadness, I asked my husband Topher to hold me while I cried and not comfort me. His natural urge is to reassure me that this sort of thing happens to everyone and I still have fifty years of my life ahead of me and so on, but what I really needed was to grieve. It felt a little artificial at first– I deliberately thought “it is sad that I didn’t get to spend much time at college”— but eventually I wound up feeling very sad about it and cried for about half an hour.

This works astonishingly well for me! For instance, previously, I’d felt shame about that for a few hours a week, but since I cried about it I haven’t had a recurrence of the shame, and it’s been a couple of months. So if you have overwhelming emotions that don’t seem to go with the things that trigger them, try this! Maybe it’ll work for you.

Thoughts on CFAR’s New Focus

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality

[attention conservation notice: Intended for a rationalist audience, and likely to be of little interest to non-rationalists]
[epistemic effort: I discussed the topic with friends and will update this blog post in response to criticism I consider reasonable]

CFAR has recently pivoted to focusing more on AI safety. I feel a lot of qualms about this, which I wanted to write up in a blog post. I had previously had qualms about cooperation and rationality as the common interest of many causes; however, I think this post addresses my concerns and made me significantly less worried. However, I do have another concern.

I want to make my positionality clear here, because I think it does affect my thinking. Most notably, I am highly uncertain about AI risk, which leads me to consider it not to be one of the most effective cause areas. For obvious reasons, this increases my qualms. I have tried to not say anything that I wouldn’t endorse if CFAR were discussing about pivoting to a focus on global poverty rather than existential risk; however, I encourage my readers to account for my bias when they assess my arguments.

I think that it is possible to create a teachable art of rationality (as in domain-general thinking skills which improve one’s ability to reason in a wide variety of fields), but that we currently do not have one. I believe that a teachable art of rationality would positively affect the world by causing people to make fewer dumbass decisions. For this reason, I care about CFAR’s success. However, while I believe that CFAR likely has a positive effect on its attendees, I’m not convinced that this isn’t due to the Dodo bird verdict: that is, I think it’s likely that CFAR has positive effects because they are kind, empathetic, high-status people who want other people to improve, not because they have necessarily figured out rationality skills yet. To be clear, this is in no way an insult to CFAR: developing an entire new field of psychology is really hard! However, this does mean that I am not a CFAR alum nor did I have any interest in attending CFAR. For this reason, their post making me less likely to want to attend CFAR might not be particularly interesting to CFAR; after all, I wasn’t going to attend there anyway.

CFAR and MIRI have always been very closely linked; for instance, CFAR and MIRI share an office. To the extent that this blog post makes public what was always true, I think it’s good and virtuous; honesty and transparency are an important part of creating evidence-backed charities. Nevertheless, I think that this thing being true is likely to be bad.

Imagine that instead of saying that they were focusing on AI risk, CFAR said that they’d decided that CFAR as an organization would plan and act as though deworming charities were the most important ones to donate to. For this reason, they would prioritize recruitment of people working in the public health sphere (in addition to effective altruists and rationality geeks more generally). They would prioritize skills that are useful in deworming, such as doing expected-value calculations in high-risk situations and avoiding scope insensitivity. Their metrics include the effects their graduates have on deworming.

I have an issue with this hypothetical. Deworming charities being the most important is a specific empirical claim; to believe deworming is the one of the most important causes, one must believe that the studies were well-conducted, that it’s likely the effects aren’t spurious, that they generalize to the locations where deworming is happening, etc. Similarly, the importance of AI risk is also a specific empirical claim: to believe that AI risk is one of the most important causes, one must believe that it’s likely that artificial intelligence will be developed, that it is possible for people currently working on AI to have a positive effect, etc.

But it’s possible that deworming isn’t one of the best interventions. For instance, imagine that the deworming studies were very poorly done. While an ordinary person might not be able to tell that they were poorly done, it’s obvious to someone who knows how to read a study. Now imagine that knowing how to read a study is, in fact, a very important rationality skill. (I’m not claiming either that the deworming studies are poorly done or that knowing how to read a study is an important skill; this is strictly a hypothetical.) I think it’s very possible that hypothetical Deworming CFAR would flinch away from the idea “maybe we should teach people to read studies”. Or they’d run a pilot program, notice that teaching people to read studies tends to make them less enthusiastic about deworming, and say “well, guess that learning how to read studies actually makes people more irrational.” Or they’d still teach the how-to-read-studies unit, but they’d alter it so that people continue to be enthusiastic about deworming afterward– thus not teaching an important aspect of the skill. Or it would never occur to them to teach that unit, perhaps because this is a flaw in the rationality of the employees of Deworming CFAR itself. (After all, they aren’t noticing that deworming is a poor cause area…)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that anyone at CFAR would intentionally teach people poor rationality skills in order to trick them into caring about AI risk. Of course not! CFAR as an organization genuinely cares about developing the art of rationality, and genuinely believes that AI risk is the biggest threat to humanity reaching the stars. But it doesn’t have to be intentional to be harmful. Many biases happen on the subconscious level, as unnoticed flinches or ideas that you happen to overlook.

You might argue that if deworming is not the best cause, surely hypothetical Deworming CFAR would notice this and reorient themselves. But I don’t think that’s true. We don’t have the art of rationality yet. CFAR employees are still vulnerable to confirmation bias, self-deception, and motivated reasoning. I think it’s important to reduce the harm caused by these aspects of human psychology.

I think endorsing specific empirical claims is different from endorsing value sets. For instance, “people in the developing world matter as much as people in the developed world” is a value, as is “it would be bad for humanity to be destroyed.” I do not think that the problems of endorsing empirical claims apply to endorsing values, because values do not generally work in the normal Bayesian way. It is hard to think of evidence that will disprove the claim that people in the developing world matter as much as people in the developed world (…maybe if they’re all p-zombies?). Rationality is, to a very large degree, about gathering and properly updating based on evidence. Therefore, a value has a much lower risk of hurting the rationality curriculum than an empirical belief. This is why I was less worried when it seemed to me that CFAR’s mission was to be a general effective altruist organization, because general effective altruism is almost all about values rather than facts.

CFAR did this shift for very good reasons. There are a lot of potential rationality skills; you need some criteria to be able to prioritize which ones you discover and teach. There are a lot of potential audiences for rationality; you need some criteria to pick which ones you will target. It is important to have integrity; secretly having AI risk as one’s mission while passing oneself off as a cause-neutral rationality organization is wrong. And we’re not trying to develop the art of rationality to make Facebook comment threads better; it makes sense to want to prioritize the most important issues facing the world.

This is probably the part of the post where I am supposed to offer a solution. Unfortunately, I have never run a rationality organization, and I am highly uncertain about what the correct path is. I don’t know how CFAR can get the very real benefits of this pivot while also reducing the risk of their mission distorting their rationality curriculum. But I do think that a first step is keeping in mind the risks.

 

Negative Emotions Are Like Foot Pain

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, polyamory

Negative emotions are like having a pain in your foot.

You can have a pain in your foot for a lot of different reasons. Maybe your shoes don’t fit. Maybe you walked too much yesterday. Maybe you have a corn or a callus. Maybe your foot is broken. Maybe you have arthritis. Maybe you have nerve damage in your feet so it sends you pain signals even when nothing is wrong. It’s important to investigate, figure out exactly what is wrong, and fix it.

It is a bad idea to go “foot pain is bad, and only bad people have foot pain! Therefore my feet don’t hurt.” If you try that, the only thing that’s going to happen is that you’re going to hobble around with a corn for the rest of time. Your foot pain isn’t bad. Whatever’s causing your foot pain is bad, but the foot pain itself is useful! It’s telling you that something is wrong. If you didn’t have any foot pain, you’d never find out when your feet were broken.

It is also a bad idea to go “walking makes my feet hurt, so I am just going to sit on this couch for the rest of time.” Maybe it’s actually your shoes, and if you stopped trying to never wear anything but ballet boots you’d be able to walk fine. Maybe you need to do some physical therapy exercises to get your feet to feel better, even though they hurt; sometimes you need to push through your pain. It’s important to push through your foot pain in a smart way, though; some things that are beneficial hurt, but not everything that hurts is beneficial.

So consider, say, jealousy.

You can feel jealous for a lot of different reasons. Maybe you feel insecure that your partner will find someone a lot smarter and prettier and better than you and then leave you. Maybe your partner isn’t taking enough time for you; you feel lonely and neglected. Maybe your partner gets to do all kinds of cool stuff with his long-distance partner, and the last four conversations you had with him were all about the laundry, and you feel annoyed because you bet he never talks with his long-distance partner about laundry. Maybe you’re naturally monogamous, and trying to be poly, and you feel like your partner dating someone else takes away the specialness of your relationship.

(This comes from a polyamorous context, obviously, but I suspect it should be applicable to monogamous people– after all, nothing about monogamy says you can’t be insecure, neglected, or envious.)

And all of those reasons have different solutions. Maybe you need to work on your sense of self-worth and security, so that you don’t worry your partner will leave. Maybe you need to say to your partner “I want to spend more time with you– let’s have a date night once a week.” Maybe you need to remind yourself that you and your partner’s long-distance partner both have an identical amount of cool stuff, it’s just that yours are spread out over a year while his are crammed into a week when he’s in town, and the latter isn’t actually better. Maybe you need to stop being poly.

It is a bad idea to say “jealousy is bad, and only bad people are jealous! Therefore I’m not jealous.” Jealousy isn’t bad. The cause of your jealousy might very well be bad, but the jealousy itself is useful! It’s telling you that something is wrong. If you didn’t have any jealousy, you’d just run around with neglected relationship needs and no sense of self-worth for the rest of time.

It is also a bad idea to go “when you talk to men by yourself I feel jealous, so you can’t ever talk to men by yourself ever again.” You might not be dealing with the actual problem: maybe the actual problem is that your partner never talks to you about his feelings, which– notably– is not solved by telling him not to talk to other men. The actual issue goes unresolved. And sometimes you have to push through the pain of jealousy: maybe you’re afraid he’ll leave you if he finds someone else attractive. Fear doesn’t go away if you try to avoid it; it only grows. To defeat fear, you have to face it. Of course, that’s dependent on the problem actually being fear: if your problem is that your partner dating other people takes away the specialness, facing them dating other people is not going to fix it. There is no point in going about doing every unpleasant thing, but sometimes it’s a good idea to do some unpleasant things.

You may replace ‘jealousy’ with sadness, fear, anger, disgust, guilt, or shame, as you like.

Frequently Asked Questions About Jerks On The Internet

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

ARRRRRGH THIS PERSON IS SAYING SO MANY MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME ON THE INTERNET I AM GOING TO FIGHT THEM AND TELL THEM HOW AWFUL THEY ARE AND ALSO HOW THEIR FEET STINK.

This is a terrible idea. Please reconsider it.

Why? I don’t want to reconsider it. I want to fight that person who is saying mean things about me. 

Personally, I think good rules for one’s social life are the following:

1. Talk to nice people.
2. Don’t talk to jerks.

You, my friend, are currently violating rule #2, and because of opportunity cost are probably also violating rule #1.

But the person I’m talking to isn’t actually a jerk.

It happens! Sometimes there is a person who is generally a nice and lovely person, pets dogs, gives to charity, doesn’t have a mean bone in their entire body, but there is just one issue that sets them off and they are completely irrational about it. I have a couple of those issues myself. It can be worth it to try to respond to the person and deescalate– maybe they’re having a bad day, and if you talk to them with kindness and compassion, they’ll chill out. But if they don’t chill out, it’s okay to go “welp, that guy is mostly okay, but he’s just a complete jerk about alpacas.”

(Notably, deescalating does not involve insults, snark, ALL CAPS, or multiple exclamation points. If you feel moved to engage in such behavior yourself, it is probably a bad idea to respond even if they are having a bad day– you’ll only make the situation worse.)

The question to ask yourself is not about the moral character of the person you’re considering arguing with. The question is whether there is any chance that the discussion is going to be productive. If the answer is no, why are you engaging in it?

Because they’re saying mean things about me! I have to stop them from saying mean things about me!

No, you don’t.

All of our instincts are horribly miscalibrated for the Internet. Our genetic instincts are designed for tribes of a hundred and fifty people, in which a person constantly misrepresenting you and going on about how you’re an asshole means you’re going to be ostracized and dead in short order. Our cultural instincts are designed for communities of a few thousand people, in which a person constantly misrepresenting you and going on about how you’re an asshole means you have a serious problem on your hands. The Internet, however, contains literally millions of people, and of those millions of people some of them are going to be dickbags.

Over time, however, I’ve come to notice that the only way that jerks on the Internet can hurt me is if I let them.

Is this some sort of Eleanor Roosevelt shit? No one can make me feel inferior without my consent? That’s not actually how human psychology works.

No, I mean what I said literally. If you’re seeing someone saying mean things about you more than once, it is almost always because you made a decision that lets you see the mean things they’re saying about you. Stop making that decision. It’s a terrible decision.

If someone is sending you nasty messages, block them. If you’re on Tumblr and people keep reblogging them, blacklist their name or unfollow the people who reblog mean things about you. If someone is saying nasty things about you on their personal social media accounts, don’t read the nasty things being said about you. You don’t have to. No one is tying you up and forcing you to read what the douchebag is saying– or if they are, you have a much more serious problem than what someone is or is not saying about you on the Internet.

But what if I actually am a terrible person? I have to check and see if they’re saying some reasonable and valid criticism!

In general, people who actually want you to benefit from their criticism will make an effort to phrase it in a tactful way. People who are calling you a vile hypocrite or writing haiku about how your mom fucked a goat are not trying to improve you as a person. They just don’t like you.

Also, why would you trust the judgment of a person who is writing haiku about whether your mom fucked a goat on the subject of whether you’re a good person? They don’t exactly seem like they’re an expert in the topic of good personhood. Best case scenario, they’re irrational on the topic of you and are likely to condemn things that in a saner moment they would think are fine. Worst case scenario, they’re a terrible person, and the things they condemn are likely to be completely uncorrelated with things that are actually bad.

But what if my friends believe them and none of them talk to me and now I am socially isolated?

It’s possible that your friends will all go ‘wow, I didn’t realize so-and-so was a vile hypocrite, now I’m going to mock them mercilessly as well.’ In that case, your problem is not that a jerk is saying mean things about you. Your problem is that you have terrible friends. It is a basic requirement for friendship that they don’t agree with people saying unfair and mean things about you. You should, if anything, feel grateful for the douchebag for enlightening you about how terrible your friends are, so you didn’t have to find it out when facing some actually important issue.

But what if the harassment explodes and I become a trending topic on Twitter because of all the millions of people who want to tell me how terrible I am? Or what if the person is a stalker and eludes my attempts to block him?

It’s true that I’m tacitly assuming that the jerk on the Internet is going to stay one jerk, and not turn into a thousand jerks where you can’t block all of them and some of them might try to get you fired from your job. In the latter case, you have a serious problem. And you might get a very determined stalker who eludes your attempts to block them. However, it is very rare for isolated jerks on the Internet to transform into thousands of jerks or a stalker; the vast majority of the time, blocking the person and no longer reading their stuff will end the issue.

The question to ask is what benefit you’re getting out of the conversation. Talking to stalkers only encourages them. And preventing the one jerk from turning into thousands of jerks implies that you can get the one jerk to stop writing goat fucker haiku about you through reasoned argument and/or insults. So far, I have never actually seen a case of this working. It is hard to argue someone out of being completely irrational on a particular issue, and even harder to argue them out of being a dickbag.

You’re saying I should just let the jerk GET AWAY WITH IT?

No, I’m saying that the jerk should experience the natural consequence of their actions, i.e., nobody wants to talk to jerks except for other jerks. This is a reasonable and proportional consequence for assholishness, which– crucially– does not require you to pay attention to them at any point.

Actually, I’m a supporter of an important cause that that jerk is slandering!

Well, then, it might possibly be worthwhile to talk to a random jerk on the Internet. However, when you do this, remember that you are advancing the cause. You are not arguing to convince the random jerk. You’re arguing to convince someone who happens to be reading your blog. It’s really important that you make the people reading the argument think better of your cause, rather than worse of it.

So you have to use all the tactics people use to convince others to be on their side. Respond calmly and kindly to insults– ideally with a little bit of not-mean-spirited humor. Be willing to point out times you agree with someone. Don’t lecture: ask questions and let the other person draw conclusions. Look at things from their point of view. Leave them an easy way out where they can admit being wrong without losing face. Unfortunately, all of those are really hard when you’re angry! If you’re not going to be capable of doing that, step away from the argument. It’s bad enough that someone is slandering your important cause; there’s no point making it worse.

So what, I’m NOT supposed to get angry that someone is saying mean things about me? 

No, you can totally get angry if you want to. However, continuing to interact with the jerk is a bad way of responding to your anger. Instead, you can try a bunch of other coping mechanisms! You can take a warm bath and light a scented candle and do progressive muscle relaxation and the rest of that froo-froo self-care stuff. You can distract yourself with a sad movie, music that makes you happy, or watching stand-up comedy. You can angrily clean your room (highly recommended). You can pull the covers over your head and refuse to get out for the entire morning. You can complain to your friends about them, but only if that won’t increase the temptation to respond (it always does for me). It’s probably a bad idea to vent, as that seems to increase anger.

I sense a secret evil motivation here.

I totally have one! Some people are just dickbags, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Dickbags gonna dickbag. But in my experience the #1 cause of preventable assholery on the Internet is that someone feels like they’ve got to respond to every asshole who drives them up the fucking wall, because they have to SHOW THE ASSHOLE THE ERROR OF THEIR WAYS and PUNISH ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR and KEEP ALL THEIR FRIENDS FROM ABANDONING THEM or what-the-fuck-ever. Naturally, when you’re angry, you have really shitty judgment about whether your tactics for engaging with someone are (a) the sort of thing you approve of in your better moments, a reflection of the kind of person you want to be (b) going to accomplish your goals, like, at all. Therefore, not only will the tactic recommended in this FAQ keep you from interacting with jerks, it will also help reduce the number of jerks on the Internet by keeping you from being one.

Ozy, you are terrible at not responding to jerks on the Internet.

Why do you think I wrote the FAQ?