Tag: Communication

Online Acrimony

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It is much commented on that there is far more anger, acrimony, and ascerbic speech online than in real life. There is, of course, more than one reason for this. Anonymity reducing people’s normal inhibitions is a commonly cited one, and there is, no doubt, some truth to it. Sometimes a lot of truth. But I think that an often under-appreciated aspect to this is the non-interactive nature of online interaction. The people we interact with online don’t react like we’re build to expect them to, and that screws with our social instincts.

In normal human interaction, that is, interactions that take place face-to-face with people in the same place, the person listening reacts to what the other person is saying through body language. But they don’t wait to react; they react while the other person is speaking. And we look for this while we’re speaking. In the normal course of events, the other person’s reactions as we’re talking may well change how we finish our sentences, to say nothing of what the next sentences are. If we are saying something important to us, we look to see that the other person is giving us their full attention—a sign that they understand the importance of what we’re saying. And here’s the crucial part: if we don’t see that they get how important this is, we amplify our intensity.

That might mean using greater volume, or it might mean using intensifiers like “dirty words”, or it might mean intensifying the thing being said. A person might go from “there’s a problem” to “There’s a !@#$ problem” or they might go to “This is a catastrophe.”

If that doesn’t work, the next intensifier available is to indicate that the relationship between the speaker and the person listening is threatened. This will tend to take the form of insults, because a person is only willing to insult someone that they are willing to do without. This is true in theory much more than in practice, of course; a great deal of insulting is really an attempt to signal where things are headed rather than to indicate where they currently are.

If we consider the nature of online interactions, it should immediately jump out that they all lack real-time feedback. But unlike previous technologically-intermediated means of communication, such as books and letters, the online ones feel far more immediate. When you write a book or a letter, you know that, if you get a response, it will be days or weeks in the future. Online, you might receive a reply in the time it takes someone to type a sentence. This can kick our processing of what they say into real-time processing, as we prepare to immediately respond to them. But our real-time processing relies very heavily on the many aspects of communication apart from the words being spoken and it’s easy to forget how much of the person’s response we actually lack.

We lack it first because most of the time we’re using text so there is neither tone nor cadence nor facial expression nor volume conveyed, all of which are very important to understanding how to interpret the words. The other problem is that the space limitations of text mean that we have to pick and choose what we respond to in what the other person said. But this act of picking and choosing, coupled with the lack of facial expressions/body language as they were speaking, means that they got precisely zero feedback on everything else they said.

It is extremely easy, under these circumstances, for people who have shifted into real-time processing to take this as complete indifference to their attempts to communicate the importance of what they were saying. When this happens, their instinct is to do what they would do in person—amplify and exaggerate.

The instinct to exaggerate, here, is really about accuracy within a context. If a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, the polite thing to do is to repeat yourself. If you’ve ever had a loved one who suffered from hearing loss in the age before ubiquitous hearing aids, this might get to the point of almost shouting into the person’s ear so they can hear you. In like manner, if you say that a problem is a problem and the other person pays no attention, and you say it’s a catastrophe and they pay no attention, and finally you say that the world is about to end and they finally rouse themselves to listen to you, the intention is to clearly communicate that there is a problem, not to stimulate them into a panicked rush. (This is distinct from people who use exaggeration in order to achieve disproportionate effects, but these people usually start off exaggerating, they don’t start off reasonable. And even the approach meant to accurately calibrate to the insensitivity of the other is fraught with problems, and I’m only trying to describe it, not defend it.)

The other thing that people may do when they perceive that the importance of what they’re saying isn’t being appreciated, you will recall, is to start indicating that the relationship is in danger of being breached. That is, they may start insulting the other person to get their attention.

I suspect that this explains more than a little bit of the acrimony that we see online.

Feelings and Facts Can Be the Same Conversation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.

All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.

Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.

The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.

Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.

When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.

This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)

It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))

The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)

Good Morning December 11, 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Good morning on this the eleventh day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I had an interesting exchange with my four year old son today:

Child: I want my [specific toy].

Me: Where did you last have it?

Child: In my hand.

Me: That’s… true.

It’s always funny when children answer questions in a very literal way, and it gets to the heart of what I think is a common misunderstanding of children: the idea that children are irrational. (There is, I think, a true idea that children are irrational in the sense of what changes at the age of reason, which is to say, when they seem to gain the ability to reason in an abstract manner, but that’s not what I mean and isn’t, generally, what people mean either.)

In particular, children aren’t nearly so much irrational as inexperienced. In a theoretical sense, knowledge and what you do with it are two separate things. This is related to the distinction of knowledge coming from experience and wisdom from learning the right lessons from that experience. Children take questions—like my question above—literally not because they can’t conceive of any wider meaning, but because they have no experience which suggests any wider meaning. Most of the things we say in life we mean very literally. “Don’t draw on the table with that crayon” does not have an esoteric meaning. “Do you need to use the potty” does not allude to any large topic with complex considerations. “Do you want a PB&J or Grilled Cheese?” touches on no subtleties. But when I ask my child where he had his toy last, this does bring up some of the complexities of looking for lost items; or at least it is meant to. But the child can only know that by this question being a prelude to trying to conjure in his imagination where the object was.

And as an incidental detail of child raising, it turns out that doing this is in fact a learned skill. I can remember with my oldest child helping him to find things several times by doing the very simple, “where were you when you last had it” and then going and looking there. They learn that skill very quickly, though, since it’s so effective, and it only take a few repetitions before they go look on their own and only ask for help when it’s not where they remember playing with it last.

There’s another interaction I can recall, which shows a similar pattern:

Me: Stop hitting your brother with Optimus Prime!

Child: Puts down optimus prime, picks up Bumblebee, starts hitting brother with Bumblebee.

The child wasn’t trying to get by on a technicality. In the first few months of hitting one’s brother, there are a lot of complex lessons to learn, such as that the objection to optimus prime (which I didn’t explicitly state) is not some special thing about Optimus Prime which I know and the child didn’t and so he just had to trust me, but that Optimus Prime was made of hard plastic, which the child can know himself, and consequently that this same objection holds to Bumblebee, who is also made of hard plastic. By contrast, when the children are hitting each other with balloons, I don’t object, because the balloons are soft and have little mass and can’t hurt anyone. But it takes a lot of data for the child to figure out what’s common to the few things he and his brother may hit each other with and what’s common to the many things he may not. He’s not trying to see what he can get away with, but just utterly lacking the experience of adults in knowing what actually hurts people.

And part of how you know that he lacks this experience is that he makes the exact same mistakes when applied to himself. He does things which hurt himself and is surprised at the result. For example, it seems that children will not believe you about not snapping rubber bands on themselves until they’ve done it hard enough to cry at it. They’re not attempting to lawyer their way through technicalities, but to navigate a big and complex world with a great many twists and turns in it without any data.

This same problem does affect adults interacting with each other, by the way. Except that while with children we expect them to not know what we know—at least somewhat expect it, anyway—it’s all too common for adults to assume that all other adults know what they know, and furthermore to hold it to be a failing if the other adult doesn’t know it. This results in a great deal of miscommunication, since on any complex subject we only say a small fraction of what we mean (for efficiency’s sake) and require the listener to interpret most of our meaning based on shared knowledge and context. Especially on the internet, which throws together people with vastly differing backgrounds, it’s a very good idea to make sure of what someone’s unstated context really is before you assume you know what they mean. Don’t go full Wittgenstein—never go full Wittgenstein—but it is true that a great many philosophical and political disagreements turn out to be misunderstandings. There are enough real disagreements in the world; it’s unhelpful to shrowd them in a haze of miscommunication.

God bless you.