OMG I have a card giving/sending friend like this! She takes such pleasure in selecting them and writing thoughtful notes in them. When she finds one she thinks is just right for a certain person or purpose she buys it and keeps it until the opportunity to use it arises.
I know it’s important to her, so I try to show appreciation and pleasure, but man ......
But not so much appreciation or pleasure that she thinks it makes me happy and is en outages to continue or, heaven forfend, increase the card sending. It’s a delicate balance.
My mother also does this, with cards and letters, and (worst of all) newspaper clippings!
But I've accepted that there's no 'affordable' means of me stopping her from doing it, but I've also 'pre-forgiven' myself for just throwing them away.
Is there some practical reason why you feel obligated to keep them at all? Would your mother actually know?
Your 'ritual' seems pretty low-cost. I was hoping to convince you that at least it's possible that it's 'okay' for you to not even do that, if you really don't want to – subject to the specific costs and benefits of you doing so (e.g. your mother discovering that you're not even keeping them as you are and being upset).
I actually keep the cards and letters from my own mom – I do throw away the 'clippings'. That turned out to be _extremely_ costly to me (for detailed personal reasons)! But I also realized that there's an interesting 'value' in _collections_ of things apart from the strict sum of values of the individual items, so I'm glad I've kept probably a good proportion of the cards and letters (and they do, alone among my mementos, take up several 'shoeboxes').
One is that I think a lot of people don’t have different mental categories for different “kinds” of facts. To those people, “everyone likes presents!” Is the same kind of fact as “gravity makes you fall!”. There maybe nuances but once you learn the basic thing you don’t change your mind about it.
The other thing is that I think we have a lot of habits and behaviors that don’t actually refer to our beliefs unless we consciously force them to. For example, I have a fear of heights which has been gradually going away through exposure, but at no point did knowing for a fact that a certain structure was safe to be on eliminate the fear: it simply was not a big part of whatever mental calculation which that was preventing me from stepping out onto a clear glass floor. In conversations, I think people build up a sort of habit of interacting in a certain way that has worked ok for them over a long period and it takes a serious effort of will or serious (Rude) interruption to break the flow because the habit is not frequently checking with reality to see if it’s working anymore.
If you think about what a 'preference' is from a computing perspective, it's a comparison operator. If you start thinking about it, you can consider all value systems this way: they're comparison operators that tell you, given two possible alternatives, which choice is better. Your beliefs about other people's preferences can be implemented the same way.
Now, consider the fact that comparison operators are extremely important to get correct. You've highlighted a number of errors in your post, thigns people tend to get wrong. So what if we consider the hypothesis that a person having the ability to "play around with" comparison operators might cause them serious harm?
In the same way that an ai which can easily change its utilty function would probably just wirehead itself, might we consider that humans with malleable preferences would have gotten weeded out of the gene pool early on?
Maybe this is a built-in-protection mechanism: we do have some ability to change what preferences we hold - or what preferences we think others hold - but because it can be super dangerous to get these wrong, maybe we're just insanely slow to update them, because whatever built-in evolutionary hook you have is almost certainly better than a randomly selected comparison operator.
You don't even need to look far for the evolutionary reason: we are deeply tribal animals, and one of the worst thing that can happen to such a species is to have a bad leader -- a Pied Piper who will lead you off a cliff. So the individual has very good self-preservation reasons to not give up his own preferences easily.
Another way to put it is that a modern OS has to have defenses against viruses, things that change its "preferences" for what it's going to do next. People need similar defenses against memetic viruses -- ideas that come from others that propose to change the individual's preferences.
I absolutely agree this is evolutionary beneficial because of the tribal aspect. A tribe superseded the individual as an organism at some point (because tribal configurations survive better than individuals alone). So some being more resistant to tribal "mutations" like that "pied piper leader" would offer an advantage and that tribe would be more likely to survive.
My instinct is that Scott is right about the link to taking ideas seriously/openness to changing priors.
The other part of the story that I think isn't really touched on in the examples is that acting in accordance with the unusual preferences can be uncomfortable for the person doing it. The B&B couple aren't just thinking about the enjoyment of the person they're talking to; they're playing a role which they are familiar with and which they associate with smooth and positive interactions. The person who doesn't give a holiday gift doesn't just think about the interaction with the giftee, but also the social awkwardness at the gathering, having to explain to other people that they didn't get a gift, and so on.
I agree. B&B hosts are supposed to be friendly and chatty and that’s probably what’s expected of them most of the time. I generally avoid B&Bs for this reason and prefer the AirBnB contactless experience of keypad entry and text messages if I need anything.
Yes! Best reason ever to go to a nice impersonal hotel!!!!
For years I had a massage therapist who would only talk if I talked, and would stop as soon as I did. Took me ages to figure out what he was doing; he only ever responded, never initiated an exchange. It was SO relaxing! If I felt chatty, he chatted, if I did not, he shut the hell up!
Now if only there were a way to get taxi/ Uber drivers to follow that rule.
My stepbrother who did the Uber thing for a while mentioned that he tended to get significantly better tips from riders he chatted with. I imagine that once one realizes this then it becomes the default option to engage with your passengers because it's likely to benefit you; not to mention it's something that helps pass the time in a job that's not particularly exciting. I would also imagine that these incentives create some natural selection pressure where extroverted chatty types are more likely to stick with the job since they're getting paid better and probably having fun with the whole constantly meeting new strangers thing.
In my experience if you just say something like "hey I know you drivers love to chat but I'm just not in a chatty mood, can we have a nice quiet ride?" then that's all it takes. No need to select some fancy Uber option...if you really want to pay extra for a silent ride then pay it as a tip that all goes to the driver for respecting your wishes :)
Right -- this was the explanation that came to my mind as I was reading the post.
For some people, intentionally not performing these social niceties (small talk; gift giving) is going to feel very awkward and strange. If you've spent 20 years welcoming guests to your B&B, conspicuously ignoring a guest is going to feel a lot like rudeness, however much you're assured by a third party that this is the right thing to do.
Imagine that instead you're a B&B owner, and a guest informs you that their friend loves being patted on the head as part of being greeted. I would guess that you probably wouldn't pat their friend on the head upon arrival -- it would just feel too weird, preferences be damned.
Thank you. Manners! Indeed, I'm approaching 70, and I find "introverts" very selfish in their demands that everyone accommodate their wishes to remain cold and distanced because their tender sensitivities can't give any more than that. They don't want to know you, even briefly, because they (supposedly?) already have their own people and you will never be one of them. So your existence is only a bother to them, except for the bed and breakfast you can provide. For which you have been paid, so transaction completed, now go away. I am also perplexed by why being an introvert is so fashionable now.
Sounds like I feel as threatened by them as they do by the likes of me.
In my mind, the difference is that the extrovert's desire/need to chat can be met by any number of other people who can be sought out deliberately, whereas the introvert's preference for not so much interaction can only be met by whoever is right there with them in the moment.
Why isn't the situation perfectly symmetric? An extrovert surrounded by mumchance introverts is unhappy, and would have to go looking for other extroverts to find companionship. An introvert surrounded by chatty extroverts is unhappy, and would have to go looking for a quiet company of introverts to be happy.
Because in a world made up entirely of comfortable introverts, the social fabric would break down. Not to say introvert preferences shouldn't be heard and accommodated, especially between friends, but there are lots of conceivable reasons why humans would be socialized, or even hardwired to view such preferences and behaviours as undesirable.
I fear I may have not made myself clear: what I mean is, Karen seemed to suggest that the discomfort an introvert among extroverts feel is harder than the discomfort an extrovert among introverts feel, and I don't understand why that should be so. The situation seems equally distressful in both directions.
You know - I was thinking that the categories shift over generations! I feel like the older categories for what is now being categorized as "introvert" are words like, "recluse," "hermit," "loner," "eccentric." Of those four, I think only "hermit" has a chance of having a positive spin! (but mostly not) In Scott's example, "guy is happy in his abusive relationship" is a category that... the only word for it I'm coming up with for it (in present-day lingo) is "codependent," which has a very negative resonance indeed!
I think I'm like you - VERY uncomfortable having a "purely transactional" interaction - even if will only see this human standing before me for a transitory moment - I don't want them to think I'm saying they're "not worth giving them the time of day"!
> "Sounds like I feel as threatened by them as they do by the likes of me." <-- I love this moment of reflection you had here! :)
> I am also perplexed by why being an introvert is so fashionable now.
MaruP, may I attempt to characterize what this "introvert" category is in a way that is compelling, and attempt to answer ideas in the question "why is being an introvert so fashionable now"? :) (I think it's a "Rationality-Community-thing" to try to get people to change their minds, and I think this would make a fun conversation!)
According to a British friend in her 60s, behaviours characterized as "introvert" and worse in the US today, were characterized as "good manners" in her youth. She's aware that Americans have different standards, and aren't really trying to be rude - but her first emotional response to much polite American behaviour is still "what a rude ..." even after living in the US for decades.
Remindfs me of all those studies of cultural differences in "personal space," meaning how close you can stand to someone before they think you're creepy versus how far away you can stand before they think you're silently signaling he needs a shower.
It's something that people can and do adapt to, but often on auto-pilot, we default to the norm of the place where we lived most recently! ...and estimating/re-calibrating can be kinda uncomfortable! As you adjust, you might even have the sense that you are literally doing something ethically wrong!
So, this might be me prioritizing a theory that I like a little too quickly but... urbanization? The UK was more thoroughly urbanized before us, right? [I don't actually know if that's the case.] So then a huge percentage of society lives in a place where you -cannot- get to know all the people you pass on a daily basis.
There's a wonderful line a Flannery O'Connor story where the POV char notices with an uncomfortable pang that "City people's eyes don't 'catch at' you as you pass by the way country folks' do." (I'm paraphrasing.) I read this aloud to an relative who'd grown up in rural U.S. - also in her '60s - a few years back. She was on the verge of tears almost immediately. (She'd been living in a huge city for the last several years at that time.)
Doesn't really mesh with my experience of within-country variation in the UK. The most extraverted subcultures are working class inhabitants of northern cities like Liverpool and Newcastle - precisely those created by the Industrial Revolution. Introversion codes southern, rural or suburban and middle class.
(Among white people whose ancestors have been in the country for some generations - black and eastern European cultures are more extraverted and East Asian cultures even more intraverted, but this doesn't tell us much about the effects of the Industrial Revolution.)
Very true. But in determining if something is an imposition or not, there are quiet assumptions that do a lot of heavy lifting. We aren't talking about people who are simply walking along on the street. We're talking about people who have already agreed to some form of interaction and have divergent needs and assumptions about how that action should be shaped.
My favorite "extroverts are vicious" anecdote involved an office party, where I and another person were conversing on a topic that interested us, which happened to be related to our profession.
We were angrily told not to do this. The purpose of the party was for everyone to have fun, and us talking shop apparently guaranteed that no fun would be had. From the way it was phrased, I couldn't be sure whether our conversation was equivalent to publicly torturing each other (i.e. the problem was that we were not having "fun") or if it was merely that mention of work caused agony to the coworker in question.
We complied. I also never attended another office party as long as I worked with that team.
I am guilty of being profoundly disappointed when work colleagues "talk shop" at social events. In my opinion, the reason I am well paid is because I am paid to think hard about topics that are both boring and difficult (the worst possible combination). If such topics were more interesting, I shouldn't be paid as much. And the fact that you are willing to discuss work topics for free, voluntarily of your free choice, indicates you are likely very overpaid. I would never voluntarily spend a second of my brain energy contemplating topics that I'm paid to think about for free. The free stuff is the intrinsically rewarding fun stuff.
I had the good fortune to start my career in a state of "wow, they pay me to do this - good thing they don't know I'd pay for the fun of doing it". That was the technical part - the dealing with people/managers/presentations/red tape was never fun, but until I rose to a certain level, it didn't take much of my time and energy.
IIRC, this was the last job where I still had fun - after that I was promoted into the wall-to-wall-BS range. My salary went way up, but I'm still not sure that it was adequate compensation.
A related example, perhaps - my primary care doctor. She's come to hate her job, insurance BS and all, and has been cutting back her hours etc. And then she spends her vacations volunteering for Medicins sans Frontiers. She also seems to love teaching, and participating in research studies. Basically, she loves parts of her job, and does them very well - but hates the rest.
Put another way - maybe you should reexamine your assumption that work is only valuable if it's painful to do.
I agree that plenty of work is valuable without pay...all the things that one does for free, for their own benefit or intrinsic reward, including volunteering, etc. But I have always thought that unpleasant work, such as very boring work or dealing with difficult people, should be paid more than enjoyable work and vice versa. When people claim to love their jobs I'm always secretly wondering why their boss doesn't cut their pay then (unless of course the only part they love is the status and compensation, which is a complex knot to untie). In my life I've worked a range of different occupations from minimum wage to several hundred dollars per hour and I can see zero relation between how "hard" or draining or unpleasant or difficult the job was with the compensation, which doesn't seem right. In fact the wages were mostly determined by the level of anti-competitive industry protections in place (licensing boards, purposely limited supply, unions, etc). Your example says to me that given many medical professionals are intrinsically rewarded in healing people, their wages would likely be much lower if they sold their services on a free market where anyone could offer them, rather than strictly limited numbers of licensed physicians controlled by a professional groups dedicated to maintaining the status, prestige, and compensation of doctors.
Anyway, to get back on topic, I think the pain your coworker was expressing was dismay that you were essentially doing labor for free at an event meant for enjoyment. They probably hated their job, and I can relate to that. It *is* very difficult to comprehend that others actually find something interesting or enjoyable that one doesn't. I feel the same way when people talk about sports endlessly, though for entirely different reasons.
If you've ever loved your job you should count yourself as endlessly fortunate.
This is the reason I stopped being a middle-manager and reverted back to being an ordinary employee again (I do teaching&research in a university).
When you rise in the hierarchy, you suddenly realize that your underlings now have a right to come to you with their problems, and you have an obligation to talk with them about their problems. Endless meetings.
You also realize that all the fun problems people have, they solve themselves. It is the difficult problems that land on your desk.
I think you've miscast what you are being paid for.
Sure, you are being paid to work on things that are generally considered boring. But sometimes that will manifest as you being bored, and sometimes it will manifest as Déformation professionnelle - you'll start to find the things interesting.
So finding them interesting is not actually an indicator that the work doesn't merit pay as you wouldn't have that developed interest if it weren't for the salary.
(one could also make the standard arguments about how pay is about supply and demand and comparative advantage, i.e. pay is not intrinsically linked to how much you personally enjoy the job, but rather about how the pool of labour enjoys it)
> In my opinion, the reason I am well paid is because I am paid to think hard about topics that are both boring and difficult (the worst possible combination). If such topics were more interesting, I shouldn't be paid as much.
I don't think that's correct in an unqualified sense. Certainly some people may be willing to accept less if they enjoyed the work, but the work is not objectively less valuable to the business just because they enjoy it. You're mostly being paid is proportional to the value of your work *to the business*. It has little to do with you, and considerations like yours cause only very minor deviations from this mean.
> I would never voluntarily spend a second of my brain energy contemplating topics that I'm paid to think about for free.
So you think carpenters shouldn't talk shop with other carpenters, exchange tips and tricks they might have learned and otherwise share experience and knowledge. It's a bizarre way to look at natural human behaviour IMO, but to each their own.
My guess- if the conversation could have been interpreted as "doing work"- i.e. it was about how to solve a problem at work or something- you and the other person are then "working" at an event that was intended to be recreational and non-work related. If others see that you are using the time to "conference" about work, it could create pressure for others to do the same, turning the event into a work conference instead of a non-working social event.
A similar thing also happened to me; reading your description triggered me.
In my case, instead of a party, it was a business trip; a rare opportunity to meet in person our remote colleagues from another country. So we spent the day at their office, and in the evening we just socialized in a hotel, drinking beer. I don't like the small talk, but I can drink and sit quietly, and the extraverts around me don't mind to do all the talking.
Except, now there was also a foreign colleague with whom I happen to share a hobby, and we were sitting at the same end of the table, so we started talking about the hobby. Immediately we were interrupted by the extraverts and chastised for "not having fun, and discussing work". (Our hobby is also related to programming.) Thus ended my opportunity to actually enjoy a part of the evening.
Next time I was invited to hang out and have fun, I politely excused myself saying I was too tired.
Hearing these anecdotes- I wonder if the "upper middle-class convention of pretending to like your work* because it flags as what successful people do" gets flipped in workplaces where you have a vocal pool of people who hate their work - maybe even hate their work specifically b/c of its difficulty...
...and viewed as a rude and unnecessary "flex"...like showing off that you're "sooo smart."
I guess that would make it kind of forbidden to say, "no, we actually LOVE this topic!"
Still, it sounds like you were pretty miserable, Viliam. (and DinoNerd!) When I have a conversation with an outcome that sucks like that, I often obsess over what I would have said "if I had to do it again." (though at first I would come up with very ridiculous ideas where I just imagine the world unreasonably accomodating me, I eventually come up with good ones for some of them!) Have either of you thought of what response you might try if this happened today?
I think this was less about work as such, and more about social conventions for small talk. If I instead started debating math, the reaction would probably be the same.
The officially fun topics to debate in your free time are: sport, travel, movies. Maybe I forgot a few. Sucks to be the person who enjoys debating something else.
Specifically, sucks to be a nerd. Which is quite ironic in software development. But I notice a general trend that software development becomes less and less nerdy. Maybe because in the past only genuinely obsessive people were willing to spend the effort necessary to learn it; and these days, many normies are there for money, and nerds have become a minority.
Aren't extroverts equally selfish in regards to their demands to that others perform conversation with them for their own pleasure? Just because you want to pretend that there is some deeper connection with random people you encounter doesn't make the rest of want to play pretend with you.
Socializing, especially with strangers, can be more energetically expensive for some people than others.
Imagine being rich and inviting someone to a high-end restaurant and they decline the invitation. You conclude they must not be your friend or want to be with you because otherwise they'd spend time with you when a more accurate expanation is that they simply can't afford the restaurant's prices.
If you're wealthy and always have been, the notion that something might 'cost too much' might not even occur to you.
In Scott's example I feel like the first interaction (greeting, beginning to get to know the person) is a social nicety, just deal with it, that sort of thing. But Scott said that the couple continued to talk their ears off for the rest of their stay, and I feel like "I don't want to be socially required to engage in small talk constantly with someone whom I'm simply paying for a service" is a very reasonable boundary to assert (while maybe "You must forego your standard greetings that make you comfortable because I don't appreciate them" is not).
AirBnB blurs the line a bit, if that's what the original post is referring to. In some ways it's a bit more like having a short term room mate and less like going to a hotel. It may be entirely reasonable to assert a boundary. But I think the assumption of a primarily transactional relationship may not be held by all parties initially, or even considered proper by all parties.
Asserting a purely transactional relationship when a person assumed something else can be a big thing with people. The book "From the Soil" ( A Chinese anthropological work) described how villagers in Imperial China would go to the trouble of selling their products in an entirely different village so that they could deal 'without feelings.' Persian culture tends to emphasize that people going into business together first become friends for the sake of the business.
I have nothing against someone trying to climb a particular social hill. I think the phrase 'simply paying for a service' might underestimate the strength of the adverse preconception.
This strikes me as a nearly perfect example of when we take our own "way of being" as the obvious and correct default, and therefore ascribe fault or wrongdoing to others who don't share our Obviously Correct Views, perhaps by ascribing bad manners or some form of personality defect to them. Everything about this comment can be inverted to the introverts point of view and it would come out something like:
"Manners! I find 'extroverts' very selfish in their demands that everyone accommodate their wishes to be imposing and inconsiderate, because their tender sensitivities can't handle not constantly being the center of someone's attention. They don't want to let you have a moment of peace, even briefly, because they (apparently) can never have enough people and attention in their life so feel entitled to monopolize every little bit of time you have. So your existence is only a transactional opportunity for them to demand you serve their endless need to be distracted from their own internal emptiness."
No doubt you would find this both uncharitable and wildly unconvincing. But I don't really see any fundamental difference between this and your post. It's not clear to me why an introvert's reluctance to accommodate an extrovert's desires is "bad manners," but not equally bad manners for the extrovert to be reluctant to accommodate an introvert's desires.
From my take, I don't think it's "suddenly fashionable" to be introverted now. My read of the situation (no doubt colored by my lifelong introversion) is that there have always been lots of introverts, but the social scene and social protocol has been thoroughly dominated by extroverts. For a long time, most of us were compelled to some degree or another to fake extroversion, which has created a lot of needless misery. Lately though (and thankfully in my view), the preferences of introverts has been gaining some recognition and given a bit of space. And swarms of introverts thought to themselves "Oh thank god" and were happy to take advantage of this small accommodation. To an extrovert, who has been used to getting their own way all the time, this may feel like introversion has suddenly become "fashionable" and they are now being wrongly denied something they have become so accustom to that they feel it to be an entitlement. But to an introvert, reactions like yours look like someone who is used to having 100% control and now finds that they only have 90% control and are outraged at the unfairness of it all.
Every interaction I have with you is HUGELY expensive. If you run a B&B, I'm at the end of a LONG stressful trip. What I want is a room, a bed, and SILENCE. I'm going to do the bare minimum of speaking to you, and resent and despise you for every word you say beyond the bare minimum level of formal politeness.
If Mr. B&B Owner thinks that's "rude" that's his problem. He's providing a service to me, and if he insists on imposing on my spoons, I will not be kind when I write my review.
If he leaves me alone. I'll be much kinder, indeed glowing.
But I'll allow him the freedom to choose how he wants to interact with me.
I think of it more as a form of entertainment for them. One reason they are running a bed and breakfast and not doing something else with their lives is because they like getting to meet people, learning about them, and having a little something to gossip about with each other later.
I think in a lot of these cases it's more than just discomfort from deviating from the norm; there are good reasons for the norms in place, too. If I was welcoming a stranger into my home I'd want to chat with them too, if only to assure myself they weren't secretly a serial killer or someone else I wouldn't want in my house. It also helps create social bonds that may come to be helpful in the future. If someone said they'd rather be directed straight to their room as if they were in some faceless hotel I'd be quite offended.
In fairness, there may be a difference in the near-universality of some of these. We all know that some people prefer to live in big cities and others do not. Many of us just have never heard of someone being averse to polite, friendly welcoming. Similarly for receiving a present from a loved one. I’m not in any way diminishing the validity of your friend’s feelings; just that they seem a lot more unusual. To extend this a lot farther than either of those examples, if someone assured you that they would very much appreciate if you would smash his hand with a hammer, that preference would probably be sufficiently unusual, as a purely descriptive matter, that you would probably decline without regard to the truthfulness of his preference. Again—I’m not equating that with your examples. I’m just trying to illustrate a broader point.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there (no pun intended). Scott knows more neurodivergent people and is therefore less fazed by their unusual requests and preferences than others, such as the B&B hosts, would be.
Yea, another way of thinking about it is the cost to you as a greeter. If a person has some really obscure preferences, such as having their hand smashed with a hammer, if you have the wrong information smashing their hand would be costly to you. So simply sticking with the norms and not smashing the hand is a safe option to fall back on. If their preference is sufficiently obscure you're safe in the knowledge that basically nobody else has a leg up on you, as they won't be smashing that person's hand with a hammer either.
Sticking to a cultural norm is also a safe default option, because even if normal treatment is annoying to some people they'll always understand that you're "just following the norms" and can't get mad at you
Yep. Might be you don't even have the wrong information, but you're missing nuisance from an unfamiliar convention and missing nuances is often a bigger faux pas.
"Yes, I do like having my hand smashed with a hammer, but obviously not on a Tuesday. All hand-smashers know that that's a rest day. How rude of you".
This goes back to the other minds fallacy. The thinking of the hotel people, when hearing your friend was an introvert, may have been "he's shy, he's from the city where people are rude, let's show him some hospitality."
I think Scott's framing of "inability to respect preferences" sort of priviliges a hypothesis that come from Scott's rationalist mind state.
Most people (and this is more true of rationalists as well then most would care to admit) don't just communicate at face value.
It is illogical to assume that they do, and the "not respecting preferences" seems to spring from this unspoken assumption.
I think this is a particular tricky cognitive bias for rationalists, particularly those on the spectrum.
It reminds me of the TOS episode "The Galileo Seven" where Spock keeps getting surprised everyone else isnt acting logically. I thought that episode was poor writing of the character, as it is not logical to assume others will act logically.
Some people refuse to admit/allow deviations from the norm, and I think others may confuse their own preferences with facts or properties of external objects. I had a boyfriend in my youth who would always pick out the nut variety of a thing (ice cream bar, candy bar, etc.) for me even though I had told him many times that I didn't like nuts. He would then claim that the, e.g., walnut chocolate bar was "objectively the best one."
Preferences are often mutually exclusive, so if you can't distinguish your preferences from those of other people, you're going to look like a jerk a lot. It's confusing in the candy bar example, since the boyfriend doesn't get to eat the candy bar himself. But if the example is instead changed to "Choosing somewhere to go for dinner" or "Choosing which radio station to listen to", if I think your preference is the same as mine, I'm just going to pick what I want all the time. This looks like ignoring your preference because I don't care, which is a jerky thing to do. Plus, effective kindness often requires knowing what other people want.
I agree, and even if you can't imagine someone not liking nuts, for example, it does feel awfully disrespectful to not take their word for it, or care enough to remember. Perhaps that's where the 'jerk' experiences arise.
I think this is getting worse now then it used to be. It's the social trust decline thing. People used to have develop this skill to some extent. Now people group together in clicks with known specific perfomances and preferences- it's odd. In some ways it's an ultra-conformist era- there are just far many choices to conform to that can be easily accessed and the role of how to conform quickly understood.
My mom always buys me cakes and boxes of candy when I visit her even though she knows I am on a low carb diet. There may be something a little passive-aggressive going on with that. But mostly she just wants to eat that stuff and getting it for me so she can "share" is as good an excuse as any. Plus mothers always want to feed their children. It's sort of an instinct.
A lot of people have a problem with objective/subjective distinctions. It may be something so obvious to us that we casually overestimate others' basic familiarity with ontology.
So true! I remember having to tell a smart, well-educated and not young acquaintance who was claiming the right to his own opinion in a dispute centering around the proportion of people in Calgary that are Ukrainian or descended from Ukrainians that while we are all entitled to our own preferences, we are not entitled to our own facts.
I see an alternative mental model for this scenario. In short: people don't acknowledge _weird_ preferences, for very restrictive definitions of weird
Your original example is a perfect one. There is a default social expectation that your friend's preference violates. When normies, who don't know your friend and don't know _why_ you hold the preferences you do, when they encounter preferences that violate the default social expectation, they're maybe making a little error correction. They're subconsciously assuming you have expressed the incorrect preference and they're 'helping' you out by ignoring your stated preference.
There's tons and tons of social precedent for this dynamic. Look at just about everything in dating, for example. For most people when they're dating, if you make no assumptions whatsoever about social context, and take everything they say at literal face value, you will most likely be hopelessly confused and stay single. There is an element of presumed mind-reading involved, and a consequent implied social burden of making your own mind legible for others.
This is infuriating for rationalists (myself included) but it makes sense when you keep in mind that we are all already five-sigma deviants from average here, on dimensions most people don't even know exist. When you or your friend or I say "hey I'm really introverted, I need my space, I appreciate your concern but please don't bother me when I'm here", we actually mean it. But when most people say that, they don't mean that. They mean who knows what. Maybe they mean "I am scared and alone in a foreign city and too nervous to engage with you", in which case the response of being especially friendly and welcoming is the _correct_ one, even though they specifically told them not to.
A lot of scenarios like this that I see rationalists get perplexed over, I think you can easily explain a lot of them with something like "most people take as a default assumption that everyone is normal". And _typical people_ would appreciate that friendliness.
So from the B&B proprietor's perspective, they disregarded your stated preferences, and then you two were annoyed and they were like "huh what'd I do?". But the _last ten people_ they had, they did the same thing, but they got positive responses. So, 10 positive responses and 1 negative response, they're gonna continue doing it
As an aside: I don't know if you literally mean a B&B or if you just mean AirB&B, but it is my understanding that at _actual_ Bed-And-Breakfast places, some level of engagement by the hosts is expected. That's why it's a bed _and breakfast_ instead of just a bed; you have someone there cooking for you. Your situation could be not a part of a wider pattern of disregarding preferences, but rather just an idiosyncratic situation based on a mismatch in expected social connotation
Yeah I think that this comment section will become a bit of an echo chamber for exactly the reason you suspect - rationalists tend way more toward reason, logic, and explicit preferences, while non-rationalists (who I often handwave as my parents' generation) tend toward emotion and blind belief (caution, r=way less than 1 here :) ).
I think of it as more like, cold calculating computational rationality vs complex intuitive heuristic rationality. The kind of rationality that rationalists tend to celebrate is the kind that is very very vulnerable to not seeing illegible things. As I get older, I find that most of the important things in life are illegible
“So from the B&B proprietor's perspective, they disregarded your stated preferences, and then you two were annoyed and they were like "huh what'd I do?". But the _last ten people_ they had, they did the same thing, but they got positive responses. So, 10 positive responses and 1 negative response, they're gonna continue doing it”
I’ve seen someone I am close to ignore their partner’s stated preferences to insist they would enjoy going on a boat, even though the partner was pleading and terrified of going on the water. I tried to step in but he insisted his partner would love it. The partner relented, had a great time on the boat, and seemed really happy afterwards that they went. So while my own MO is to always respect people’s preferences, I can’t deny that people do get feedback that stated preferences are often shortsighted/false.
Reality is that most people are really really bad at understanding, reifying, and communicating their own preferences, and it seems that evolution thought it was easier to just give most people an assumption on default preferences than it was to make them capable of more introspection
Or even just at differentiating between ‘I am afraid of boats/water’ and ‘I don’t like boats/water’.
Which is also the difference between an introvert/low sociability person and someone with social anxiety. You can have both, but they ain’t the same thing
I agree. I've had good experiences in the past with people ignoring my (weird) stated preferences. For example, I say I'm perfectly happy to get the bill when I got out to dinner with poor student friends, but they often insist on splitting the bill anyway. On reflection, I think I feel better when the bill is split evenly, even though that's less fair. The more I age, the more I find that treating myself like a normal person makes me feel better than respecting the weird preferences I think I have.
Probably a lot of people behave like this? We state our preferences in a way that signals openness / generosity / humility / other positive qualities, while trusting that other people will treat us as if we were closed-minded / miserly / etc, thereby having our cake and eating it.
> The more I age, the more I find that treating myself like a normal person makes me feel better than respecting the weird preferences I think I have.
I've also come to this, and it's from two directions simultaneously
On the one hand, it really helps in social and romantic scenarios. It's all fine and good to dream about meeting another autistic programmer gf, but supply and demand being what it is, if your social success depends on "find someone who just so happens to be the same weird I am", that's a real long-shot strategy. If, instead, we all just got over ourselves and acted more normal, we would have radically better success. I like having success.
On the other hand, I've undergone something of a stage 4 -> stage 5 transition (in the David Chapman sense https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence). One of the interesting things this has done has been to make me keenly aware of the failings of rational/legible systems, as well as given me a lot of humility regarding what we (think we) know about Being Smart. From my perspective, I've really started to appreciate how a lot of human 'irrationality' is actually smarter and more optimal and more pro-social, even if I can't immediately see how this is true. There is a lot of mundane wisdom in habit and tradition, even if we aren't aware of it.
I think people are confounding the classic bed and breakfast experience with the modern airbnb experience. Classic B&B, yes, expect to interact with the hosts - they will be serving your breakfast, after all. This is not at all true for airbnb. I have used many airbnbs without interacting with the host at all.
I’m referring to something else. Before AirBB there were charming- if you are into it - little places typically run by a retired couple where there was a full court press of friendliness. You would sit at their kitchen table and chat with them while they cooked your bacon and eggs plus home frys and keep an eye on your coffee cup.
I think it's more of a defense mechanism to convince oneself that one's worldview is the 'correct' one - my preference that I'm not allowed to express except anonymously on the internet (or to extremely close friends) is that white privilege is not a thing anymore and that affirm action is stupid and ultimately hurts more people than it helps (yeah, opinion prob =/= preference here but it's the first thing that comes to mind).
However, god forbid that I as a white male ever say that, because the 'right' path has already been defined by the screeching majority - just like other, softer, non-political preferences like 'everyone enjoys small talk' and 'people LOVE presents' have also been completely internalized. It takes a level of self-awareness that unfortunately most people aren't capable of to escape that mindset.
A preference is very different from a belief about objective facts. "Affirmative action is net harmful" is objectively true or false as a statement about the world whereas "I'd rather not have a cup of tea right now" is purely about what's going on inside your mind.
"Affirmative action is net harmful" is not "objectively true or false"; it requires both a factual position on AA's effects and a value judgement about whether that outcome is better than the alternative.
> "I'd rather not have a cup of tea right now" is purely about what's going on inside your mind.
Not also an objective fact? In fact, like most things, there's lots of possible 'objective facts' related to the above, e.g. is the person engaging in that verbal behavior lying, 'being polite', or or are they wrong about their own preferences?
It's an objective fact whether a given person has a given preference or not. But if you and I have different preferences that doesn't mean one of us is objectively wrong
> But if you and I have different preferences that doesn't mean one of us is objectively wrong
I agree, practically at least!
But the way your other comment was written seemed to imply that 'things going on inside someone's mind' weren't objective facts (at all), which seems just wrong.
Isn't the simplest explanation for the b&b scenario that they like small talk more than they believe your friend doesn't like small talk, and so feel justified in expecting small talk from them anyway?
There's also the problem of cultural norms, which for those of us more on the analytic scale are really hard to suss out and so going back to a base axiom ("Everyone likes to talk about themselves!") seems more safe.
Imagine if you took your girlfriend at her word when you started to pick up the check on your first date and she said "Oh, I can pick that up". Even if she said it again, I would be inclined to see this as a cultural norm or a standard that I should still pick up the check.
Naturally, there are women for whom my insisting to pick up the check would be a clear sign of what Scott points out in this post. Thankfully for me, my British now-wife is of the opposite caliber and had (social) expectations that I would continue to graciously insist on paying.
There are definitely some cultural scripts that work this way. A host is supposed to be self-deprecating about the quality of their food, and the guest is supposed to say they love it. You're supposed to offer someone a gift at the holidays, they're supposed to say "no, you don't have to", and then you're supposed to give it to them anyway.
Breaking these scripts with people you know well is fine. But to break it with a new acquaintance is to insist on honesty and trust - and while honesty and trust *sound* like good things, they can be very dangerous things in some cultural contexts. (Related to why people at polite dinner parties aren't supposed to mention religion or politics.)
[Re a proposed game of Truth or Dare] “There are good reasons people don’t go around telling people their most intimate thoughts. Games like this can be really dangerous.”
“I don’t see what’s ‘dangerous’ about it.”
“You don’t have to. Other people have. That’s how it became a convention — people saw the harm excessive candor could do. That’s why there are conventions, so people don’t have to go around repeating the same mistakes over and over again.”
I think an even more interesting thing with these people is if you try to tell them to stop directly they will continue talking!
My grandmother when she starts a story she’s told me 4 times will refuse to acknowledge my interruptions and interjections informing her that she had just already told me recently.
By far though the most annoying feature of these nice older people is that the questions often lead to a long drawn out monologue about themselves.
It is almost a strategy so they can talk at you and make it hard for you to stop them.
There's also the idea that 'respecting one's elders' seems to be fast falling by the wayside as a common belief, and that today's adult generation doesn't understand or respect that rule, while the older generation does, and both arrive at expectations of their own preferences being met for different reasons.
I think it’s a cognitive issue that arrises in most people at a certain age for everyone. My grandmother was not always like that, but right as she turned 70 she became a broken record. I don’t believe it’s a conscious mechanism, I’ve tested distracting them when they won’t stop and that usually seems to work.
Most people like talking about themselves and we work to listen to others perhaps it could also be their ability to self regulate is degrading.
You have to understand... we can access any information or order anything we want at the touch of a button.
In her day, she had to walk 15 miles uphill (both ways) in the snow with no shoes just to get a cabbage to boil in a pot to share with her 15 siblings, and that was breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the week, and god darn it, she was greatful she didn't fall down in the snow.
This sort of thing was plausible when I was a kid and old people said it. They grew up in the 30s with Naziism and the Great Depression. Today's 70 year olds were kids in the 60s. Unless they're black, they were not experiencing any kind of tenement/sharecropper level hardship in the 60s, at least not in the U.S.
Well, it's possible that she can't process "Alec doesn't want to hear this story again" without also coming to the conclusion that "Alec thinks I'm a boring useless old fart," so she's emotionally blocked from the seemingly-trivial insight by the fact that, for her, it is necessarily attached to a much bigger and sad insight.
Or just listen politely to the story again and react appropriately. Remember that your grandparents won't be around for much longer, and once they're gone you'll probably say "Man, I'd give anything to spend one more afternoon with grandma listening to her old stories again".
Also, remember that your elders probably had a lot of patience for _your_ stupid ramblings back when you were a kid.
I guess I should credit you for having more social courage to put this in writing than I did, because I had the same thought. My grandmother died almost 30 years ago, and I loved her dearly. My memory of her face, her voice, the gentleness with which she would pat my head when I was small and sat in her lap are fading now, and it feels horribly like she almost never existed at all. If I could have her back for a day I'd listen to any number of stupid boring stories.
Suggestion- Act interested and and ask complicated questions till she loses interest. Everytime she tells the same story, ask questions. not just trivial details- but like "so given you said x, what was different y that year?" Follow up.
She will be glad you are engaged, but either 1) you get her to talking about different things 2) she can no longer just repeat herself and loses interest
also, try telling your own anecdotes that might be relevant.
The questions will work best if they involve areas that challenge her, and highlight possible philosophical differences, without being obviously confrontational.
I once had a friend and colleague who just loved to tell anecdotes. One day he started in on an anecdote which (like so many of them) was about his friend Claudio, and I was suddenly gripped with a sheer determination that, whatever it took, I was not going to hear this one. At first I gently demurred: I have heard a great many Claudio stories, I think I'll skip this one. No, seriously, I don't want you to tell me this story. Stop. Please stop. Stop now. Eventually I was curled up on my chair, fingers in my ears, almost screaming "it won't stop why can't I make it stop". This finally, was such an unexpected reaction (and it was obvious that I would not be able to hear him over the screaming) that he actually did stop, and looked at me with a very confused look on his face.
There was a pause, and I looked at him, and whispered "has it stopped" before gingerly taking my fingers out of my ears, and began to relax. At which he said "so, anyway, Claudio...". After the *second* session of putting my fingers in my ears and screaming, he finally relented.
I have a saying: as polite as possible, as rude as necessary.
I'm not so sure. There are people in my own family just like this. Once they start talking, nothing you say or do will stop them until they've said their piece.
I finally realized that David Mantel was telling the literal truth when he said he had to say something. He had a lot to say.
I found him very wearing because I felt like I wasn't allowed to be in the conversation. If I was following my ideas of politeness, I didn't get to say anything.
And yet he said, apparently sincerely, that he respected me.
I finally asked him if he minded if I interrupted him, and he said he didn't mind. He was almost certainly telling the truth.
But there'd been so many years of my getting tired of listening to him that I didn't get back in touch. And then he died.
I'm not sure what to take away from this. I don't feel regret about not getting in touch again, but it might have been a good idea.
Aha! The same as the bracket problem! There are those, myself included, who will argue unto death that whether the quotation mark or bracket goes inside our outside the period depends on whether the quotes/parentheses set off the whole sentence (period inside) or only the last part of it.
I also have strong opinions about the Oxford comma, but will spare you.
Perhaps because I tend to write by ear, to me it makes perfect sense to have a comma before the last in a list (two is not a list). There is a natural pause there. But others feel strongly that insisting on that comma is just pedantic and insufferable ....
I like the Oxford comma because it's less ambiguous, e.g. sometimes it's not clear if the last clause in a list separated by commas is one item or two – consistently using an Oxford comma avoids that problem. It's way easier to visually parse.
I'm not even a native English speaker and I haven't read much about this topic either - just enough to know that what's intuitive to me is definitely not remotely how it's done. My priorities would be:
1. If it's inside the quotation marks and it's a standard character (whatever that means, but not brackets of course [] ), then it should have come from the stuff being quoted!
2. You shouldn't need to look inside the quotation marks to know how to punctuate what's outside.
That's called "logical" or "British-style" quoting, and is what has been taught in British schools since the 1990s. As someone older than that, I was originally taught the other form, which is that a punctuation mark at the end of a quotation goes outside the quotation marks.
If my quotation is a sentence and also ends the sentence that contains the quotation, I tend to end with .". (full stop - close quote - full stop) which is wrong according to both rules.
> it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.
Yes! Tho I don't think of it so much as counter-intuitive as just _worng_ (ha).
This is really interesting:
> Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style ‘new’ or ‘logical’ quoting. This returns British English to the style many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and German) have been using all along.
So English has (yet again) been a weird outlier, and seemingly for some weird fashion/fad pertaining to the supposed "aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text"? I'm shocked but not surprised :)
I agree. I understand it's the convention (at least I think it is), but I can rarely bring myself to do it. Periods are another weird problem, because they both end sentences and certain abbreviations, so e.g.:
Yes, (3) was supposed to be "in". I'm used to comment systems that allow editing and I type too fast.
I agree with you that (2) is least ambiguous, but copy-editors the world over would reject it, alas. In principle the problem occurs with any punctuation:
Nah – it's perfectly understandable, better, and the only downside is that it just 'feels wrong' to (probably overly-)conscientious people :)
We can just change the rules; especially when it's a small enough change that it doesn't actually significantly impact communication.
Or do you also object _every time_ someone sends you a message that fails to follow any rule? (I don't _like_ it when people, e.g. don't capitalize _any_ letters in text, but I don't complain about it.)
But the password hash is overly conscientious, and that's who ultimately needs to understand the password. If your password is "elehpant" and you write it as "elephant", you might has well have input "butt". And passwords can have punctuation marks within - most sites even force you to sprinkle some. So I think passwords would be a case where communication demands precise rules.
I use Markdown 'code span' syntax, e.g. "This is code: `code`" for 'precise text like what you would input into computer code'. Passwords seem to fit that use case very well.
> But the password hash is overly conscientious, and that's who ultimately needs to understand the password.
Huh? I'm confused as to whether we have anything like the same idea of 'conscientiousness' if you think a "password hash" (function?) is conscientious at all.
But you _seem_ to be agreeing with me that precision would be important in the case where you want to communicate a password. My point is that extra precision is useful in other scenarios and the cost seems pretty minimal to me (ignoring the almost inevtiable blitzkrieg by grammar Nazis).
Don't fall into that trap! Punctuation is for us and we're free to change it to be more sensible!
I deliberately _include_ (relevant) punctuation in quotation marks now, and, if the quote is at the end of a sentence, punctation _after_ the ending quotation mark.
People don't actually have explicit models of other people. They have patterns of behavior that are distributed across many different situations. When I say I have a mental model of an introvert, what I really mean is that I have behavioral patches that tagged 'introvert', and when it's time to deal with one I swap in the behavioral patches instead of my default behaviors.
This means that if you tell a person that your friend is an introvert, and they don't already have the relevant patches for all sorts of different situations, they find it very hard to change, because there isn't such a thing as a centralized "models of people" database where they can update a handful of traits. They have this entire distributed-across-life-situations pattern set that is hard to change.
My personal observation is that people who are generally smart are good at adapting and people who don't seem that smart are worse, and my inference is that doing this distributed system update is pretty cognitively expensive.
Clarification: I totally have what FEELS LIKE a mental model of an introvert, but my idea is that this is illusory / downstream of the distributed behavior-metis set. I notice I'll nod and consciously register other people's preferences I find both unusual and complex, but when the time comes to act on that conscious information I get confused and flub it a surprisingly high fraction of the time.
well, "introvert" is just a sign that points to sets of similar types. There are different introverts- or more correctly, there are different people to whom a label introvert can apply and describe the territory.
I think this largely depends. Some people do the mental model thing, some people see others as more individual. It's also a culture/context thing. Some people categorize some groups of people as types and others as individuals (this happens with racism)
Lots of people lie about their preferences, either because they don't know them, they don't think it's okay or polite to hold the preferences they do, or to manipulate others. Most people implicitly know this, and that makes someone claiming they have unusual preferences weaker evidence that they actually do than you'd think if you assumed everybody was honest about their preferences.
I came here to say this. Anecdotal example: when my mom turned 50 and I wished her a happy birthday she said she didn't want her birthday acknowledged anymore because getting old makes her sad. So on her 51st I treated it like any other day and she was upset I forgot her birthday.
Generally when people express an unusual preference like hating presents or birthdays I take them at face value and respect the preference but I always wonder in the back of my mind if it's a trap.
50 is one of those milestone birthdays, so it is a big step on the "you are getting older and now death is coming closer" realisation. So your mother probably was being honest when she didn't want that acknowledged or celebrated. But a year later, she was now used to being 50, she didn't feel all that different, it wasn't so bad - and thus ignoring her birthday did feel uncaring.
People change preferences or don't even know what preferences they have. It is hard to figure out, and you weren't wrong in what you did - you were only doing what she asked! - but sometimes you have to dig a little.
Like Scott's girlfriend - she probably was honest about "Mandated holiday/occasion gift-giving makes me feel weird" but equally she was pleased to get a gift. The unexpected small, thoughtful gift from someone who knows you well is a nice thing to get, whereas having to tell someone what big expensive present you want for the birthday/Christmas deal feels like a lot of trouble and leaves the recipient trying to decide how expensive is *too* expensive and if the giver will think that what they asked for is *too* expensive and that they are being greedy etc. so it's more trouble than it's worth. The cliché bunch of red roses can be unwelcome because it's the cliché, don't have to think about it, gift, but a small bouquet of something colourful or sweet-smelling, or maybe they really like cacti! - that's different. That's showing you put thought into something that would please them and you know them well enough to know their tastes, and it's just "I saw this and thought of you and it makes me happy to make you happy" with no score-keeping. That's important; it doesn't work if it's "I got you that cactus so now you owe me the favour of letting me watch the game" and so on.
>> Lots of people lie about their preferences, either because they don't know them, they don't think it's okay or polite to hold the preferences they do, or to manipulate others.
> I came here to say this. Anecdotal example: when my mom turned 50 and I wished her a happy birthday she said she didn't want her birthday acknowledged anymore because getting old makes her sad. So on her 51st I treated it like any other day and she was upset I forgot her birthday.
You came to the wrong conclusion. Lots of people lie about their preferences. But there's no reason to think your mother was lying here. I feel the same way about my birthday. Acknowledging it is bad. Not acknowledging it is not great either. The problem comes from the fact that *the birthday itself* is bad. You can't fix that. No matter what you do, you'll be part of a bad situation, because there is no option for the situation to be good.
The tactful thing to do, I guess, is to treat it like a special day without specifically acknowledging it's her birthday. :-/
I agree, lying about preferences is the biggest reason for this behavior I've experienced. Especially for the gift giving anecdote. There's such a strong norm against asking for gifts that basically any denial of a preference for gifts should be meet with strong suspicion.
I'm also reminded of the Japanese norm of refusing things the first time, with the expectation that they will be offered multiple times with increasing insistence.
For anyone unwittingly trying the similar tactic of offering to pay for my meal without wanting me to accept, please be advised that I hate fake-fighting about the bill and I will accept your offer to pay even if I know you don't sincerely want to pay. I really don't care who pays, as long as we don't have to fake-argue about it. If you suggest I pay for the whole thing, I will probably oblige. I'll consider it an exchange whereby I pay you not to make me argue about who is going to pay the bill.
Yes, I think way too many people are overthinking this. People lie about preferences all the time. They *particularly* lie about not having common preferences that other people might find burdensome to satisfy. So when you tell someone that you don't have a particular very common preference, the proper Bayesian updating is "it is now only 90% certain that they have this preference, and they will most likely be pleased by my efforts to satisfy it".
I mean, technically this whole community is about overthinking things and yes, I agree, that he completely left out the normie habit of falsifying preferences. Hell, in many circles one might expect that Scott telling his hosts to ignore his friend was a prank.
Just a thought. Even though your friend didn't like the talking, both of you left thinking they were actually nice. Maybe that's the (hansonianly hidden?) motivation.
I’m in the weird position that (despite my own lack of social skills) I feel, rightly or wrongly, extremely confident of what’s going on here, and it wasn’t a possibility even mentioned in the post. The B&B hosts thought that you and your friend were engaging in “Jewish grandmother behavior.” I.e., “I’m completely fine, I’ll just sit here in the dark, I don’t need anything” — meaning I *do* need something, I want you to help / engage with me, but I want you to freely offer it, without my needing to explicitly request it. The hosts thought that you and your friend just “didn’t want to cause trouble” by “expecting” or “demanding” small talk, so that by making small talk anyway, they were being all the nicer to you. As your story illustrates, this is one of *the* stereotypical behaviors of neurotypicals that confuse nerds, the literal-minded, and those on the spectrum. (Or am I missing details of the story that would invalidate this explanation?)
The weird thing about this is that it was Scott who told them, after nicely engaging,that the friend, who wasn't even there, didn't like that.
Also, in the girlfriend/presents case, Scott's first hypothesis was that it might actually be "some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation", which makes me think that Scott is not so clueless with these dynamics and there may be other details that make him not consider your hypothesis as too likely for the B&B case.
I think you're right that Scott, and people like him, aren't "clueless" – but they do want, and actually can achieve with similar people, honest 'object level' communication.
But it's _also_ the case that even 'normies' _regularly_ fail to communicate with each other because of these same dynamics, sometimes to _spectacularly_ disastrous effects, and that a lot of these failures could _easily_ be avoided or greatly mitigated by actual honest and direct communication.
I am not expert in social situations, but I am not sure this explanation is correct. Telling somebody you are introverted seems like an oddly specific way to say "Don't mind me [but secretly do talk to me]". I can't imagine a non-introvert ever telling somebody they were introverted in the hopes of secretly wanting conversation.
To people who are familiar with the concept of "introvert" and with people self-labeling as such (i.e., anyone who is reading this site, among others) your reasoning sounds reasonable. But people who aren't familiar with the trope will just think, "that's odd that this person is doing the usual pretending-to-seem-low-maintenance thing with an unusual new word - kids these days!"
The chain of inferences in their mind would be "introverted just a fancy word for "shy", so she is shy, therefore we need to be extra nice and welcoming to help her feel at home."
Do you not know about Guess cultures vs Ask cultures? TLDR: Anyone who has internalized Guess culture will automatically ignore any statement like "I don't want a present" or "I don't want extensive hospitality", because in a Guess culture, making those statements is (merely) proper courtesy and the proper response is to ignore them.
Yes, I think this is the correct answer. The things Scott mentioned may have had a causal role in creating Guess culture, but the culture is now somewhat independent of those things.
Speculation: Guess culture vs. Ask culture is also ties to extroversion vs. introversion. Two extroverts might actually know each others’ preferences better than they know their own, given the amount of time and effort devoted to paying attention to others instead of self-reflection. Vice versa with introverts.
+1 for this being a Guess vs Ask disconnect. As far as I understand Guess Culture, there is no string of (polite) words you can utter that will convince someone that you don't want the standard thing. At least I haven't found one that reliably works.
Yes, agreed. But I would frame that as you having slowly acquainted the other person with Ask Culture.
However, as Deiseach mentions downthread, Guess Culture also has some default ways of asking for some less standard things, such as "if you don't want tea, refuse three times". Perhaps part of my problem is lack of practice with Guess Culture. It doesn't work for truly weird or unexpected preferences, though.
Guess cultures tend to be culturally homogeneous - you don't need to ask/explain/believe polite protestations, because everyone just KNOWS what is appropriate in this situation. Ask cultures are often heterogeneous ones; since we can't reliably guess or count on others to guess correctly, we must be (uncouthly) specific.
Perhaps the B&B couple grew up within a homogeneous culture, and now are in a heterogeneous one but haven't adapted well.
I suspect that your grandmother did think that your girlfriend was lying *to herself*. It's an important distinction. The happy boyfriend in the miserable relationship demonstrates our capacity for self deception quite well. Perhaps old people underestimate youngsters ability to know what they want; and simultaneously overestimate their ability to know what youngsters want. (Drawing on their experiences as a former youngster)
I call this sort of thing the Golden Rule Fallacy: applying "do to others as you'd like them to do to you" too literally or narrowly. "I like chocolate cake, so I'll buy everyone else chocolate cake" rather than being able to abstract away a level and go "I like it when people buy me my favourite cake, so I'll buy them *their* favourite cake."
People forcing small talk onto introverts is a good example.
Going back the other way, if a new person joins a group I'm in, I have to make an effort to remember "they might feel more welcomed if I talk to them" rather than thinking "I'm sure they won't want me to bother them."
I've heard something like this called "The Platinum Rule". Rather than "Treat others as you wish to be treated", it's more like "Treat people as you think THEY would prefer to be treated".
I like how in the bobverse books, they come across some aliens and to them, that's the Silver Rule, while "Do onto others as they would wish done onto themselves" is the golden rule.
Jordan Peterson wrote/said something I thought was very interesting about The Golden Rule: treating people as you would want to be treated _doesn't_ mean treating them exactly as they verbally/explicitly demand or request.
It's very common for people to _later_ appreciate someone else's behavior that, at the time, they didn't want (or thought that they didn't want).
I think of it as something like the 'consequentialism corollary' of The Golden Rule: treat people as you'd want to be treated _from the perspective of the 'wisest version' of yourself_.
That's like the opposite of Scott's point. That's like a licence for people like the B&B owners to ignore the stated wishes of Scott's friend and think they know better. It doesn't allow for people genuinely having different preferences from "the wisest version of yourself".
Platinum Rule > Golden Rule > consequentialism corollary.
Well, I think it's technically much worse than what you describe – you have to be able to accurately predict the entire evolution of the universe that's part of any future 'light cones' of causality (for which you're 'responsible').
But part of why I can imagine some people, like the B&B hosts in the example, 'ignoring' people's explicitly stated preferences is that that's a very common thing to do, e.g. with young children.
I'm more (naturally) an 'ask culture' person myself, so I don't like people ignoring my own explicitly communicated preferences, and, because I don't like that, I generally don't do that to others (even when they probably _would_ want me to do so).
But ultimately there's no escaping that, per the degree to which you are (or assume) responsibility for someone, or their wellbeing at all (which we should, to some degree), then you can't _just_ satisfy their explicit preferences and wash your hands of the consequences. You have to actually try to know whether it's better or worse to give them what they say they want, or give them what you think would be best. And sometimes you really will know better!
I'm not one for casual genetic explanations but how talkative/unthinkingly social you are seems like one that could easily be influenced by the genome. They may very well have intended to say less but their nature is just to overly socialize without realizing it.
As you get older, your neuroplasticity decreases, and you become less likely to update priors. Certainly you wouldn't do it just from a stranger saying something.
> part of me will always refuse to believe that people enjoy living in New York City, and whenever I talk to friends in New York I have to resist the urge to ask them if they're okay
So my specific reasons for sorta liking it here aside - I will point out that you live in America's second-densest urban area, so evidently you do enjoy some of the consequences of density (probably more "having enough people to be able to surround myself with like-minded people" than "lots of traffic") in a way that would be equally incomprehensible to a lot of more rural people.
(Granted that NYC has some extra disadvantages mostly unrelated to density, like terrible trash management. But if you model "why do I like Berkeley"+"what if those disadvantages just bothered me less", it seems resolvable)
What cities do you like? I want to move back to the US (currently an expat), but after living in Asia's relatively well-built cities it's hard for me to judge which American cities are actually liveable these days.
Unfortunately I find that people are very often wrong about this kind of thing.
For several years it was something like common wisdom that Jar Jar Binks was the reason why The Phantom Menace was bad. People may genuinely not remember the degree to which the character (and actor) were held responsible for the film's crappiness, followed closely in blame by Jake Lloyd's performance. It wasn't until many years later that the zeitgeist shifted, in no small part because of the Red Letter Media reviews, to more of a view that The Phantom Menace and the prequels in general were bad because the script/story was extremely bad and Jar Jar was more of a symptom of a larger and more insuperable badness.
So I think here we have an instance of literally millions of people being wrong about their preferences. And if you pay attention to art criticism, this is more the norm than the exception. People usually do know when they don't like a piece of art (music, fiction, film, etc.), but they are usually wrong about why they don't like it. In other words, if you fixed the specific thing they said they didn't like, they would probably still not like it. What we do is form immediate visceral/nonverbal/emotional reactions, and then confabulate an explanation for that reaction. If you've trained yourself by actually trying to create art, or do art criticism for a living or something, then your odds of being right about why you don't like a thing are probably better ... but even then, it's not a sure thing. A movie critic's ability to point out a poor shot framing doesn't actually mean the shot framing was the *reason* she didn't like the movie.
If people self-knowledge about their artistic preferences is this poor, then why should we expect their self-knowledge about other domains to be that much better? More data? Maybe. But what if you've just confabulated your preferences as a way of justifying what are actually contingent emotional responses? You got yelled at really loud for writing in a library book when you were three years old, and now you hate libraries, and you say it's because of the smell. But the reason you hate the smell ... is because of the first thing. And if the smell was fixed, you would still hate libraries.
I mean, there are legitimately different reasons to like or dislike TPM, and I think you might be claiming more of a change in individuals' preferences than reflects reality.
Some people just don't like comedy. The comedy in TPM consists mostly of Jar Jar (there's a little bit with droids as well). If someone found the amount of comedy intolerable, they're not wrong to say they hated it because of Jar Jar. (I don't like comedy, but Jar Jar wasn't enough to make me say TPM as a whole was bad; I actually like it.)
Really? I don't run in truly deep-geek circles but everyone of my group just thought that Jar Jar was a horrifyingly bad nugget of awful in a generally bad stew; fun to talk about but whose removal wouldn't have made the meal tasty.
Why doesn't a simple model apply? Assume most people a) operate largely by social norms/defaults, b) don't have much occasion to modify their behavior, c) don't have a burning desire to satisfy other people's oddball preferences. This would predict that people will acknowledge preferences more when:
1. They don't have to violate usual social norms to do so
2. They are used to accommodating behavior of this kind
3. The behavior is unusual
Let's apply to the original example. Not exchanging a pleasant word with a guest/neighbor is in many parts of the US seen as *extremely rude.* Further, finding such chit-chat deeply unpleasant is *unusual.* And it sounds like your hosts are not used to accommodating unusual behavioral norms. So we should not be surprised that a brief/causal conversation did not shift their conduct, or (from their perspective) cause them to rudely ignore a guest. Also, old people are often chatty!
Prediction: the hosts would have done far better acknowledging a more usual preference that did not require norm-violation. E.g., "Please don't make noise before 8am, we keep late hours on vacation."
I don't see a contradiction. If the goal of kindness is to feel kind then just letting things be maybe good for others but not very rewarding. Put another way, many acts of kindness are a little selfish.
- the hosts also wanted to feel hospitable
- the gift giver also wanted to feel great at gift giving
- the therapist also wanted to feel competent
Maybe all the protagonist in the article are rational.
It takes a certain dose humility, selflessness and/or respect to not seek credit for other's joys.
There is a French saying that roughly translates to, “to know all is to forgive all.”
You can’t understand NYC (Manhattan) but if someone walked you through their day - work is 8 min away, best friend is 3 min away, doctor is 11 min, favorite restaurant 9 min, favorite bar 4 min, supermarket 6 min, I’m sure you could understand.
Respectfully, this the opposite of my own experience of living in Manhattan. Among the innumerable aggravations the city provides are that the overhead of traveling anywhere is substantial due to the necessity of walking to / from and waiting for a subway and then travel along it including various stops that are not one's own--basically, it's impossible to get anywhere in under 20 minutes and that's under essentially optimal conditions. The irony of New York's cheek-by-jowl construction is that while its density is definitionally "things are closer together," it takes longer to travel a mile or two in New York (and heaven forbid somewhere more remote like Coney Island) than to travel ten miles in a rural area, with the various indignities of public transit as an added bonus.
As someone who deeply hates driving - an environment that forces me to concentrate on travel - and is entirely capable of walking to a subway stop station, catching a subway, exiting the subway and walking to my destination without consciously stopping reading my book, I tend to regard driving as being an enormously inferior mode of transport, to the point that I will happily take a great deal longer by public transit than suffer the hardship of driving.
Also, I've never driven anywhere in less than 20 minutes. Checking the oil, coolant and washer fluid levels before leaving, plus finding parking and parking safely, plus getting into and out of a car, which is never an easy or graceful process, is going to add up to an easy 20 minutes to get anywhere.
Checking the *washer fluid* levels before leaving on a five-minute trip? You're doing it wrong. You're doing it *painfully* wrong, which is why you find it an unpleasant experience. Even with oil and coolant, there's no need to check more often than every time you fill the gas tank. I'm guessing you've been trained so thoroughly to do this wrong that you couldn't do it right without feeling bad about yourself, which leaves you in an ugly trap w/re the utility of convenient short driving trips.
When I drive to the nearest grocery store, it is literally a two-minute trip. Literally literally, and much more convenient than a ten-minute walk while trying to carry a week's groceries.
You have to open the door, sit on the seat, lift one leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill, then, squeeze your knee under the wheel with one hand while pushing against the frame of the car with the other to get enough leverage to twist your body to turn your back into the seat, then lift the other leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill. Then you have to belt up, then catch your breath enough that you can concentrate on the road, and only then drive.
And getting out is worse, because getting your feet out and turning your body is now uphill, and you have to make sure not to hit your head on the top of the door frame.
Checking oil, coolant and washer fluid takes no time compared to the physical process of getting into and out of a car.
Not to be rude, but are you a larger person? Or do you possibly have a physical disability of some kind?
I'm a fairly big guy (>6' tall and fairly stocky) and I haven't had that much trouble getting into the driver's seat of a car in my life. Maybe I need to adjust the mirrors and steering column if someone else has been driving it, but even then the process is still under thirty seconds tops.
I injured my knees and back playing football as a college freshman - about 30 years ago, and before I learned to drive. I don't generally think of myself as disabled, but I do have very limited flexibility, which is probably why getting into and out of cars is so hard.
Also, I'm 1.98m tall, ie about 6'5.5"; the few extra centimetres make a surprising amount of difference - I regularly find I can't get the seat to go back far enough to get my knees comfortable with my feet on the pedals.
At a petite 1.90 meters, I just plant myself in the seat facing about fifty degrees to the side, rotate my torso forward, put one hand on the steering wheel for support/leverage, lift my legs (using their own muscles) to the right height that I can then pivot them over the doorsill but under the steering wheel. I'd be surprised if it takes five seconds.
I can imagine cars small and ergonomically poor enough that I'd have the problems you describe, but that would only be a problem when I was renting sight unseen. You describe old injuries that might make getting into any car a chore, but you shouldn't settle for the experience you describe without shopping around - nor assume that the only answer would be an automotive behemoth like the Canyonero. I have a friend who was a full 2.05 meters and, after trying several models, found he fit comfortably in a Ford Focus.
You have to open the door, sit on the seat, lift one leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill, then, squeeze your knee under the wheel with one hand while pushing against the frame of the car with the other to get enough leverage to twist your body to turn your back into the seat, then lift the other leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill. Then you have to belt up, then catch your breath enough that you can concentrate on the road, and only then drive.
And getting out is worse, because getting your feet out and turning your body is now uphill, and you have to make sure not to hit your head on the top of the door frame.
Checking oil, coolant and washer fluid takes no time compared to the physical process of getting into and out of a car.
If you live in a city w/a lot of slush, you need to know what your washer fluid level is! But checking each time is certainly not necessary. When I do use a car, it's car share, and I LOVE that the co-op takes care of all that. City living is great! My colleagues who live a similar distance from work get there sometimes faster than I do, and often much, much more slowly, but I always know how long it will take me, AND I can read a novel on the way. Plus those 10 min walks to get to and from the subway really add up, for my fitness. It means I can afford a doughnut stop on the way!
I was not clear; those colleagues who drive. They have chosen to live in neighbourhoods where housing is much cheaper, but transit sucks. What I pay extra for housing I gain in not owning and maintaining cars, and in lower aggravation.
Some time ago, my mother and I lived together for a few months. I had just started a diet. It took me forever to get her to learn that she wasn't helping by cooking for me, let alone yummy fatty food - she knows I usually like food so... that's that. And every time I had to tell her, or had to choose whether to eat or not what she had made, it felt like I was about to harm her much more than eating it would harm me.
One time, she noticed I was a little bit down, asked why, and I told her that in part it was because that day I had screwed up badly with my diet. Her response: go get ice-cream to cheer me up.
In the end she was much better, but it was a slower update than reasonable, and I had to compromise on the way. It seems to me like it was some sort of slow bayesian update together with the fact that she clearly got something herself out of cooking for me.
There is a certain subset of American office workers that will bake 100 dozen cookies for even the measliest maybe-holiday even if they know that every other person in the office is on a diet and would prefer no cookies.
I might be able to give you a small example of where you're doing this thing.
B&Bs are widely known as the place you stay if you want talkative hosts. If you don't want that, you stay in a hotel. I certainly avoid B&Bs most of the time for this reason.
Maybe I'm wrong about it being a widely known preference. Or maybe you didn't know this. Maybe it's your first time in a B&B. But I like to think there's at least a decent possibility that you were informed that B&Bs are hardcore into the talkative preference. It would explain the voice in your head that said they weren't going to respect your request for your friend's peace and quiet.
But you booked one. While these people are pretty obviously more on the "ignore preferences" side of things, would it be fair to call this specific case an instance of mutually ignored preferences? That is did you ignore that B&Bs were a talking space, booking one for an introverted person, much as they ignored that some people are introverted?
I do not mean to accuse. I'm genuinely curious if this narrative carries water, and if not, why not.
I'm not sure that the preference-ignorers are acting irrationally here. People are *really* bad at predicting what will make them happy, to the point where "things that usually make people happy" might actually be a better predictor than "things people say they want."
Well, no, 2.14 trillion dollars say he can convince people that they want things. There is a difference between satisfying an existing need and peddling addictive drugs.
Yep. I am very introverted and in the B&B situation I would absolutely be "please do not talk to me." But I usually do enjoy hearing hosts' stories and information about the area despite my reticence for smalltalk.
Would Scott prefer that the talkative BnB scenario had never happened? Probably not as it resulted in his essay. So in the end the hosts probably did the right thing.
This, but even moreso. They may think, "their preferences are wrong. This will not make them happy this time, but over the long run it will help them update their preferences." The movie Gran Torino is mostly about this dynamic.
What about paying attention to how people are reacting? If someone is relaxing during a conversation, that's one indicator, and if they're hunching and their is immobile, that's a different indicator.
I grant it isn't reliably that simple, since people can lie with body language, too, and are frequently under social pressure to do so.
I'm another vote for the ask v guess dichotomy. A lot of my childhood experiences are of WANTING things and not making action for them / saying I DIDN'T want them, because that would be BAD and SELFISH and MORE WORDS FOR BAD.
I am no longer like this. But I expect there are more people who are like this than there are people who actually don't want a present, even if it's left on the doorstop with a signed note guaranteeing lack of expectation of reciprocity, etc.
A friend of mine has a totally different and (to me) mysterious mode of communication in which what they say often does not really mean anything. This might explain the phenomena you describe for at least some people because if what they say often does not mean anything, then what other people say might not mean anything to them.
Some examples to illustrate what I mean.
1) in the early days of covid, they described it as 'worse than world war 2' and several months later as 'just the flu'. What's stranger is that they recently met somebody who lived through world war 2 as a child and heard stories about rationing. We had this little exchange:
Them: 'I realise I do not actually know much about wwii after talking to them.'
Me: 'Now do you see why I think you were wrong to compare covid to wwii'
Them: 'No, I still think covid is worse'
Me: 'So you admit that you do not know much about wwii, but you still think covid is worse'
Them: 'Yes'
2) They often exaggerate in what I consider an extreme fashion, to the point where I can't tell what they're communicating. Imagine somebody using the same hyperbolic expression to describe many possible scenarios (e.g. 'all my friends say they like X' could correspond to '2 friends said X out of 30 friends i spoke to' or 'all the hundred or so friends I met in a party yesterday said they like X'). Sometimes I challenge them. One time, they got frustrated with me and complained: "You always exaggerate what I say". In their mind, they are not the ones exaggerating (despite literally exaggerating) but it is me who is exaggerating by interpreting their words badly.
3) Sometimes they say things that get to me, or frustrate me, or affect me in some way. To try to explain themselves, they often use the phrase 'it is *just* talking' or 'I am *just* talking'. I do not fully understand what it means, but I think it is something like 'you should not put weight on what I say because it is just a bunch of words out of my mouth'.
My overall takeaway from this is that there are people who often say things in which the literal words they choose have little weight on what they are communicating, and it is more context and emotion that do the communication.
Some people use words exclusively as tools to influence the internal state of those they are interacting with with no respect to the meanings of the words used. Don’t know if that’s what’s going on with your friend but when I read the part about exaggeration that’s what stood out (they want you to adopt the belief they are professing by making an appeal to normality, which is made stronger if more than two people they know hold it.) I believe this to be a somewhat common communication mode.
They are not trying to influence me, just telling me a story. Again, just speculating, but I think a another part of it is that they assume that I *do* know what they mean even though there is no possible way I could know what they mean. Almost like they have a weak theory of mind.
The point of telling a story *is* to influence you, though not necessarily in any deep or lasting way - it's just a way to get you to feel or think something in the moment (and maybe something less literal than what you or I would normally be trying to get someone to feel or think by telling a story).
I just taught this a few weeks ago, and in the middle there's a story that might help understand the other side of this. Ludwig Wittgenstein gets mad at his friend who said she "feels like a dog who's been run over", because Wittgenstein thinks there's no way the friend could know what that's like! Most of us are fine with this level of non-literalness, but not Wittgenstein. And it sounds like your friend is way down on the opposite end from Wittgenstein.
BTW, the 'don't get offended/hurt/angry about what I said, I was just talking/joking/whatever' is often used as an easy out by people who meant every word they said but now want plausible deniability. They want to continue being aggressive to you while undermining your ability to confront them on it.
If they ever turn it back, to how unreasonable YOU are to have taken offense at what they said, and don't you have a sense of humour? Then you know.
Some people think "everyone is like me" and can't grasp others having different preferences.
I think the main benefit of MBTI and similar personality category exercises is just to break down the resistance and drive home that some people are different. (I'm thinking of a boss who wanted to reward me by dragging me to a minor league baseball game. It took some effort by this nerd to convince him that someone else would enjoy it more.)
There is a big debate in the autism community about labeling. Do you want to label someone as autistic. In the case of Scott’s friend, if he said she was autistic and was very uncomfortable with chit chat, I’m certain they would have respected that. But short of a “label” people are going to default to the preferences of the median customer/student, etc.
Yeah, part of the problem here is that Scott's idea of "introverted, doesn't like small talk" is different to most normal people's idea of "introverted, doesn't like small talk", because Scott tends to hang out with weird people.
As a proud normie, I'd describe myself as "introverted, doesn't like small talk" but to me that means I'm happiest with a couple of minutes of formulaic small talk and don't _really_ want to tell you my whole life story; it definitely doesn't mean that I fly into a panic at the sound of the words "how was your trip?"
For contrast, at one point when someone in a Chinese class I was taking asked me "how are you?", someone else saw me -- as usual -- struggling to respond and remarked "it's always such a hard question for you!"
I have a nasty suspicion that the more "normal" someone is, where I mostly mean "fits the local hegemonic paradigm", the less able they will be to conceive of people who aren't just like them. All things being equal, of course.
Or wearing my aggressive autistic hat, the less autistic they are. AFAICT, most non-autistics have a "theory of mind" that amounts to "if I introspect how I would feel in whatever situation, that will tell me what the other person feels".
Many people have a built in exception for other kinds of people, i.e. Them, who have somewhat inexplicable preferences - foreigners "talk funny"; women are inscrutable (aka "from Venus"); the local oppressed minority all conform to their local bad stereotype. ...
A few people overcome this built in limitation. AFAICT, anyone can do it, with effort, but it's easier for the non-hegemonic, and probably also for autistics qua autistics. But the few people who have really good social skills - not ordinary extrovert ability to interact well with folks similar to them - have clearly learned it.
I don't know whether it spills over to believing statements of preference - but I do know that a good salesperson can home in on why the customer is interested, what problem they are trying to solve, etc. That seems to me to be much the same thing, but often with less explicit information.
This sounds a lot like my understanding of W.E.B. DuBois's idea of "double consciousness" - a black person in the United States knows how black Americans think, and *also* (out of necessity) knows something about how white Americans think, whereas white Americans can usually get by with ignoring how black Americans think.
Your point is to generalize this to any cognitive minority.
I would assume "convince a stranger that you're a different race" (presumably over the phone or via text communication, rather than in-person; the last would be very difficult).
I was thinking via text communication, as most Turing tests now use. I was also inspired by Bryan Caplan's idea of an "ideological Turing test". Turing himself was inspired by an existing game where you try to guess whether a man or woman wrote something.
I certainly know a lot more black Americans who can speak both General American and AAVE than white Americans who can do the same - and while that's not the same thing, it's certainly part of the story.
For what it's worth, the very best salesmen I have known are seriously introverted. They feel social signals with exquisite sensitivity, and they know damn well when the customer is resistant, bored, hostile, et cetera, but they press on anyway because it's their job.
I surmise an argument can be made that in some cases introversion is a result of *excess* sensitivity to social signals -- they bombard you too painfully, with too many implied tribal demands. At least in the case of this kind of salesman it seems to fit. They have phenomenal social antennae -- but that means it's as if everyone is shouting at them all the time, with all these social demands. Notice me, leave me alone, fulfill this or that drive, say I'm pretty/smart/powerful, ignore this faux pas, subscribe to my paranoia, et cetera.
Their awareness of the signals is what indeed makes them a good salesman -- but it's personally painful to them. After they finish the day, they have to go have a stiff drink, and some of them end up with drinking problems.
Your theory of "*excess* sensitivity" I think is part of what's going on, for some people.
Personally, I thought for years that I just didn't 'get' (most) people. I now think it's more like I'm _confused_, and overwhelmed, by all of the _conflicting_ info people 'give off'.
Well a lot of the skill (speaking strictly algorithmically) is probably an effective filter. That is, the way the neural net (the real one inside the skull) learns to detect meaningful patterns in nonverbal communication (or probably even verbal ha ha) is *after* the preprocessor in the sensory cortex strips out 99% of the information coming from the other person and only passes in what has a high probability of ending up meaningful.
After all, there's a similar division of labor at work in simpler sensory processing, e.g. detecting important objects in the visual field -- there's preprocessing layers, some in the retina itself, that do stuff like detect edges and motion, and it's this stripped-down priority-ranked data that gets fed to the visual cortex of the brain for final object detection. I think it's reasonable to assume more abstract "object" (e.g. emotional state) detection works in a similar way, there's a preprocessing filter that removes noise and low-significance dat, and there's a higher level pattern matcher that hooks up the intermediate data objects with meanings.
So if things are going wrong, it's totally possible that the problem is in either stage. Some people may have flaws in their pattern-matcher, some in their preprocessing filter, for example, and while both may result in lowered competence in detecting emotional state (for example), they may have quite different other symptoms, including quite different internal experiences.
In the case of the one woman I know in the sales biz, she's turned what would otherwise be a crippling flaw -- a poor ability to filter out and ignore the emotional state of others -- into a career strength. But she does have an alcohol problem, so there's a cost.
That's a very good point, about the relevant details of visual processing.
But I can also imagine a _lot_ of the same 'mind theorizing' even with my eyes closed; nor do I think that even the congenitally blind are totally 'emotionally blind'.
But it's still true that a lot of this info is or can be visual. And I'd expect other sensory perception to work similarly, even if it isn't quite as elaborate as vision is.
I think it's also significant that even people that are overall very good at reading other people can still fail spectacularly! Humans are hard to model!
I doubt the "autistics qua autistics" bit. I don't think it's *easier* so much as that the world keeps kicking us in the face until we figure it out. I'm pretty sure I started out with the same "everyone is just like me" null hypothesis as everyone else does - it's just that I was beaten and teased out of it by the time I was 12.
"Group A is subjected to beatings if they assume X, Group B gets told once or twice a year that ~X but assuming X gives them decent results in daily life" is more than enough reason for A to realise that ~X at a higher rate than B does.
It seems like you've overlooked a critical assumption you made: that the other person in the exchange, be it a B&B proprietor or a gift-giving grandma, doesn't have feelings and desires of their own. People open B&B's to talk to guests. That's pretty much the whole reason for the B&B's existence. If someone didn't want to have a conversation, they'd book an AirBnB or a hotel.
But let's dig into the B&B argument, because I think you've also failed to consider a number of relevant factors to the interaction.
Any B&B proprietor can reasonably assume that every guest that arrives has made a conscious decision to stay somewhere that will include conversation. Hotels and AirBnB's without contact are ubiquitous. Nobody forces BnB customers to stay there. That's a pretty strong prior!
So, with that prior in mind, these proprietors hear from one guest that that person's travel companion doesn't enjoy socialization, and asks the B&B proprietors to not socialize with one of their companions. Now, let's be honest here: that's a weird thing to say. It just is. Normal people do not make these types of requests. You can argue all day about whether that's good or bad, but I doubt you'd argue that it isn't true. This is not a class of request that is common and familiar. So that weakens the amount that the proprietors should be moving away from their prior.
On the request for no socialization: you're assuming agency for another person and their choices. From the context, you didn't express that this person was your significant other. So, by what right were the proprietors to assume that you had the authority to dictate the experiences of somebody else? Like, if I'm in line at a Starbucks, I have no right to tell the barista how to speak to the person in line behind me. That would be ridiculous. While this situation is different, the core principle is the same. It's simply weird to try and govern the interaction that a stranger has with somebody else, and especially so when you are not in a relationship with either of the parties involved. So the weirdness of you trying to govern an interaction between two third-parties when you have not indicated any right to do so continues to weaken the reasons for these proprietors to move away from their priors.
Continuing on: the friend arrives. The proprietors, having a strong prior for socializing with guests due to running a voluntary BnB and weak reasons to update because of an odd request from a travel companion of one of their guests, greet this friend. This friend does not express any objection to socialization, and their interaction only ends when you come out and end the interaction. If the friend didn't express any resistance to socialization, then the proprietors have no reason to assume that their prior about socialization was incorrect. Instead, it's more likely that you, Scott, were just being kind of odd. After all, you said that this friend didn't want to socialize, but they socialized anyways, and the friend raised no objection (presumably). So now they've got evidence that points them back towards their prior.
Throughout the rest of the stay, it sounds like you and your friend gave them no reason to update away from their prior of guests having chosen to stay there because of a desire for interaction. It sounds like you just quietly tolerated it all, growing more and more upset that these proprietors weren't reading your thoughts about you and your friend's desire to be left alone. Nothing was preventing you from asking them to leave you alone. But you didn't. And with each interaction, the proprietors would have their prior confirmed further. After all, if what you said was true, one or both of you would have actually, you know, requested to be left alone. But you didn't!
This is not society failing to be rational. Proper application of priors and a general sense of social decorum should have made it clear to you what happened. Either this is just a case of you failing to be sufficiently rational, or you have an oddly weak grasp on certain aspects of interaction in society.
On gift-giving: people express love and affection for another by giving gifts; it's one of the core love languages. For many people, the giving is as important as the receiving. Somebody refusing to accept gifts from a person who expresses love through gifts is shutting down that other person's ability to express love via their preference. Interactions like gift-giving are two-way streets.
This is my interpretation as well. There's a sense that one is a guest in their house when one goes to a B&B, not a consumer of a recreational service. The proprietor's social behavior is not on the list of options in the way what beverage you want for breakfast is. It strikes me that telling the proprietors one would prefer they not provide the service they provide (part of which is personal hospitality) is kind of like telling a fancy restaurant how they should take food orders, consult about wine pairings, or describe the specials.
Another thing I find interesting in this scenario is the assumption that people should be able to change their default way of socially interacting on the spot because a person expressed a preference that they do. There's a world of personality and habit manifested in a person's social behavior and we can't just flip it like a switch, even if we thought that was an appropriate ask (regardless of how old we are, though I get that age may have some effect on this).
Example: as a therapist, I tend to ask too many questions. I've been working on it for years, not because someone told me it's a problem but because I know it can get in the way. If a client said, "hey, could I ask you to stop asking questions quite so much?" I would consider that an entirely appropriate thing to ask of me, so that's not the problem; it's that it's a very deeply ingrained way I've always had of navigating social interactions and of expressing interest in a person, so it's really hard for me to change it, even with all the therapist training.
This situation seems not so much about people's inability to acknowledge other people's preferences, but more a situation where people are bringing different assumptions to the table. Scott's assumption seems to be that it's a reasonable, appropriate thing to ask people who run a B&B to greet a guest differently from how they greet all their guests and to expect them to comply because it was his preference that they do that. Who knows what the B&B proprietors were thinking, but one possibility is that they're thinking it's not really his place to tell them how to do their job.
Hmm, I routinely stayed in a B&B when I visited my mother, and it was always the same one? Why? Primarily because it was walking distance from mom's house, and no full scale hotels were that close. Secondarily - after the first visit - because the hostess is a wonderful cook, with her food far above typical hotel breakfast. (I made myself hungry just thinking about it.) Third, I did enjoy chatting with them, once I found out this was standard practice; but that was least important for me. (Actually, third may have been price, now that I think about it; the local hotels were pricier.)
Agree with this take. The kind of people who run a B&B usually a have a strong preference for socializing and smalltalk.
Scott likely viewed the interaction between him/his friend and the hosts in purely monetary terms. They paid in exchange for staying the the B&B and for that the hosts should make the stay as comfortable as possible, including by not having small talk. The hosts see the exchange implicitly different. They are paid not only monetarily but also by having small talk with their guests which they enjoy.
I think half the puzzle is what some are calling "Guess vs. Ask" culture. Someone also needs to say that this (and direct vs. indirect styles of communication) is often a male/female difference: "I don't really need a present from you" is a classic and stereotypical trap of wives and girlfriends everywhere. It goes right along with "I'm not mad, everything's fine" and "Yes, it's cool if you ditch me to go hang with your friends, do what you like."
But I also think that changing habits is hard. How many people here have wished at some time they could turn on a "smooth-talking extravert" switch at will? People naturally fall into the habits of how they're used to communicating with others.
Calling it a "trap" seems to be ignoring the fact that our culture is not at one point on the "guess"-"ask" continuum, but rather demands different levels of "guess" vs "ask" in male-female vs female-male interactions.
Seconding Kenny's comment. Your language about "stereotypical trap[s] of wives and girlfriends everywhere" is straight out of a men's rights forum playbook. Women who acknowledge that they *do* want gifts run the risk of being seen as greedy, demanding, gold-digging, shallow, materialistic, high-maintenance. Similarly, women who say, "I'm mad, everything is *not* fine" are unreasonable, hysterical, bitches, crazy - "I don't want you to ditch me, I want to spent time together"; needy, desperate, controlling, manipulative. Manipulating a partner is shitty behavior, regardless of gender. That said, classifying a woman saying "I don't really need a present from you" as a *trap* is as ungenerous and lazy as considering it a trap if a man says "Aw, cut it out!" when his partner shows him affection, because he might *deep down* really want to feel loved and cared for. Bullshit gender expectations are bullshit, and they're certainly not going to get any better if people keep buying into them.
Saying one doesn't want X when one does, in fact, want X is not in and of itself a trap. Saying one doesn't want X when asked, *and then punishing someone for not giving one X* - that's directly analogous to a baited trap, because it is encouraging someone to perform actions that one will punish them for.
The fact that some people have unrealistic expectations (which is a problem!) is not an excuse to lie about one's own requirements and then enforce them anyway. That only perpetuates the unrealistic expectations, because they'll see everyone claiming unrealistically-low requirements and assume the dishonesty is an isolated bad apple rather than systemic.
We agree on your first sentence, and I’m not sure what the rest of your comment is intended to do. Wency did not say that that using these phrases disingenuously and then punishing someone for believing them = traps: they said, These phrases *are* traps, and that they are gendered. Their comment assumes bad intent, as Scott was doing in the post above - bad intent that obtains across the whole categories of wives and girlfriends. These women are lying and playing games to manipulate men!
What I’m trying to point out is that it’s not that simple. Neither is it as simple as Ask vs. Guess culture. Humans suffer social repercussions for violating *others’* expectations for them - in American culture, broadly writ, women who openly want gifts are judged as greedy and selfish, and men who openly want affection are judged as weak and unmasculine. Punishing other people for not reading your mind is bullshit - we also agree there! But when there are social costs to saying what you really want, you are far less likely to say it - and that doesn’t make it a trap.
Well, my intention with the word "trap" wasn't to necessarily convey malevolence on the part of the woman. The "trap", as such, is often enough simply laid by nature, or by culture, take your pick. Though some women (and I'm sure men too, but more often women) do in fact lay traps in this specific way, which they might frame as a "test". I know this because I have in fact had a girlfriend use the phrase "It was a test, and you failed" when I took one of her statements literally after she insisted that I ought to take it literally.
I am happily married with children, and my wife would never intentionally ambush me in this way (which is certainly a factor in why she's my wife). But she does sometimes still communicate in ways that are indirect and that I find very unclear, even after years of insisting that she be direct. And meanwhile I sometimes think I've cracked the code of her indirect style, only to still manage to misunderstand something. As I said originally, change is hard.
But my original point in all of this was not to offer not a "men's rights forum handbook" approach or whatever, I don't really know or care what such a handbook would say, but what I see as a normie approach to Scott's problem. This is the kind of thing that married normie guys talk about with other married guys. And it's also considered something of a stereotype for young married men to say "My gal is different, she doesn't have an interest in gifts."
Now, maybe Scott's gal *is* different. But the point is that most people are accustomed to the idea that when a young man says his gal is different in this regard, 99% of the time she's not actually all that different, he's just misunderstanding her indirect communication style. And so most people who have learned this lesson will assume this is the mistake Scott is making, regardless of whatever insistence he makes to the contrary.
I've made this mistake before, and at this point my wife would need to signal her commitment by connecting my gift-giving to an automated doomsday device, if she wanted to stop me from giving her a gift at any occasion that might call for it.
"And meanwhile I sometimes think I've cracked the code of her indirect style, only to still manage to misunderstand something."
...is exactly where she wants you to be. That is, if you ever "advanced" (as your male mind might consider it) to "I definitely cracked the code! I now understand everything!" she would consider that a problem and change the code.
That may sound pejorative, but I don't think it is. Men and women have some goals in communication with partners that differ, for excellent biological reasons, and I can see functional reasons why for women in general* there is value in keeping their male in a state of "I've almost cracked the code" indefinitely. Most men I know who are comfortable in very long-term (decades) relationships accept this and don't take it the wrong way (e.g. that she's yanking them around maliciously or narcissistically, which she is not, although [caveat] that behavior certainly does exist in some other cases).
-------------
* There are always individual exceptions of course.
It can help to frame it as "Hint vs. Ask". Thinking of Hint cultures as Guess cultures is very much a view from the outside. Is there a Hint framing for Ask cultures?
I'd say the presents thing isn't that she hates present as a concept, it's that the mental work required to figure out what present she'd want is usually not worth the present. I know it's like that for me. If I want something, I either just get it, or it's way too expensive to ask for it as a present. Figuring out something that is not both of these classes is work, and I rather not get any present than would be forced to do it (and realize I also committed other person to do work for thing that a minute ago I didn't even know I wanted). Thanking somebody for a useless present is also work (I am an introvert) but much less, so I'd be ok with it, so I'd be also better if I didn't have to do it. Of course if somebody manages to give an awesome present - which happens much more often than I'd have any right to hope for - I'd be very pleased. And mainly because I'd never think to ask for that thing as a present or buying it for myself.
Though could be that she also hates presents as a concept, or an a reciprocal obligation... But there are ways of hating presents without actually hating presents.
Speaking of denying deviance is even possible, there is a part of the game Gone Home where your sister notes how upset she is that your parents didn’t even get mad when she was outed as lesbian. Instead they insist she is confused or going through a phase that she will snap out of. The game is set in 1995, but I imagine the belief that people don’t know their own preferences continues in other areas where exposure is less common.
I think there are two layers to this. The first is that people are starting from a prior like "the average person likes presents." The second is that the prior is common knowledge: everybody knows that the average person likes presents—and, by extension, everyone knows that giving presents is a thoughtful thing to do.
If you give someone a present that they don't actually want, nobody can really fault you for it, because it's obvious you were only trying to be thoughtful. Conversely, if you don't give someone a present and it turns out they did want one after all, you've embarrassed yourself, and you don't have the excuse of a social norm to fall back on. Since there's almost no risk to giving a present, and some risk to not giving one, the socially-safe thing to do is to always give the present, even when the recipient says they don't want one.
Culture: a set of defined, normative customs and social forms. Your premise that "preferences" ought to be respected above "culture" is totally unworkable for a functioning people group. (As is evident of present day American society.)
When preferences are given a greater emphasis than culture, then there is only harmony when preferences accidently align. What if your friend's "preferences" were to show up, drop their pants and start sharting everywhere? That's rude. And - for better or worse - rudeness is defined by cultural standard, not "respecting preferences."
Would you go to a foreign country and expect that all yield their cultural norms to your preferences? It's basically what this screed against the elderly amounts to. The elderly grew up an intact culture that included "gift giving" and "inquisitiveness" actions of courtesy and friendliness, rather than the present, culturally-fractured mess, where everyone can neurotically assign a multiple possibility of meanings and intentions to any word or action.
That's a helpful tension to point out, between an individual's preferences and the glue of norms that hold a culture or group together. We are living here in the US in a kind of maximally individual-preference-oriented moment, it seems to me. Some of that experiment seems good because of all the pressure of an earlier time (and present-day in some other forms) to conform and the costs of that demand for conformity on people who are outliers in any number of ways.
Traveling has always seemed like an interesting friction point in that way -- people visiting other places in order to experience something new while wanting to feel varying degrees of safe and in control in what's familiar. That friction point can be an adventure or it can be a bit of a disaster depending on the expectations one brings to it. How much do we expect other people to bend to meet our preferences? How much do we imagine people *can* bend to meet our preferences? When the outcome isn't what we hoped, what's the story we tell about what went wrong and whose responsibility that is?
My current theory is that most people don't really have a theory of mind. They seriously don't understand that other people have preferences different from their own or preferences different from what they are supposed to have.
It takes unusual perceptiveness or enlightenment or something to really understand the range of preferences. Or maybe sociopathy.
This is partly self-observation-- I find it astonishingly hard to believe that many other people don't like science fiction or do like beer. These are so strongly contrary to my strongly felt and obviously intrinsically correct preferences.
Unlike many people, I don't have a theory about why people go around appearing to like beer or not like science fiction. The standard theories of why people have implausible preferences seems to be that they're just showing off or just wicked rather than that (as my default seems to be) that they're just intractably incomprehensible.
Actually, the case of science fiction is interesting because science fiction has become a *lot* more popular and respectable since the 70s. My theory is that strongly unrealistic fiction is a natural human taste, and the idea that such fiction is ridiculous is a modern weirdness which finally broke when Star Wars came along. However, this doesn't mean that all those people who didn't bother with the original Star Trek were just pretending they didn't like it.
Also, it's interesting politically-- I don't know whether my sample of people who are opposed to Social Justice is representative, but a lot of them seem to have a consensus that no one (or hardly anyone) could really believe that Social Justice is correct.
As for my bit at the end about sociopaths, they seem to really believe that most other people aren't sociopaths. They then use it as a handle, but at least they've got that little bit of truth.
I think you're overinterpreting the usual meaning of "theory of mind." As far as I know, it consists of no more than the realization that other people have preferences at all -- i.e. that they *have* an interior hidden life such as one experiences one's own self.
That one may be inaccurate in guessing *what* is going on in that hidden interior life is more along the lines of what they call "emotional intelligence" these days.
But even the step of assuming that others have a hidden inner life -- even if it is naively or incompetently assumed to be exactly the same as our own -- is rather a big step forward, in terms of our ability to live socially, as the cost of sociopathy demonstrates.
Me at a restaurant: "I would like the salmon, with nothing on it and nothing on my plate but the salmon." Most of the time I will be served a plate with a food item on it in addition to salmon.
Yup. tried to get plain spaghetti with butter at a restaurant for a kid who was in an 'I only eat plain plain things' phase. Explained very carefully, waiter seemed to get it. Brought spag with butter, artfully scattered with chopped parsley ..... If at least it had been a sprig on the side, easy to remove!
I think this is an underrated comment. There is a lot of story telling going on in other comments and a lot of it sounds quite convincing. But then I see this and think of course, someone who serves salmon 50 times a week and always with other items is deep in a heavily ingrained pattern of behavior and can easily write down your order, repeat it ten times to themselves, and still get it wrong, just because repeated behaviors become so automatic that it takes tremendous effort to do anything differently and most attempts fail.
I wonder to what extent this same type of thing might happen to a B&B owner who casually small talks hundreds of guests in their home a year. What fast food is to a personal chef, a B&B owner is to anyone else who sometimes meets new people. They can do it thoughtlessly in their sleep through pure muscle memory, but this also means it's harder for them to go against the muscle memory.
I think I fall into the category of people who take ideas seriously and who also update on what people say. The unfortunate consequence is I often end up being gullible!
There are generational differences in hospitality as well. Happy and conversational vs out of sight and mind is one them.
It could also be mental talk “ I’ll only talk a little to her, oh but she needs to know this before I finish, woah her bag looks just like my grand daughters, I wonder what ethnicity she is? Did you know I once went their on a cruise the locals were so nice.” , Soon they have completely forgotten about what you told them.
Also, if they are significantly older than you, their perception of time is vastly quicker and so what you find long and drawn out they believe is a quick greeting.
My theory: a lot of people, sub-consciously, hate their own life choices, but at a conscious level, if they can be assured everyone else is making the same choices, they can live with it. So they ignore data that is inconsistent with their own preferences.
Alternate but related theory: A lot of people like their own life choices, but only feel safe from being attacked for them if everyone else is making the same choices.
There are a couple things in what you write that I find particularly interesting. For one thing, it assumes that people only have one thing motivating them or informing them at any given moment.
So, your girlfriend who said she doesn't like presents was probably being completely honest. But, what you (and she) probably weren't accounting for was the fact that, even somebody who doesn't like presents, may experience inexplicable disappointment at not getting one on Christmas or a birthday. And she too might have that innate societal expectation. She may truly not like getting presents as she imagines herself receiving them. But the disappointment nonetheless happens. And so, when she gets a present, she is delighted in spite of herself.
Now take the lovely innkeepers. They probably have a couple of things informing them. One of those may be loneliness. And for people who are deeply lonely, it's incredibly hard to suppress the urge to socialize. So, they almost unconsciously don't hear what you're asking for. It's such anathema to them that anybody would turn away human interaction and friendliness, purely because in their experience and their loneliness, it is an irresistible opportunity. So they've taken their own experience and motivation, and used it as a buffer against your request. In fact, they probably didn't even register the request, because they can't even imagine that world in which everybody doesn't need the social interaction that's so nourishes them.
My point is that we always have conflicting motivations and experiences. I may very much love my partner who abuses me. I see the abuse as being the price of doing business so to speak. I haven't been in that situation personally, but I have stayed in relationships years longer than was healthy -- all the while justifying it to myself in ways that make no sense to me 10 years later (and I don't mean having children or something concrete like that as a justification).
It's the internal tension between our undistinguished desires and our conscious needs that makes it so difficult to act rationally in these circumstances. The tension that exists between what we hear or what we ourselves believe and what we are pulled to do by conflicting motivations, intentions, or experiences overpowers any attempt to talk and listen without undistinguished background experiences informing all that we hear and say.
Thank you, I was about to say some version of this, that we very often have conflicting preferences. I think it's less that we are irrational -- though that too -- but that we can have very rational but competing desires/needs and that can make the way we behave look irrational until we sort out which desire/need we choose to prioritize. I'd say a lot of the terrain of psychotherapy is people unable to resolve conflicting preferences on their own, often because some of their preferences are not yet conscious or acceptable to themselves.
Your example of people staying in relationships that are anywhere from not great to abusive is a good one. There are often many countervailing preferences keeping them there -- fear there will be nothing better, a need to not be alone, a desire to be sure the relationship can't be improved, a preference not to pay more for housing or to face greater economic insecurity, etc.
The other confounding factor that plays a role too is that even when we manage to communicate what feels like a clear preference, communication itself is very imperfect, and the more it happens between people who don't know each other well, the more imperfect it is. In my experience, most of us way overestimate how well our words are understood by others, even inside of close relationships. We think because we expressed a preference and it was not acted on that the problem is someone else's unwillingness or inability to act on it, when it may very well be they heard something fairly different from what we intended.
Thank you both for your extremely well stated reply but also the affirmation. One thing you said is especially salient, and I feel a bit regretful that I didn't distinguish the same thing. That is, that we always behave rationally unless we're insane. But, our rationality is derived from our own assumptions and that which informs us. It is perfectly rational to stay with an abusive spouse if what you believe is that you will never be loved again, or that by leaving this relationship you will put yourself in emotional or physical danger. Those beliefs make the decision to stay rational. And there are countless other examples of rational behavior that appears utterly irrational to somebody else. Actually, the economics of this are absolutely clear. People behave in their rational self-interest. But, what they believe is in their self-interest may be very much in conflict with how their self-interest is perceived by others. To paraphrase Tim Harford, when crime pays, being a criminal is rational.
There is ALWAYS an underlying logic. We may not agree with the premises people are using, but once you start from their premises, people's beliefs and choices make perfect sense. And 'insane' people are NOT an exception! If you truly believe the aliens are beaming thoughts into your head through the television, lining your hat with tinfoil is a very rational thing to do.
Half of therapy is getting people to examine their premises, and consider at least that there might be other reasonable ones available to them. Or another logical path they could follow, from their own premises.
Totally fair point! I stand corrected (?)... (Not sure if that's quite the right verb). Most importantly, thank you for advancing the point. One caveat, I know absolutely nothing about psychotherapy. So I am emphatically not speaking from that perspective, but rather from the perspective of ontology.
Maybe here we could distinguish between "being rational" and "having reasons"? Though as I say that, we could probably have a pretty interesting philosophical conversation about where the boundary between those two is and how would we know?
I think of being rational as following rules of logic (which includes reference to some agreed-on criteria of what constitutes evidence) while having reasons seems like could really be anything people might say to justify or explain anything.
In psychiatry/psychology we sometimes talk about whether a person has impaired "reality-testing" because a person experiencing psychosis may have reasons/explanations but there may be no discernible (troublesome word there) logic or evidence to support their reasons. I mean, and then there's just word salad where what's being conveyed isn't comprehensible at all.
My guess is this all exists on some kind of spectrum from the very precise logic of mathematical reasoning to the word salad of a person unhinged from reality as we know it. In-between there is where most of us live most of the time, and that includes lots and lots of garden-variety human delusion where we feel we're being perfectly rational because we can't see our own blind spots.
I mean, sure, you can be delusional and still proceed rationally from those delusional premises. There are some cases of incoherent thought, though, and others where people think doing X is stupid but do X anyway.
Years ago (decades, pre-internet) a couple who worked in our office said that they didn't watch TV. None of us could believe it. But now I hardly watch any TV either and I accept their preference.
My guess is that if someone has a preference that is way off the standard social environment we cannot project ourselves into their 'world' to understand them, and we prefer to avoid the uncertainty. We do this by ignoring the incongruity. It's a social radar ping that doesn't get reflected.
Before watching films/TV on other devices was a thing, I hadn't owned a TV in many years. My telco would constantly call to offer me their fantastic deals on cable, I could bundle it with the phone and internet and cell service I already had, save so much money etc etc. I would have to repeat three or four times that I didn't own a television before the callers could wind themselves down. Sometimes they never could. And of course, when I asked them, and their supervisors, to take me off that call list, they couldn't; the system had two options; existing customer 'already has cable with us' or 'doesn't yet have cable with us'. No toggle for 'doesn't own a TV'. Sigh.
Also had friends looking and looking around our place and finally asking 'where's your tv??' Especially after we had kids! Upper-middle class family, not religious or anything else whacko, raising CHILDREN without a tv? (Or a car.) Unimaginable!
I'm not as sure as you that the B&B people care about your friend's feelings -- it depends on what this means. My feeling about "nice," chatty people is that they are being chatty not out of generosity -- or not *primarily* out of generosity -- but primarily because they enjoy being chatty. Naturally they project their own preferences onto others, so they also have a reinforcing secondary motive, that they believe others will enjoy their chattiness. When a guest enters, they anticipate a double dopamine hit of doing something they like anyway while also pleasing the guest, and it's hard to give up on this.
The number one reason, by far, that I've been tempted to make similar claims than Scott's gf about present-giving is to give myself an out in having to buy presents myself, because I don't usually know what to pick. I wonder if Scott's gf was proactive when it was her turn to buy something or what.
I was going to say something very similar. Receiving a gift creates a (perceived) obligation to reciprocate. I'm terrible at choosing gifts, so it's easier to just say "no gifts please" -- even if I actually really enjoy receiving gifts. Granted, the rational thing here is probably for me to learn to choose gifts, but still...
When I was young, I thought the ideal gift was *exactly* what the recipient desired. But this goal makes gift-giving inherently illogical: what I think would be perfect for you will never be as accurate as what you pick out yourself, even if I discuss it extensively with you (and the normal tradition excludes that, it's supposed to be magical). So I should just give you cash or something. But that becomes silly when you're giving gifts to people who don't need cash, people who are at least as well off as yourself.
Then I thought: wait a minute, what kind of gift pleases *me* the most? (And it helped that by this time I was well off enough that I could more or less acquire anything I wanted, so it wasn't a question of 'I've always longed for X but can't afford it, and if only someone would get me X I'd be super duper happy.' So it was a question of: given there's nothing I really want I can't get myself, what would make me happiest to receive as a gift?
And put that way, it was clear: what pleased me most was a gift that reflected *the giver's tastes.* Something he or she found fascinating, desirable, interesting, cool. Because (1) I might discover something I liked that I didn't know I liked, and (2) even if not, I would discover something about the giver, and of course I valued the chance to understand the people who might give me gifts (friends, family) better.
So that changed my approach to gift giving. I would certainly still try to be as appropriate as I could be, think of what the recipient would like, but I no longer tried to make it "perfect -- just what they would have chosen for themselves." I would be thinking more along the lines of: what can I give them that reflects what I know and cherish, but from what I know about them (imperfectly), might be a discovery for them, something they *would not* have thought of getting for themselves.
It makes gift-giving "riskier" in some sense, but more fun, as risk and serendipitous reward kind of necessarily go together. You make a bunch of lame choices, where somebody has to say 'well the thought's the thing', but it's more than made up for by the occasional big hit "Wow! I never knew this existed!"
> what I think would be perfect for you will never be as accurate as what you pick out yourself
(Half of) your new approach somewhat makes sense in terms of the perfect gift though. You are giving something that you think they'd want but they wouldn't buy themselves. Arguably, that's more beneficial than giving them what they want the most but were going to buy anyway. And a great way to finding possible gifts is to think of stuff that you know well and they don't know, or don't trust they can choose well.
Yeah I think giving living things that imply a long-term obligation is regrettable, under almost all circumstances. Even for children: I have gotten my children pets, but never as a surprise. Although honestly I think that stems more from my sympathy for the animal, I don't think it's fair to assign it to someone who I'm not 100% sure wants it. I would never give an adult, or child not mine, a pet. If I *received* a pet, even one I wanted, I'd probably be slightly horrified: what if I *didn't* want this animal? What a risk you took! And not a romantic, but rather a foolish and narcissistic risk.
I'm having a hard time identifying the worst gift I ever have received...but probably something along the lines you suggest, something that tied me to some long-term commitment if I didn't want some innocent third-party entity to suffer...that would be the right category.
I mean, it probably comes down to either that or taunting gifts (the most extreme possible taunting gift is an obvious suicide method, but lesser versions exist like giving a known atheist a bible, or giving a depressed person a "stop whining" self-help book or bracelet).
Oh sure, if we're going to admit the category of Trojan gifts then the worst would be an Amazon gift card envelope actually containing anthrax, or an antipersonnel mine wrapped up to look like a book. I wasn't thinking along those lines, because I thought the assumption arguendo was a lack of malevolent intent.
Tea is serious business! The Father Ted sketch is parodying something that is (or at least was, up until recent years), the very important signifier of hospitality. If someone visits your house, you offer them tea (including if you have tradesmen working on a job there). If you are going to have a cup of tea yourself and there's anyone else in the house, you offer to make them a cup as well. To have someone come into the house and not offer them hospitality? The height of meanness and maybe you even have "notions"!
And if you're visiting and are offered tea, you *never* accept the first time (that's why Mrs. Doyle continues to ask after Ted says "no" the first time). There's the little dance of courtesy you do - offer, be refused, offer again, usually say something "Ah sure, you'll have a quick cup out of your hand?" and then if they do want it, they say something "Well, if you're sure it's no trouble" or "As long as you're making it, I might as well". A third refusal really does mean "no, honestly, I don't want/don't have time to have it".
So that's why Mrs. Doyle is so insistent about making the tea - it's really a big deal!
l love this. Half-serious question: in all the British crime procedurals I watch, the detectives always accept the tea on the first offer when they go to interview someone in their home. Is there something different going on there or does TV just have less time to play out the obligatory refusals? I had thought it was rude to refuse any offer. And it's always seemed to me the shows' writers are often poking fun at the tea tradition, even inside of very serious shows, but I don't know enough to know for sure.
It's partly the fact they are police - you don't lean on police, so people would be more likely to take their first no as an absolute no.
And it's partly the English class system; in England, that dance is appropriate in England with a guest who is a class equal, but not with a tradesman who is an inferior. If a tradesman is working in your house, you don't spend all that time going back and forth, you offer and they say yes or no. Many English middle-class (that's the English version of middle-class, which is higher up the social scale than the American) people will have the tea they drink themselves, which may well be loose tea, and is probably a varietal, possibly even a single-estate, and bags of blended tea (usually PG Tips or Yorkshire) for tradesmen - "Builder's tea" is strong tea made from bags with milk and lots of sugar, and is what most English people would default to offering to a plumber or electrician.
Police are a step up from tradesmen, so they would be offered the good tea, but they're not equals so you won't do the full dance.
Working-class people will make "builder's tea" for themselves, of course, and they might well do the dance with a tradesman - but they wouldn't dare with the police.
Incidentally, if you are offered and politely refuse, expecting to be reoffered and it's taken as a no, then you wait a few minutes and then come back and say something along the lines of "I'll take that cuppa now, if you don't mind".
Obviously, this is a bunch of stereotypes, which were probably more true 50 years ago than they are now, and there are always exceptions (and people getting it wrong; they don't show those sorts of social awkwardnesses on TV). And there are lots of people who just like a particular type of tea.
But I certainly know lots of people who keep a box of Yorkshire Tea bags in their kitchen just to make tea for tradesmen.
Yorkshire Tea is okay. I wouldn't refuse it. But PG Tips is awful (then again, that's the "Irish like stronger blends" thing at work).
Down South here the joke is that the big divide is between Barry's tea and Lyon's tea (warning for strong language in linked video comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJtFEEU5flI ) Barry's tea *is* better, by the way.
Up North (of Ireland), they have their own blends like Punjana. That's a whole different argument.
People really have defaulted to using tea bags rather than loose tea; I grew up drinking loose leaf tea because that was what there was, but now we're always buying tea bags. Much more convenient, especially if you only want one cup for yourself.
There is an English-Irish difference (e.g. Irish tend to like stronger teas, so Kenyan and Indian blends) but mostly it's because the "ask, refuse, ask again" custom is old-fashioned and country folk type thing, it's going now if not already gone amongst younger people. Apart from that, I can't comment on English habits, but as you see from the cop shows, even when the filth come round to interrogate you, it's only polite to offer them a cuppa! 😁
There's something delicious about watching people observing very old traditions kind of grudgingly even when it really grates on them. Oh that does sound a little sick as I say it (not the tradition, but my sadistic glee about watching it).
I think the request for others to abandon social norms of friendliness and politeness to accommodate niche preferences is, frankly, just rude. It is the duty of the one who is outside the norm to respect and appreciate the rules of the place they are in (it would be like tourists demanding foreigners in a strange land shake their hand instead of giving them the finger as a greeting, even if that went against all the customs of the foreign land)
Interestingly, this reveals a difference between the motel case and the girlfriend present case. In the former, the interaction was guided by public social norms and rituals and hence the request for alteration is rude. Whereas the girlfriend case is 1-1 personal interaction and this regulated by more flexible agreements.
I don't think "be warmly greeted and entertain numerous questions from owners of a bed and breakfast when you stay" is a public social norm, I think that's more idiosyncratic to these particular owners, in which case they're essentially supplanting others' preferences with their own in a 2-2 social interaction.
I don't think you've stayed in a bed and breakfast.
You might as well be going to a stuffy restaurant and asking them to sing happy birthday to your friend, or asking them to please not have the sommelier hover nearby until you sample the wine.
"Appreciating the atmosphere of a bed and breakfast or stuffy restaurant" is not necessarily a social norm, but once you find yourself a patron of one of these places, "when in Rome" absolutely trumps personal neurosis.
Or maybe the ones I've stayed in are atypical, but in my experience, if you don't want to chat with the proprietors, you stay at a Holiday Inn; the chit-chat is a selling point.
Replying to your followup-comment here (boy, imagine a world where comments were able to be edited after the fact - and while we're at it, imagine if one could use italics and boldface in these comments... sounds pretty much like science-fiction, I know): There's a difference between "expensive" and "stuffy". A proper "stuffy" restaurant can also be described as "snotty", if there isn't finger snapping to beckon the staff, it's probably just "expensive".
I don't know if I'd describe them as "stuffy" in that case, the service definitely didn't involve finger-snapping, but it did involve the staff being attentive enough that you should never need to flag someone down.
The finger-snaps are strictly reserved for intrastaff communication - a customer finger-snapping the staff would be perceived as obnoxious and would certainly result in a passive-aggressive approach to the rest of the meal's service.
As an aside, in my experience, while expensive restaurants (and I've never been rich enough to eat out at really fancy restaurants ordinarily, but I had a high school friend whose father is a very notable, wikipedia page-having restaurateur, and ate at a number of his restaurants,) are usually not in the practice of doing things which are obtrusively out-of-place in their atmosphere if you ask them to, I've found they're generally quite amenable to not doing things they usually do if you ask them to. In all cases I've found them to have actually thoughtful, not merely rote, service.
Any serious high-end customer service professional will thoughtfully adapt to the needs of each guest, *especially* if those needs have been explicitly stated.
For example, I work for an high-end luxury brand hotel with a longer-than-you-would-believe literal checklist of mandated informational chitchat which is to be performed with each and every guest.
I've been explicitly instructed to use the chatty checklist with every guest and my bosses even hire secret shoppers to verify that I'm using it, but as a professional, I absolutely do not use that checklist unless I suspect someone is a secret shopper.
Instead, my first question to every guest is, "How was your trip in?" and depending on their answer, "Do you want to hear about the hotel?" Their answers determine the course of the encounter. If someone says they had a horrible day of travel and now they just want to get to their room, I produce a key as fast as humanly possible and send them off. Same thing if they merely seem grumpy, antsy, and/or disengaged.
Ideally, Scott's B&B proprietors would have had a similar strategy, but then it's worth noting that B&Bs usually aren't a luxury product.
This is fascinating! And I think captures the depth of the micro-cultures that exist out there in hospitality. The sensitivity you show in meeting guests where they are is remarkable and points to what someone said elsewhere here that in very high end service, the service is usually as deferential and unobtrusive as possible.
It seems to me B&B proprietors are going to see themselves as more equal to their guests in terms of conventional class markers. Around here where there are tons of B&Bs, they are often run by couples and families who live on the premises, if not in the same building, their family pets are on the premises, and they often "retired" to managing a B&B from high-status professional jobs. They're doing it as part lark and part extra income in retirement. They may hire a team of cleaners to clean the rooms or they may do it themselves, they almost always prepare and serve the food themselves, and they are largely not staffed by professionals from the hospitality industry where people have specialized training in customer service. The whole vibe is quaint, idiosyncratic, and homey -- that's what people seek out when choosing a B&B.
My guess is the retirees who are introverted rent out AirBnBs and the retirees who want the social engagement open B&Bs.
When we travel, we're always stepping into these microcultures, in addition to whatever larger culture surrounds where we're staying. The norms of the microcultures aren't typed up anywhere, but they're also well known, even when you travel in other countries.
I want to clarify when I said the B&B proprietors may see themselves as more equal to their guests, I meant more to say that they are more likely to behave like equals in a class sense. I didn't mean to suggest that people working in other places in hospitality don't perfectly well see themselves as equals to their guests -- it's more that their professional role requires them to perform the role a particular way, regardless of how they see themselves, if that makes sense.
I could understand this framing if the friend was the one hosting the B&B, and thus would be expected to be chatty with guests to maintain the usual social norms about hospitality.
I have more trouble seeing it this way in the situation as presented though. Being chatty with guests is a nice thing you do for them, to make them feel welcome in your home. This particular guest feels uncomfortable with being chatted at though. So doing it anyway is doing the opposite of making them feel welcome, enforcing your preference at their expense.
> It is the duty of the one who is outside the norm to respect and appreciate the rules of the place they are in (it would be like tourists demanding foreigners in a strange land shake their hand instead of giving them the finger as a greeting, even if that went against all the customs of the foreign land)
I can guarantee that every local who made their living off of tourists would learn and accommodate this preference, even if most tourists never complained.
The proprietors are in the same position; they're trying to sell you something. It's on them to conform to you.
Old people are like this. My dad (85) occasionally asks if I want a hot dog when I visit. I've been vegetarian for 20 years. The problem is that his brain now mostly remembers me as a kid who liked hot dogs. The memories of me as an vegetarian adult, in his head, are suppressed. This habitual behavior extends to other factors too and generally makes dealing with elderly aging parents a huge pain in the ass.
Great post, but missing two important points: (1) people are bad at knowing their own long term preferences (I.e. who to marry) and; (2) people are bad at communicating short term preferences. There are any number of reasons for #2, which all boil down to essentially: people express preferences to be seen a certain way, and often forgo speaking up for what would actually make them happy.
I think this explains a lot of kind old people ignoring your stated desires.
Douglas Hofstadter tells a story in one of his books about a friend of his who died. The friend had really liked rock music; DH hates it. At his memorial service, they played some of the friend's favorite songs, and DH comments that he kept thinking "This is terrible music, so it can't be appropriate to play that now!", despite knowing with his rational brain that it was a completely appropriate way to honor the friend and his taste.
I'm seeing the same dynamic pop up in a lot of the comments: elders are unwilling to withhold a nurturing/caring behavior from those who deny they need it.
I can see a lot of reasons this behavior would be culturally, if not biologically, hammered into us. People who openly express too much need are regarded as socially parasitic. Those individuals tend to be punished with a cold shoulder once their needs are deemed exaggerated.
Yet most of us need things from other people, socially or otherwise. Not wanting to appear burdensome, we've learned to signal "I'm not a parasite" by denying needs / asserting our own self reliance. And the providers (the parents, the grandparents, etc) have learned to offer anyway.
I wonder if this behavior is especially ingrained in generations who lived through times of scarcity. In my father's family, food is pushed on the young even if they don't want it, and the existence of vegetarianism is patently denied. But if you serve yourself too much lamb, you are considered greedy. This tradition comes from multiple generations who experienced hunger.
Those same generations generally emphasized self reliance while aggressively nurturing their children. This can feel like a contradiction to the young, who learn to play along by denying need while accepting resources.
Of course the old BnB people aren't offering food to people who aren't hungry. But perhaps they consider social contact a universal need, and their lives have taught them that the needful have a habit of denying need. In which case, the most rational thing is to provide anyway.
For what it's worth, I think it's also possible that older generations are used to eras of much higher pressure to conform to a standard social behavior model, because they lived through eras of savagely destructive social disunion. Someone who remembers the Vietnam War, or the Berlin Crisis, or race riots in the 60s, et cetera, may have a much greater concern for rampant individuality than is common today.
Indeed, the present time seems to me considerably more confident* than my, and even more so my parents' or grandparents' generation, that mild social disunion -- people insisting on their individual personality quirks being given broad public respect -- will NOT lead to destructive fission, chaos, riots, actual civil war.
------------
* Whether this is a foolish overconfidence or just a glorious liberation from stultifying stereotypes is the $25,000 question.
I often get the feeling that many of the issues here are the result of confusing fast thinking with slow thinking. ("Thinking Fast and Slow" Daniel Kahneman's.) You rationalists want everyone to be thinking slow. But it just doesn't happen that often, and when the darling B&B owners meet a new customer they naturally use fast thinking... be nice. Is there some Less Wrong or SSC posts that talk of this?
Yes. It's the difference between Heidegger's present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Rationalists prefer and trust the theoretical, conscious present-at-hand. But everyday life is lived in the immediate, unconscious ready-to-hand. Present-at-hand is a rare fallback mechanism for when things go wrong/unexpected.
People are wrong about their preferences all the time, I can think of times where I wasn't feeling like going out but my friends pressured me and I ended up having a great time. Or I didn't want to try a certain food but ended up liking it
I suspect this depends strongly on how weird you are. I have made the opposite experience. Throughout my childhood, distant family members, teachers and other adults pressured me to do things they thought were fun despite my protests that they are not fun to me, and I ended up disliking it pretty much every time.
Multi-day school trips were always the nadir of the year for me. Eventually, I got my parents to habitually deny the school permission to take me along, social fallout be damned. It was a substantial quality of life improvement.
I think there's a subtle point here as well, which I haven't seen discussed in the comments...
There's a big difference between you stating your own unusual preference, and reporting, second-hand, your friend's unusual preferences.
If you had said to the proprietors "I am very socially anxious, I would appreciate it if you don't interact with me", I think this might have had a chance of success. It's an unusual thing to ask, but hearing it direct from the person in question would carry some weight. But some guy just telling them that his travelling companion has some unusual preferences? This carries very little weight.
If you haven't established that you have any reason to be speaking for them (like they are your spouse, or child, or patient), their prior assumptions about how to treat people aren't going to be swayed.
Put yourself in a similar position. If someone tells you "my preference, when you greet me next time, is to stick your tongue out at me", you might well do it. But if someone tells you "my friend's preference, when you greet them next time, is to stick your tongue out at them", that's a whole different story. You could be lying, or mistaken, and either of these seems more likely than the possibility of your friend having such a strange request. And who are you to ask that of them, anyway?
That's a very good point. If I put myself in their shoes I would definitely attach far less confidence to something a soi-disant friend (not spouse or parent) tells me about somebody else, who isn't even there in person so I could watch the friend's face for nonverbal ratification, than I would about something he said about himself.
It's even possible that the hosts were ready to react to Scott's friend's apparent discomfort and would stop talking, but she did such a good job at suffering in silence that they decided Scott was wrong.
I was in the middle of writing up a comment to the same effect.
Also, I wanted to add that the effect of the Bayesian update may not be as big as Scott expects in saying 'If you're bad at calibrating updates, maybe getting told "I don't want a present" isn't enough to convince you not to give someone a present.'
H = person X likes presents
E = Scott says X doesn't like presents
• estimate P(H) around 90% [the "Everybody loves presents!" prior]
• estimate P(E|¬H) around 90% [If X really doesn't like presents, Scott's probably telling the truth]
• estimate P(E|H) around 30% [all the doubts Scott said he checked when he heard it directly, plus the factors of 'how comfortable do _I_ feel _she_ would feel telling him', 'how good is Scott at reading the social cues that go with "you don't need to get me anything"', 'maybe he's actually trying to sabotage her' etc.]
...plug into Bayes...
P(¬H) was 10%, and after updating, P(¬H|E) is only 25%: it is still not likely that she dislikes presents, even though you say so.
(One might have different ideas about P(E|H); with the other assumptions it'd take P(E|H) < 10% to alter your prior to the point that you really think she doesn't like presents. But if you believe it is common for people to refuse gifts out of mere politeness, you are unlikely to estimate the probability that low.)
I think you need to add in to your thoughts on this subject the fact that updating mental models is effortful. Neurons need to burn a fair amount of glucose to do it. So an additional and I think very clarifying question here is: just how much effort do people consider it worth to contemplate certain updates?
For example, in your B&B case, I think it is entirely possible that the host couple might have considered it just totally not worth the mental effort to even bother firing up the frontal cortex to ponder whether this update was worth making. There are some good reasons for that:
* You were very transiently in their life. They're not going to see you again anyway. So why bother updating the standard "here's how we put our guests at ease" protocol?
* They're older. When you're younger, you worry a lot more about fitting in. When you get to be 65+ you tend to stop worrying about that stuff. You pretty much already know who you're going to get along with and who you won't by about 2 seconds into any interaction, and your motivation for *adjusting* your ability to get along with anyone that fits into the wrong category is low. Why bother? Life is short, you already know who you like and don't like, and you've been successfully sorting people for decades. So older people may very naturally be more likely to decide that pondering whether to adjust their mental model for new types of people is not worth the effort.
* There's actually a balance between both sides in this interaction, in terms of who updates his mental model. For example, it's possible the older couple thought: "Hey, you two are guests in *our* home, it's on *you* to adjust your mental models to fit in well with how things run in Our Home." Meanwhile you may have been thinking "Hey, we're the renters of your property/employers of you as contract cooks/housemaids, it's on *you* as the employees to adjust your mental model to suit your employers' tastes."
Id est, there's inherently a conflict between who has to adust, any time two parties that have conflicting models of social behaviour meet, and the two parties may not come to the same conclusion about how that mental effort is to be split, if it's split at all. (A B&B seems like a natural place for this problem, too, inasmuch as a lot of them are in actual personal homes, not commercial properties, so the precise line between "private guest" and "tenant" may be blurred, or not seen nearly the same way by the same people -- I'm a little curious how either you or the older couple would seen the same situation if (1) you had been nonpaying personal guests, or (2) it had been a fully commercial establishment, e.g. Best Western motel, and they were just the night manager and asst manager.)
* Finally, the value individuals put on low-friction social encounters, and their sensitivity to any abrasion, differs considerably. Some people are exquisitely sensitive, become almost social chameleons to avoid the tiniest hint of friction, and the cost of updating mental models seems cheap to them for the respite they get from being rubbed the wrong way. Other people are, for lack of a better phrase, made of much coarser fiber and really don't give a shit, or aren't even aware, of mild to moderate levels of abrasion, and so they evaluate the cost-benefit ratio of updating mental models quite differently.
It's also possible that this isn't a one shot interaction because B&B customers leave reviews, and the couple owning the B&B are getting bad reviews from people who don't want that chattiness.
Talking to people who really don't like it is less skilled for someone in a service industry than looking at people when you're talking with them to see how it's going over.
So you're seeing it from the "I'm the employer and their the employee and it's on them to do the heavy lifting in terms of updating mental models, unless they don't want to get paid [in this case by a good review]." Perfectly understandable. However, you might approach it differently if, say, you were running a B&B yourself, or if the situation did not involve paying strangers but rather, say, friends of friends to whom you were offering the favor of a place to crash for a few nights.
I think that if I were running a B&B I'd feel obligated (within some limits, which I don't presently have fully defined) to make it a pleasant experience for my customers, which doesn't mean I'd always succeed.
If it were a favor for friends of friends, the dynamics would be different.
Exactly. Which is why I think an underappreciated aspect of this whole story is the phrase "B&B". If the whole thing was about a visit to friends or family, or a stay in a hotel, it might come out quite different.
Hence it's perhaps less an issue of "people" having certain tendencies towards updating/not updating mental modes so much as that in different scenarios there are different expectations of who ought to do that work (or how it should be split between the parties), and in borderline cases you get the typical disputes over borders.
Yeah, but for every one or even two people who write "They wouldn't stop talking" reviews, if they take the opposite tack, there will be six or eight people writing "They were so rude and unfriendly!" reviews and that will damage their business a lot more, since most people *do* want the "friendly, homespun" touch.
Maybe there's an opportunity for niche businesses: introvert-friendly B&B and guesthouses. "When I arrived they never said a word, just threw the key of my room at me. 10/10, would stay there again!" 😁
Besides being naturally chatty old people, the B&B owners may have been caught doing the customer service performance; when you deal with the public, providing services, you do construct a particular persona that is smiley and upbeat. And it's hard to break the habit - several times, I've answered the phone at a new job repeating the standard greeting from the old job. So it's possible the owners did mean to try to avoid the "standard greeting small talk" but slipped and repeated the routine they used with all guests.
I believe the only businesses that have achieved this required massive scale surveillance of behaviors the customers thought were being conducted in private, along with somewhat state of the art computing techniques widely considered "AI," and they still get bad reviews.
Sure, but the ideal is expensive, right? You want the ideal car, with ideal engineering, it's going to cost you 6 figures. If you want ideal customer service, you hire a personal concierge and train that person in your exact wants. If you want ideal interpersonal sensitivity in your innkeeper, you stay at the Four Seasons and fork out $400/night.
This is why I regularly draw a distinction between "friendly" and "nice." In my experience, a lot of people tend to conflate them, but they're very distinct qualities. A "friendly" person is quick to interact with others and engages in a lot of warm social behaviors, a "nice" person is attentive to other people's feelings and priorities. Some people are introverted but very nice, and may work hard to seem "friendly" with people who prefer that kind of behavior, while some friendly people are very inconsiderate or even downright cruel.
I've heard a lot of stories from people who knew Andre the Giant who described him as a really nice guy, but under this distinction, most of the accounts I've heard of him make him out to be a friendly but inconsiderate asshole, who wouldn't bother to think about how it might affect other people to be involved in his hard-partying behaviors no matter how they encouraged him to, and would occasionally do things which would physically hurt or endanger others because he wouldn't think too hard about how his actions might affect others as a tremendously powerful 500lb man.
Going further, deliberately hurtful bullies are often friendly and charismatic.
Sure. And people in the customer service/hospitality/personal care industry have an inverse problem, where the efforts they need to make in their job to be personable, warm, friendly, are overinterpreted by narcissistic customers: "I'm memorizing and using your name, Mr. First Class Passenger, and offering you a pillow and smiling warmly at you *because it's part of my job* and not because I find you sexy and want you to comment on my figure or ask me out."
I think this is a rational response to data points of people saying they are uninterested in something but are just being polite and actually are interested. How many people will politely say "Oh please, I don't want anything for my birthday" but in the end are delighted if they get one, versus people who are honest-to-goodness worse off for getting a present? More seriously, how many couples are there that have genuinely worrying fights at times, with words as bad as "I don't love you" and "I hate you," but still manage to stay together and seem (or at least claim to be) better for it than separating? And this goes doubly for "I was sure they were my friend and then they stabbed me in the back" or "She rejected my advances four times but I persisted and that's how I met your mother." Certainly such things are portrayed endlessly in movies and other media, enough to seep deeply into people's decisionmaking processes even if their relation to reality is skewed. And the older people are, the more they will have encountered these (real or fictional) cases.
People will constantly encounter situations like this, and I think these might be the cases messing up true "preference reading", rather than the (perhaps less frequent) signals of "people who say they want presents and actually do." I'm inclined to think that the strength of this effect would be muted the more serious the preference is; even if the hosts had a practice of giving a flower to every visitor I doubt they'd offer one to your friend if you said she's deathly allergic to flowers. However, that admittedly doesn't accord well with the abusive partner example.
My policy with my friends and much of my family is "I don't expect a present, but if you come up with something you think I might like, then I will be happy to receive it". That definitely can be rounded off to "I don't want anything for my birthday" - and I generally get something every three or four years per person when they find something they think I will like or that is on my list (I have a list of out-of-print books for friends who like second-hand bookshops).
There is a big difference between that and "I will be offended if you give me a present", but they both round off to the same words.
My steelman view of very nice people who don't acknowledge protests is that they have simply converged on a mentally efficient strategy (space: no person-specific lookup table needed, processing: minimize anxious time spent looking for hidden preference clues) with a small downside (oh no, they didn't want tea, but now they have tea). In the same vein, it's a low-cost energy-saving move in cultures with elaborate politeness rules.
Efficiently directing someone to their room is rude and violates social norms, which is high-risk. If your business depends on fickle consumer reviews where even a single poor review can tank your five-star rating, you're strongly incentivized to avoid social risk.
If you had provided harmlessly weird instructions, they might have cooperated. ("Greet her as Queen Cassandra.")
Providing instructions that expressly contravene social norms is too risky, and will be ignored. ("Greet her as Ugly Troll.")
If you follow social norms, you can always maintain your place in the hierarchy (or AirBnb ranking) by publicly invoking the norm. Most people would agree with the following statement: "My Granddaughter told me not to buy her a present. Buying presents is normal and good. I bought her a present and she's mad. She's unreasonable." Likewise no one is going to write an AirBnb review of "Proprietor was too friendly."
This generalizes to an individual's self-image, unconsciously:
1. Buying gifts makes me feel like I'm being caring and thoughtful.
2. Forgetting birthdays makes me feel thoughtless and bad.
3. Not buying a gift feels like forgetting a birthday which will make me feel bad.
4. Add in confusing gift-related norms, to further incentivize ignoring people's stated preferences.
5. Buy a gift.
Confusing gift-related norms include:
1. Decline gifts you want, in order to avoid the appearance of greed. See e.g. "We'll buy lunch." -> Recipient must decline twice before accepting.
2. Tests to make sure the partner really cares: "No need to buy me a gift, honey" -> Mad no gift was purchased.
3. Demonstrating thoughtfulness is the real point of the gift: "If I tell you what gift I want it doesn't count."
Given the above "ignore stated norm-breaking gift-related preferences" is a good default rule, and one I endorse.
If anything, a review that said "I asked them not to be friendly, but they were friendly to me - one star" is likely to strike a lot of potential customers the same way that a review that says "I was looking for a Chinese restaurant because I like sweet-and-sour pork but this place just has a bunch of things I can't pronounce on the menu" is going to strike a lot of other people.
"I told them I didn't want it, but they forced it on me anyway, because they knew they would enjoy it and they didn't particularly [care/register] that I'd said no..."
This is a relatively non-horrifying value of "it," but I try to stay the hell away from people running that algorithm, even when it's locally harmless. It potentially goes bad quick- not being able to set boundaries as simple as "Please stop talking at me" is social interaction with the safety *off*- and the usual compensating possibility- that you could make a lifelong friend- is off the table.
If they *honestly don't realize*, they *literally can't process* the communication, that's legit not their fault but also they're potentially *really dangerous*.
And... my uncharitable suspicion is that what's proposed is not *literal* inability. I could be way off base here, but I started to write a hypothetical about someone with a rare, potentially deadly food-allergy- which is the kind of thing you *really* need to worry about, if they actually *can't process* surprising preferences- but it felt like I was playing dumb. I guess I don't expect other people to *literally* believe this is a mental glitch rather than a goal-directed process.
I feel like maybe the "preferences" framework is throwing people off? Both of the central examples fall under the more narrow umbrella of "A preference to avoid being involuntarily subjected to a specific kind of social interaction, nominally friendly, over explicitly protests." Most of our cultural touchstones for illustrating why this is really bad involve sex, but I don't think sex is the *reason* it's bad. Masturbation seems morally neutral to me, so I don't think sex itself is bad. I think it's just a factor that makes for really evocative examples that illustrate the underlying bad thing.
If you're looking for examples of where you are not respecting other people's preferences, you might start with the fact that the first line of text under that LessWrong post reads: "I, the author, no longer endorse this post." The second comment thread at the bottom links to a post named "Posts I repent of", in which the author states: "I would prefer it if no one linked to or promoted "Taking Ideas Seriously"."
The example you give to crystallize why you're so certain that people ignore others' preferences is similarly blinkered. Your girlfriend expressed a preference to you. Your response was to internally question her motivations for having it ("some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation"), to "challenge" her with questions about whether acting in direct opposition to this preference would be ok, and to share the whole situation with someone outside the relationship (ostensibly to ask for advice about whether or not to respect your girlfriend's preference). You focus on your grandmother as the person in this scenario who couldn't acknowledge people's preferences, but your own behavior treated your girlfriend's stated preference as both potentially untrue and potentially rooted in animus against you.
You say that you "think it's hard for conscious people thinking rationally to get this one wrong... but our emotional reasoning machinery gets stuff dumber than this wrong all the time." Do you think emotional reasoning machinery played a part in these two decisions you made? Maybe it *felt good* to you to read that article, and you shared it because you were focused on the good feelings it gave you and not the preferences of its author. Maybe someone before that girlfriend treated you badly, and you pushed back against her preference because you didn't want to comply and risk her getting mad and hurting you again (you mention women playing games twice, later in the post).
You are not alone! Humans generally act in ways that prioritize our own emotions and preferences over the emotions and preferences of others. But this is not a mystery, and you are not an outlier.
You had to "rescue" her? Therein lies the tale. For both of you I think.
But as to the respecting of preferences - it appears to me to be a "clash" of preferences. Why couldn't your girlfriend acknowledge the preference of the couple to be outgoing and friendly and, as they saw it, courteous. It made her uncomfortable. I would bet that the couple would have felt uncomfortable ignoring her or failing to greet her in a way they considered appropriate.
For someone as smart and informed and perceptive as you it surprises me that you frame this as "they" were deficient. From my perspective it was a typical interaction of two different personality types. For what it is worth, I identify more with your girlfriend but I manage to play act my way through those situations.
>But as to the respecting of preferences - it appears to me to be a "clash" of preferences. Why couldn't your girlfriend acknowledge the preference of the couple to be outgoing and friendly and, as they saw it, courteous. It made her uncomfortable. I would bet that the couple would have felt uncomfortable ignoring her or failing to greet her in a way they considered appropriate.
Essential element of asymmetry- Scott and his girlfriend were paying to stay at the Bed and Breakfast, the Bed and Breakfast proprietors were not paying to stay with them. When you stay at a hotel, they don't clean your room because they're so nice it pains them to think you might be troubled by a disorderly environment, they do it because you're a paying guest.
If you’re paying for a BnB experience, and then arrive and at the last minute say in an offhand way, “My friend doesn’t want what we paid for and your whole professional identity is constructed around”, you might... still get what you paid for.
If somebody told me to not welcome their friend who I was about to meet, I'd assume they were kidding, because that's a very strange request. Even more so if I'm the owner of a B&B. Like, if you don't like friendly small talk, don't stay at a B&B, Motel 6 is probably much cheaper anyway.
It's also a pretty rude preference to expect a random member of society to go along with. I wouldn't say it's so rude as to be objectionable just for asking, but at the same time, "please don't do what you usually do to help yourself feel at ease with the stranger who's about to be part of your general living quarters for the next few days" is definitely in the territory of "mensch-points for acquiescing to, no deductions for disregarding".
I think that's a good point - this *is* a stranger coming into someone's family home. Are they likely to steal the good silverware or set the bathroom on fire? You have no idea, so a little chit-chat when they arrive is a way of scoping them out. Maybe they are monosyllabic and don't engage in conversation because they're shy, or maybe they're on the run from the Feds and don't want you to recognise them from the TV news! Here's a news story about criminals targeting guest houses by pretending to be guests: https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/criminals-pose-as-guests-and-target-b-and-bs-guest-houses-in-brooklyn-31416226
Exactly so. I have spent a fair amount of time in a B&B owned by my sister in law, playing both the role of the guest and the help. Guests were given the key to the front door, and, if they were willing to ignore signs and perhaps look for keys on hooks could have gone anywhere in the house. One memorable case explained that he opened a door marked "private" because he figured the innkeeper was likely there. He was right, although not a very pleasant person.
It's almost certainly true that the innkeepers really did want to know something about Scott's friend, partly for purely defensive reasons. How many people would give a person unwilling to engage in polite conversation the run of their own dwelling, even if they had paid for it?
Epistemic status: Cherry-picked parameters from sample size of 1+eps
I’m gonna add another sample, and say that this kind behavior is international (Russia), and does seem to have a strong correlation with age and other factors. My paternal grandparents are strong example of this, while maternal grandparents are much less “affected”
A few factors that seem like they could be linked with “affected” vs “unaffected” (and also heavily correlated between themselves):
- Openness to new ideas
- Comfort with new technology (need help to read sms from simple phone vs comfortable with smartphones)
In Indian culture, you're supposed to pressure visitors to eat. There's the inevitable "No, we cannot impose" and a predictable set of rounds of cajoling, "Oh, just eat a little", that goes on back and forth, until the guest says yes. This protocol is broken at great risk to the friendship.
You absolutely have to pressure people to eat more, as well. If they say no, they're in trouble. If you don't pressure them, you're in trouble. You might say things like, "You are so skinny!" to an overweight person.
Every culture has a version of this. Food is always involved. You say one thing but expect everyone to understand they're supposed to disagree with you.
I saw the Chinese version in the movie Joy Luck Club. The Chinese girl takes her white boyfriend to meet her parents. The mom serves food while criticizing her own cooking. The guest is supposed to disagree, but he says something like ok, ok, maybe you need to add more salt....and they hate him for saying that. :)
I don't think you have to be Chinese to wince at that. Your girlfriend is taking you to meet her parents. Her mother made a home-cooked meal and she is doing the "polite self-deprecation" thing in front of the guest - "this is just something plain, I'm sure you've had better elsewhere, don't expect a restaurant-quality meal" and so on.
And instead of smiling and choking it down even if it *did* taste like burnt sawdust, he goes "yeah, you're right, this is bad and you should have done it this way"? That will upset the girlfriend, the mother, the father, and probably the dog and the goldfish as well. *Later*, after you've had a couple of visits to the family home under your belt, *then* you can mention to your girlfriend "uh, your mother's cooking is a bit lacking, huh?" but not when you're on the first formal introductory visit and should be on your best behaviour to impress the inlaws!
Yes, but that's from the perspective of the hosts. This man might be quite literal in how he interpreted the question. He might not know the social nuances involved. You could also say that the onus is on the other side, to understand HIM!
> (the local four-year-old recently announced she had no sense of taste, something we're pretty sure is some kind of weird game she's playing with herself and not true at all)
Umm, have you had her tested for COVID ? We no longer live in the Before Times, when life was green and good, you know...
The answer is people are wrong or do not tell the truth about their own preferences. If you have children, life is a constant battle with a small person who is incorrect about their own preferences (though not always, which makes this hard). If you deal in an industry that depends on socially mediated success, lying about your own preferences is necessary to succeed. Dating is a consatnt battle of discerning hidden preferences.
If you violate someone's expressed preference in favor of a more universal ideal (or situation appropriate ideal) of preferences, you will find you get constant feedback that this is correct choice in the situation. (though again not always).
Thanks for writing this comment so I didn't have to.
People very frequently lie, consciously or unconsciously, about what they want. As a result, you'll generally get a better response by ignoring someone's stated preferences entirely and treating them the way you would anyone else.
The exceptions are generally people with some kind of genuine illness or disorder that they will usually take pains to make you aware of. Gluten is a good example: the vast majority of people who "don't eat gluten" would in fact enjoy a cookie, but the few who actually have celiac or a gluten allergy will make sure to tell you. I'm not sure how kindly-but-insistent old people handle this.
As a result, you'll generally get a better response by ignoring someone's stated preferences entirely and treating them the way you would anyone else.
I think this is very susceptible to evidence-filtering.
In college, strangers would regularly sit with me during meals and strike up conversations, perhaps supposing that eating alone meant I was lonely, and I would apologize and tell them that I was there to eat rather than make conversation, and would prefer not to talk. Having space and quiet is a preference I hold strongly enough that I'm prepared to be somewhat rude to fulfill it. But, if I'm stuck in a space with someone for an extended period, like at a B&B, and I've told them that I don't want to make conversation, and they do it anyway, I'm not going to complain, because my reasoning is that they've already demonstrated willingness to ignore my stated preferences, and protesting further is likely to cause an unpleasant argument rather than improving the situation.
For a strong introvert in particular, telling people off for violating your preferences can be *very* unpleasant. I hated telling off people who were just trying to be nice by talking to me at mealtimes. I just didn't hate it as much as I realized I'd hate sitting for entire conversations with strangers at meals once I discovered that people were going to keep on doing this on a regular basis.
I guess I should clarify that ignoring a stated preference is not the same as ignoring revealed preference. People say all kinds of things, but what they do (or don't do) is ultimately the only reliable guidepost.
If someone says they don't want to drink, you offer them a drink and they don't touch it (or barely touch it) then they have demonstrated that they in fact don't want to drink. Likewise, in your example if someone isn't holding up their end of a conversation in smalltalk then they probably don't want to talk and you can politely dip out of the conversation unless you're under some obligation to continue.
That is, the goal is ultimately to respect someone's preference but the best way to do it is to see what they actually prefer rather than relying on a weak and game-able proxy for that.
True, there are occasions when people will dissemble for social reasons, but usually that consists of pretending to like things they don't. What social lubrication could you support by pretending to dislike what the person you're talking to likes? And the kind of social interaction where I've had these responses are co-equal conversations like the one we're having here in this comment section. Nobody's trying to impress their date, or suck up at the office.
Leaving aside the oft-discussed phenomenon of people not realizing they don't particularly like something because they haven't calibrated their sense of "like", I am unfamiliar with the idea of being wrong about your own preferences. Though people are different, so maybe there are people who do that. But I don't. I never, ever, ever, throughout a long and culinarily difficult childhood, was mistaken about tastes I disliked.
It is very common to say you dislike something or do not want something when you in fact do so as not to put any pressure or impose on the other party to provide that thing. When the other party disregards this stated preference you get to be certain they are not doing something simply because they felt it they were obligated. This is not "irrational" as in many situations, even without power imbalances, constant "imposition" of your preferences can be tiresome.
Is it so strange to think you may not know your own preferences? Almost any nerd that has ever gotten into body building or long distance running will tell you a story as to how that changed their preferences. And how bizzare never to eat something, dislike it, but later to grow to enjoy it.
Exactly. It seems highly likely that older people, having been exposed to multiple cases of stated vs revealed preferences mismatch, are more able to detect such cases intuitively (which is likely the case with the grandmother, the girlfriend and the gift). It may also be hard for them to explain their intuition (hence the nonsensical "everybody likes gifts" explanation). They may or may not be right, of course.
Aside from that, Taarof is a thing, and there are similar traditions in many cultures, so it's not just a weird fluke. I.e. it can be considered polite to state the opposite of your preference, multiple times, before finally revealing the real one, and that may actually be rational behavior due to complicated incentives.
> Ability to model other people as having really different mind-designs from theirs
While I wouldn't say a person who doesn't like gifts or is bothered by friendly strangers as "really different". But there does seem to be an inability "to relate to people who are not just like me" that seems to be missing.
But I have also noticed this is from the same generation. This is also written into Kitty Foreman's character (That 70's Show) who I think would be from that same generation as well.
Some thoughts, beyond the ones in the article:
* They have more life experience to draw on for making a good excuse to not update their beliefs (She only says she doesn't like presents because she is used to getting bad ones. Get her something good, and she'll like it).
* They are used to people just giving up on this battle, and are mistaking that for the previous point.
* They've spent a long time with a self selected bubble so their priors are unusual. (People who get B&Bs disproportionately want the interaction. The B&B hosts end up with strongly reinforced beliefs about what people are like.)
* (Wild speculation) Maybe as people age, their ability to update beliefs gets worse.
* This is mostly just relevant to gift giving: but there may be several social attitudes and signals informing the person's opinion that "everyone likes presents" that may be hard to update all at once.
* There may be a different social attitude towards the preference: being introverted may not be seen as a valid preference. Instead it is something the introvert is expected to cope with.
All of these are at least fairly speculative.
On a final note regarding the second last paragraph: I've noticed the opposite! The emotional response is that she likes me or he is a true friend. It is my rational brain that can rationalize their behavior as "just being polite" or "playing a game". Weird.
I once saw the question, "What thing do you know that nobody else does?" and my answer was, "People are different."
I won't say that -literally- nobody else knows this, but a very large number of people seem not to. And it's not just innocent social preferences, where they assume that everybody likes the same things. It also affects hot topics like politics and religion. People on one side of a divide will assume that people on the other side are perverted, or lying, or have some kind of ulterior motive, and they will puzzle themselves endlessly trying to figure out what that ulterior motive might be, when the people in question have stated their reasons plainly.
However, the most intense example of this phenomenon is back on the innocent social side. It's music. If you say you dislike some music that other people love - and it happens to me a lot; I can't abide about 90% of what passes for popular music - they will accuse you of -lying-. About your own musical tastes! Why would you do such a thing?
Speaking of tastes, it also happens with food. And here it's often genetic, or at least epigenetic, and thus scientifically documentable, yet people who love cilantro still won't believe that other people find it repulsive. (Me, I find it nearly tasteless, yet I'm willing to accept that other people are not like me.)
I think people just don't take statements of preference that seriously because most people who are not rationalists genuinely don't examine their preferences very often so people are constantly right when they insist that someone's preferences are wrong. At the same time you respect preferences so immediately because you, and the people you usually surround yourself with, do take the kind of authoritative "I like X" or "I can't stand Y" statements seriously and carefully avoid making them without being very sure. These people are optimizing more for the kind of person who declares that they are in love with the most recent city they've visited and HATES a third of all food types all of which they'll order in their next meal.
Don't know about the specifics in your case, but "I don't want a present" is the oldest trap in the relationship book. So your grandmother did have a very good point.
Anybody who'd play games like that, I wouldn't want a relationship with. So not giving them a present and then getting dumped for it is the optimal move in that case.
Yes! as an autistic person, I'm not wired to do well in a "guess culture," and I've mostly uninstalled whatever guess culture modules i picked up in life experience. A relationship with a "guess culture" person would be huge amounts of work, and I'd be unlikely to succeed. I'd spend lots of time being judged as a social failure, as uncaring, etc. etc. Better to break up ASAP. And because of the "guess culture" element, there's no way I can explain the problem and be heard or believed. Better to "fail" massively and intentionally (easier on my own feelings) ASAP, and be dumped by the guess culture person, however attractive they are otherwise.
Now if only I really believed that guess culture behaviour was a binary thing;-) Sadly, even extreme autistics pick up bits of it from those around them, particularly when it's ritualized.
I think it does read that way a bit because of the "I" framing, but practically speaking, it could just as easily be reversed.
"For a person with an ingrained 'guess culture,' a relationship with someone like me would be a lot of work and would be really unpleasant, because they'd have to parse a bunch of atypical preferences without being able to rely on simply asking me things or trusting what I tell them. They'd spend lots of time being judged as inconsiderate, obnoxious, dishonest, etc. for behaving according to their own understanding of the implicit expectations of a relationship."
Not to me. I'm so unable to empathize with guess culture that I think that even normies "should" also abandon it in droves, but I'm aware that in practice they'll stick with what they know, strongly prefer it, and mostly notice people from other cultures only as defective and rude. (With exceptions; some are ultra-good at soft skills, and learn to code switch.) So will those autistics raised in a strongly guess culture who manage to learn to function in it, and don't happen to switch their primary self-identification to the autistic/geek subculture.
Not to me. I'm so unable to empathize with guess culture that I think that even normies "should" also abandon it in droves, but I'm aware that in practice they'll stick with what they know, strongly prefer it, and mostly notice people from other cultures only as defective and rude. (With exceptions; some are ultra-good at soft skills, and learn to code switch.) So will those autistics raised in a strongly guess culture who manage to learn to function in it, and don't happen to switch their primary self-identification to the autistic/geek subculture.
It's a normie world. We're guests there (statistically speaking).
Like with disability ammenities, it's civilized and moral to have them (e.g. handicapped, parking spots, ramps for those in wheelchairs, special traffic light signals for the blind, etc), but there's no way the majority of the population will turn to live like they have disabilities so that everybody is on the same level.
Besides imposing a minority issue on the majority (that doesn't need to handle it themselves), it will also in a way handicap their preferred mode of communication (the implicit, non-austistic, way).
For normies, the issue of implicitness and unstated preferences still being respected, is at the core of relationship.
For normies, respecting an unstated preference, even in spite of a token polite stating of the opposite (e.g. giving them presents even if they said they don't want any), is the core of actually connecting.
They don't want the others following their explicit orders (explicit preferences), because e.g. that wouldn't be a real gift. Telling you "bring me a present", and you bringing me one, is more like a mechanical action.
Whereas the subtlelty of bringing a present anyway (even if I didn't ask for it, or made a token gesture of not wanting any), means you took initiative, not blindly followed what I said, and went above and beyond it for me.
In other words, people in general don't want friends/lovers that explicitly follow their orders, but people that "click" with them, and "read their minds".
I think the ask vs guess culture observation suggests that this simply isn't true; normies who come form "ask" cultures, or from "guess" cultures with a different set of rules than some other normie, would be just as baffled and unhappy by being blamed for not doing what they were explicitly told wasn't wanted, and similar, as any autistic person.
OTOH, my most successful roommate relationship, was with a person whose grandparents came from the same part of Yorkshire as my great grandparents. We lived several 1000 miles from the UK, so neither of us commonly encountered people from that area - or people anywhere near as compatible in the tiny details of living together.
This. If someone reacts negatively to me respecting their stated preference, that's generally a good reason to downgrade my overall opinion of them. Especially in relationships - "I expect you to care about me too much to listen to what I say I want" is a messed-up dynamic that leads nowhere good.
Well, such "games" are part and parcel with social life in all kinds of contexts. And it's not some cunning plan on the part of the perpetrator, it's how humans (or at least "normies") are wired, and part of the evolutionary development of interpersonal communication. So whether within a relationship or outside of one, one must deal with them to get by.
But we also probably shouldn't throw the baby (e.g. relationship) with the bathwater, because we don't like this or that aspect of it.
In terms of finding someone you are compatible with for a long-term relationship, if you want things stated explicitly and the other person continues to ignore that, it's a sign to end things, so each person can find someone they are more compatible with.
It's extraordinary how little skill people have at what might be called "enforcing your preferences." Scott told the B&B folks about his friend's preferences but did not secure any explicit agreement or even check for understanding.
What they may have taken from him was this: A) Not much at all -- they just didn't pay attention; B) "This man doesn't understand his friend, or how much people like us" C) His friend should learn to be more friendly, so we'll help her; D) We don't want folks like that at our B&B, so we'll work her over in the usual manner in the hope that she doesn't return.
If you want to enforce your preference, you need to make sure that you have been understood, that the other person agrees, and that the other person sees more advantage in respecting your preferences than in serving his own. I don't see any of those elements present in what he describes.
I think it's worth noting that receiving/wanting a present from a partner and receiving wanting a present from a friend are really quite different things, and it wouldn't surprise me if she really did have a different preference for each of those situations.
One of the changes in society that has occurred in the last ten years is that many people are desperately lonely. They may be nice people – but when they have the opportunity to visit, they will talk and talk and talk. Another change that has occurred is many people have become very bad at conversation. Once you have discussed the weather they are out of things to talk about.
Not just in the last ten years. The most talkative guy I ever met was the proprietor of a used book store housed in a broken-down school bus in an otherwise (as far as I could see) abandoned ghost town in Nevada. He talked as if I were the first person he'd seen in a week, and I possibly was.
I admit to making a similar mistake, more than once. The problem was the lack of social skills and inability to pick up on social cues. What makes this extra difficult is that people *do* say stuff they don't mean all the time. So if you grew up around people who often play coy, you learn to expect that another person will reject whatever nice thing you're trying to do in a humble or self deprecating way ("oh, no, thanks, I wouldn't want to bother you"), but if you do the nice thing anyway ("oh, but I insist"), they will appreciate it and be happy about it.
So, for example, I would insist on helping my friend to carry her heavy backpack, and fail to realize that she said "no" in a "I don't want you to do this and am feeling increasingly annoyed" sense, not in a "oh, no, don't bother, oh, but okay, thank you."
I don't think that I'm particularly irrational person or that I don't care about people's preferences, or was doing whatever a modern woke person would accuse me of doing. It's just that taking other people's preferences at face value is a social skill you have to learn, and unless you've been taught it or are able to figure it out eventually on your own, it's not that weird that you'd miss it. I guess a smarter person would've picked up on this kind of thing faster... Or maybe some people are just naturally better at socializing than others.
Which is why I think it would be much better if our society didn't have a huge stigma around teaching social skills and dating advice to young guys. If you're shy, awkward, kinda weird, and feeling overwhelmed by social interactions, you'll end up making mistakes like this all the time, because your model of how human relationships are supposed to work is based on romcoms, platitudes, and whatever your parents taught you when growing up, who didn't really know any better themselves.
Cultures and sub-cultures come with a set of very deep unspoken assumptions and understanding that those may be really different is HARD. I live in a different country then the one I grown up in, so I actually have quite a few examples of where I literally can't comprehend people having other preferences, even though I rationally understand they do. To take an apolitical example, I'm having trouble imagining people might want to live in a group setting if they can afford a place of their own. Not for the lack of examples of the contrary, Scott being one of them! Also, whenever I see or hear any office worker approving of going back to full in-person work after the covid, I can't get rid off the little voice in the back of my head saying they are an evil lying bastard who just wants to look good in front of the boss.
Would I disrespect any of those preferences given a chance? Not sure, but I'm in the bay area where they are squarely withing the norm. If someone would've been expressing something equally alien in the context where my assumptions were the norm and their a wild deviation, I can easily see myself ignoring this as a lie or confusion or whatever.
As for the most probable explanation though, I'm on board with everyone who said that deep down they probably just didn't care what she wants.
Some of these seeming disconnects about "preferences" are just complicated social dynamics playing out. For example, an act that appears like altruistically trying to please someone else (giving a present), is actually more about social positioning ("I am generous and considerate"), and the recipient has good social reasons to get annoyed ("now I look inconsiderate for not getting them a present" and "now I owe them").
A more fundamental version of the "problem" would be: "Why it is hard to accept that other people experience a different reality?" Formulated that way, the answer is almost obvious. Each of us wants to believe that we are living in one objective reality and that we accurately perceive it.
But if you meet someone who prefers the taste of lemon peel to chocolate ice cream, you have to ask yourself "do those things taste the same to each of us?" "Or does that other person enjoy bad tastes?" "Why would they do that?" "Are they a weirdo?" "Am I the weirdo?" "Are there multiple realities, in which we are both right?" Of all these choices, it's easiest to assume you are right about reality and "they are just a weirdo" or "just pretending to like bad stuff."
That's how I feel about sushi. I can't believe people really prefer the taste of raw fish to something that is actually worth eating. So my theory is that all the people who go to sushi bars are just pretending they like it because they think it makes them cool or interesting. (As objective evidence for this theory, notice that sushi eaters go out of their way to load up each bite with a bunch of rice to obscure the raw fish taste). Anyway, that's my reality, and I'm sticking to it.
I don't think all these cases are really best explained by a single theory. For instance, there are specific reasons why people might be reluctant to update on explicitly given information in many of the cases you cite.
1) Recognizing that a girl who says they aren't into them really isn't.
Here I think you have evolution on the other side favoring male optimism about women sleeping with them since, for unattached women in the evo environment, the costs to continuing to pursue them were probably pretty low compared to benefits and given a limited selection people probably did change their minds not infrequently.
2) Accepting that someone didn't want a present.
Here I think you need to not only take into account the fact that it's considered appropriate to pretend not to want presents in our society but also the fact that some people really feel they *shouldn't* want presents and should indicate they don't like them.
Also I think many people have genuine experiences of finding out that people who insisted they didn't want presents actually found that unpleasant. People just aren't as good at predicting their future emotional reaction as they believe.
3) B&B experience.
In this case the owners are almost certainly extroverts who don't understand (intuitively) that other people genuinely dislike those interactions. Not only did they probably just forget your warning if they remembered it they probably assumed it meant nothing more than your friend might get tired and make excuses early.
The problem in these cases is that convincing someone that there really are people who hate that friendly extrovert stuff would require them accepting they've been making lots of people secretly feel bad when they thought they were being friendly. That's just too big an adjustment to make based on brief remarks from a stranger.
Re: #1, a friend of mine once told me that in his experience, there are primarily two kinds of guys: assholes who assume all girls are into them and if someone says she isn't, she must just be playing hard to get, or at worst she must be a frigid bitch, and regular men who have a sensible estimate of their own likely worth (i.e., average or less). The first group hit on every girl they like, get shot down a stunning amount, never take it personally because clearly the chick is just crazy or something, and crucially, never miss any opportunity with any girl who does like them because they throw their net maximally widely. The second group essentially never hit on girls because they assume, correctly, that any given girl won't be interested; thus they whiff most of their shots and the consequence is that assholes get laid more. Same principle: there are basically zero costs to hitting on everyone you want because the people who get mad about it wouldn't have slept with you anyway.
There are costs if you care about women for any purpose other than getting laid, which is why feminism tends to try quite hard to get men not to make moves on women without some reciprocation - or at least to make moves in such a way that they won't get mad about it if they aren't interested.
For fairly obvious reasons, if someone made a move on you and you got mad about it, then it's likely to make a professional relationship between the two of you more difficult.
"A man comes across a drunk, at night, squinting anxiously at the ground under a streetlight. 'What's wrong?' 'I lost my car keys!' 'Oh here I can help.'
"After some time spent in fruitless mutual search, the sober man asks the drunk: 'Are you sure you lost your keys here?' 'Oh no,' the drunk replies, 'I lost them crossing the street over there. But the light is much better here.'"
I don't know if I would describe that as *the* problem, I don't think feminists going away would just resolve the entire tension between competing preferences, but it certainly is *a* problem related to this whole situation.
I think the B&B thing comes down to the misunderstanding - Scott requested "please don't bother my friend" and the hosts agreed, but to them "say hello and make small talk" wasn't "bothering" her, it was "greeting the guest in a friendly manner". For them, "bothering" meant something different. For the friend, what she wanted was "come in, say who I am, get shown the room, no other interaction" but for the hosts, that would have been rude and mercenary - "we're treating you like all we care about is the money for the room".
> When other people's behavior baffles me, I try to think of an example where I make the same mistake; this usually shows up pretty fast, and I get appropriately humbled.
This one is weird, because it's staring you right in the face here. In your first two examples there's a counterparty with legitimate preferences that you have completely failed to acknowledge, yourself!
Your friend has a preference for no small talk. Your host has a preference for small talk. That's a reasonable preference conflict that needs to be resolved somehow, but you seem to be just assuming that it should be resolved on the side of your friend's preferences rather than your host's preferences. Why so?
Similarly your girlfriend has a preference for "no presents" while your grandmother has a preference for "presents". Why should we assume that this perfectly reasonable preference conflict should be resolved on your girlfriend's side rather than your grandmother's?
What's more, you seem to be making the same mistake that you're assuming the counterparty is making, of assuming that the other person's preferences are simply invalid. Nobody could _really_ have a strong preference for making small talk, could they? Nobody could _really_ have a strong preference for giving presents, could they? In fact I think some people do have a strong preference for making a bit of small talk with strangers that they're letting into their house; it's scary having a stranger under your roof and it's nice to be reassured that they're vaguely normal through a few minutes of conversation. Similarly, gift-giving rituals have an important role to play in strengthening familial bonds.
In both these cases, it's not a story of "one person has a legit preference which the other person pigheadedly refuses to acknowledge", it's a story of "two people have legit preferences which the other person pigheadedly refuses to acknowledge". I find it amusing to consider the possibility that your grandmother and your hosts have their own substacks on which they're writing exactly the same post from the opposite perspective.
I think potentially this comes from a similar place in all of us, which is: we're acutely aware of how much work *we* have to do to accommodate the weirdness of other people, and since our own weirdnesses are ipso facto not really weird because their ours, it is extremely difficult to credit the fact that *other* people might have to do a lot of work to accommodate *our* weirdnesses.
So the cost seems asymmetrical to us: it's hard for me to accommodate your pecadilloes, whereas it's easy for you to work around my small harmless idiosyncrasies, so why are you so selfish?
Id est, I think a really important part of understanding these conflicts is assessing with some degree of accuracy the *cost* (mental and otherwise) of accommodation, and the relative willingness of the parties to bear the cost. Sometimes it's trivial, sometimes it's not, sometime the cost is apparent to all, sometimes it's not -- and that seems like a really big part of the story, much more so than any ethical/moral ground rules.
There are many good responses to Scott's post, but yours stands out to me. It's one of those situations where I'd like to claim I'd have written the same thing if I'd got round to it. I didn't tho' and you put it particularly well. Kudos.
I think for most people in most parts of the world, the idea that they would host people in their homes and not interact with them is completely beyond the pale of social norms. Scott seems to be underestimating the “weird points” being spent in a request as extreme as ‘don’t talk to my friend who is staying in your house' and because of this level of weirdness, the hosts are politely pretending it wasn’t said, or else the request didn’t compute because it was so beyond acceptable precedent.
I imagine they felt a bit like flight attendants would if a passenger suddenly said, “Sorry, I don’t like flying, Please don’t put this plane in the air.” What would a sweet elderly flight attendant do in this situation? Almost surely smile and say “Sure, dear whatever you say,” and then proceed to let the plane take off. Such a preference can’t be taken seriously because one person demanding the plane not take off means no one else gets to fly, which is to say that extreme introverts tend to seriously underestimate the damage they can do to social gatherings of any kind. Just one or two people who are in an anti-social headspace can completely suck the air out of a room, just like how one or two people talking in a movie theatre can completely ruin it for everyone else.
The hosts had a strong preference for this not to happen on their social turf and expressed this by ignoring the request. I currently live in Japan, and I imagine the response here would be much worse even than that: hosts would hear the request loud and clear, and hate me for it because expressing such a strong and anti-social preference would be viewed as both generally arrogant and directly insulting to the hosts. I see there as being real historical baggage here in both America and Japan: walking around not being bothered or chatted at by the people doing the cooking and cleaning has long been a privileged reserved for the high-upper-class.
Basically, those two hosts didn’t want their home to become a place where people don’t talk to one another, and they held that preference very, very strongly, probably much more strongly than Scott’s friend held hers. And although not a request for some material luxury, what Scott’s friend was asking was on the level of requesting golden bed linens and a bowl of only-blue M&M’s in terms of weirdness, and in the eyes of most people aged 50+ , arrogance.
Since nobody else has, I feel obliged to point out the status effects at play here as well.
To oversimplify massively: when you stay at a hotel, you are automatically of higher status than the hotel employees you interact with since they're just hired help, but when you stay at a B&B you have at best equal status to your hosts because it is, after all, their home.
One of the ways in which B&B proprietors like to assert their status as not-inferior to their guests is to engage in lengthy and somewhat personal conversation that would be totally inappropriate from a random Marriott employee. By disturbing this routine you threaten their status, which nobody likes.
Of course it's all a lot more subtle and less conscious than I've laid it out, but I think something along those lines applies.
>I imagine they felt a bit like flight attendants would if a passenger suddenly said, “Sorry, I don’t like flying, Please don’t put this plane in the air.” What would a sweet elderly flight attendant do in this situation? Almost surely smile and say “Sure, dear whatever you say,” and then proceed to let the plane take off.
That actually strikes me as really bad service and something I definitely wouldn't expect a flight attendant to do, because once the plane takes off, the rest of the customers are stuck with them, and they might make a huge scene, so if the customer is, say, someone with a massive phobia of flying who hasn't properly thought through the fact that staying on the plane commits them to do so, that should absolutely be resolved in advance of the plane taking off, for the sake of the other passengers if nothing else.
i don't know how much this generalizes, but my model of the b&b couple & elderly people that don't want to accept weird preferences is that, while they do somewhat care about how the other person feels, their actions are mainly determined by a social script that they feel really bad if they don't follow. if the b&b couple hadn't been really friendly, even if you said that was preferable, they would have felt bad about it all day. most peoples' conscious minds and emotional minds aren't connected very well, so i can totally see it being very difficult for the conscious mind, who knows that they should violate their well-worn social script *this one time*, not being able to override the powerful, uncomfortable feeling of social violation generated by the emotional mind. i find myself doing things like this in the moment sometimes, too; even if i planned on not doing something, the social pressure *from myself* is too much to handle and i end up doing what i always do (i can't think of a specific example though).
I think this is it; this matches my own experiences. In fact, I'd say the B&B couple are most likely bad at accommodating weird preferences *for the same reason* that they're so nice: that they're *scared* of not being nice is what produces the effusive flow of Niceness™ in the first place, not just the cause of their inability to turn it off.
I agree with this, on the basis of my experience with buddhist mindfulness and psychoanalysis. The reason it is harder to accept different preferences from our own (as opposed to different beliefs) is because preferences are typically reinforced with tightly conditioned emotional reactions, which are associated with fantasies and irrational fears. It's basically the same phenomenon as addiction.
I would imagine that the nice old couple are addicted to niceness. Perhaps the idea of their own mortality, declining relevance, and an image of the isolation and abandonment in old age scares them. Connecting with people has generated positive feelings that displaced the negative ones, and shored up their positive self-image. So they ward off their fears by nursing and feeding a fantasy of a cozy world of social connection. Anybody who doesn't buy into their system of happy social connection would seem to be making an implicit claim that cozy connection cannot redeem or ward off the aspects of the world that scare them. Since they can't tolerate that threat, they suppress the possibility.
Whenever I have an experience that something is *special*, like my coffee in the morning, or a movie that really made a perfect night (which I probably combined with a nice drink), I think, this special thing has made an otherwise intolerable world tolerable. I was experiencing discomfort, which it replaced with comfort or reassurance. I become attached to that experience, and I want other people to affirm it as well, to reassure me that I have found a talisman that works. If they don't like it, my fantasy is threatened.
It could be that intense, but my guess is that they were rewarded for being sociable when they were young and possibly punished for not being sociable, and the training has stuck.
Heavy duty stuff like fear of death might be in play, but if my model is correct, it's heavily backgrounded and based on not getting along with their families as children which can translate to not getting life right.
If you've ever had a woman ask you out on a date, straightforwardly, instead of making various spastic jerking movements and inane statements meant to get *you* to ask *her* out, that alone makes you a massive experiential outlier in the West, to say nothing of the planet.
I'm a bit surprised Scott is so puzzled over this. It's been well covered in x-rationalist circles.
Other minds fallacy. We use our own minds to model others. We have to. We assume that everyone is basically like us. Often, they're really, really not (see the "people literally see different colors" or "some people cant visualize" posts.
There's more to it as well. Older people tend to be more habitual. It's possible they heard what you said but completely forgot it (especially as these people see tons of guests all the time and might not have connected what you said to this guest).
I had a friend who used to be an egregious example of this. Part of it stemmed from his insane overconfidence (he believed he was the smartest man in the world- basically he discovered tautological reasoning, said he figured out the goal of life was to be happy, and thinking anything else might interfere with his happiness.)
At one time he believed people didn't like things he didn't like, they were just trying to be cool contrarians. Examples- reading books, being homosexual.
I have to admit even I struggle with this. There are definitely times I have a hard time believing people have preferences they claim to have. (I still can't grok people who prefer winter over summer. I understand for people with allergies and overweight people, but otherwise it's tough.)
Of course, people also do signal, and are often bad at knowing what actually makes them happy. I relate to you on the NYC thing. I feel it's possible people's preference there is often feeling like "they've made it" if they're living in the city. Of course that's not all of it. There are people who have lived in the city there whole lives who can't stand to leave.
There's also cases like your patient. There are often situations where "prefence" is multi-variable. People rarely get to choose their ideal preference, their are many factors involved like social pressure.
There's a lot of research that social media makes people less happy, but a cumulative effect may not be obvious to the person when their motvations are short term, when the social structures around them motivate them in a certain way, when short term interests conflict with larger happiness (Moloch), when it doesn't occur to people there is a different way to do things. There is also inertia- making changes to routines is hard, and allowing oneself to exercise different preferences might take quite a bit of work. There are many people who want to get in shape and get healthier- that's a preference. But exercising that preference comes at the cost of other short term preferences and can require a reserve of "will[power."
I had a friend who lived in the city and I did wonder if it didnt actually make her happy but was one of those "I have to" things. Of course she claimed that i couldn't possibly enjoy drives through places in jersey I havent seen and that I like beat roadside motels (she assumed I was signalling.)
There's also different depths of preference. The smartest man friend loves to play video games. I enjoy that as well, but more so in certain situations- a lot of experience is sort of "spiritual junk food"- it may be somewhat enjoyable but it doesnt create memories or have much depth of emotion to it. Video games that are designed to reward your dopamine drives are often like this I feel.
In the case of the patient in the abusive relationship, people's preferences always have downsides, but we tend to create a schilling fence where the harm of the preference says we shouldnt respect that preference as a society. We call these preferences self destructive (i'm not saying this is a bad thing, just pointing it out.)
Of course there are disagreements about what should count as a self-destructive preference. There are those we feel are an issue as a society, like serious addiction and abusive relationships, and those we may feel are a personal issue (not living up to one's potential). Of course people have huge variations of preference for this sort of thing and the degree they generally respect people's autonomy.
We tend to grant more autonomy the better the person understands. But not everyone does. (Take for example, the disagreements over whether someone can consent to sex while intoxicated, including those who have a sometimes explicit preference to do so themselves.)
This brings me back to what Scott was saying- in more conformist societies (which can include smaller social groups) person preference is less important.
So social interaction in certain contexts could be an expectation to fulfill what are seen as social norms, not a matter of preference.
I have noticed that in urban black neighborhoods, when passing someone on the street, it is considered polite to acknowledge them- this certainly is not the case universally across America.
The notion of what's "polite" could be a major factor. The hotel staff may have felt having a conversation was the polite thing to do regardless of what you said, and expected the other person to reciprocate.
This may even have been true had they known the other person was an introvert, as many people, especially older ones, probably feel there are social customs that must dictate behavior.
Going back to Scott's post about tribal knowledge, this has an evolutionary advantage (in the broadest sense). Customs that have worked mean safety and security, and not following those customs means potential risk.
On the girlfriend present thing- what your grandmother was saying usually makes sense.
Keep in mind, a lot of social interaction isnt honest exchange of information but performance.
The whole "don't get me anything" but you're supposed to is established schtick.
Since that is the norm, Person A has to follow it, of course they don't care, they're not greedy, they love you anyway, etc. But since this is the norm, she really is expecting a present, and expects that you get unspoken social rules to get how this works.
Your grandmother probably assumed your girlfriend was a normal girlfriend and not YOUR girlfirend.
This kind of thing has evolved to a level of silliness in Japan for example where people are supposed to insist on giving gifts and the receiver has to insist on not receiving- to the point where even if you do and you didn't argue enough, you're seen as cheap/greedy.
Performance=social signalling. Again, this isn't "rational" it's customs that have evolved over time.
This sort of thing can be very toxic though.
This is literally what the "no means no" campaign was about in the 80s. Because while no always "officially" meant no, the "good girl" was supposed to offer token resistance and the man was supposed to keep trying till he just overwhelmed her resistance. yeah. And people weren't even supposed to be having pre-marital sex anyways.
This is part of the reason why I think you see so many older people so skeptical of rape claims. but it was a legit toxic situation for everyone involved.
Nobody is "supposed" to be doing this anyway- but it was up to a horny inexperienced guy to judge how real the "no" was.
I had a coworker from Nigeria and in his culture this sketchy shit still goes on.
If you are sincerely interested in a girl, you are supposed to "stalk her." Which literally means following her around, going to her house, etc, declaring your intentions for her. She's supposed to refuse you untill you prove yourself "honest". Failure to play either role sincerely enough means the two are judged negatively (the opposite of the way westerners think). If she gives in too easily, she's not "pure" enough. If he isn't... super stalkery, he's not sincere and just wants sex.
"Nobody is "supposed" to be doing this anyway- but it was up to a horny inexperienced guy to judge how real the "no" was." You know that it's still like this, right? The penalties to the guy for guessing wrong were just vastly increased, and now we have headlines about "young people are having sex less than ever".
Ritually lying about preferences is an essential part of many cultures. In China, for example, it takes a bit to convincing to refuse gifts or hospitality. This is especially true if you're family. The Persians have a moral formal system called taarof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taarof
"In the rules of hospitality, taarof requires a host to offer anything a guest might want, and a guest is equally obliged to refuse it. This ritual may repeat itself several times (usually three times) before the host and guest finally determine whether the host's offer and the guest's refusal are genuine, or simply a show of politeness. If one is invited to any house for food, then one will be expected to eat seconds and thirds. However, taarof demands that one can't go ahead and help themselves to more food after finishing their first helping. Good manners dictate that one must first pretend to be full, and tell the host how excellent the food was, and that it would be impossible to eat any more. The host is then expected to say one should not do taarof ("taa'rof nakon" - similar to "don't be polite!"), for which the appropriate response would be to say "no" two or three times, then pretend to cave in to the host's insistence and pile on the food. Done any other way, one can come across as either starving, or simply a bit uncouth.[7]"
Ritualized lying about preferences isn't such a prominent part of American culture, but it's still there. How many times have you actually wanted to know how someone is doing when asking "how are you?" Asking "how are you?" without wanting to know is considered deeply weird in most of the world, even Western cultures like Germany. When you last went to a party, did you show up exactly at the specified time, or 30 minutes late, as required by custom? When was the last time someone said "let's get lunch some day" and subsequently invited you to lunch for real?
For whatever reason, it's often against custom to say directly what we want. It sounds rude, demanding, or unappreciative. If a friend asks whether I want a gift and I say yes, I've just created a burden that wouldn't exist had I said no, so I would say no to demonstrate that I value the friend's time and don't want to impose upon him (which is true). But that doesn't mean I actually don't want a gift, or that I wouldn't be happy had he given me a gift without asking.
For most people, our preference to be liked by others, in particular our significant others, usually trumpfs any other preferences we may have. (That is also why you can get large swings in public opinions whenever people sense "what is the prevailing correct opinion on this question" has shifted.)
If a girlfriend tells you she does not like gifts that is likely to be because she knows you are a rather prominent "rationalist", and rationalists might be likely to appreciate someone who does not like presents, since there is something irrational about gift-giving as such. "Why give anybody anything else than money? If you give money, the receiver can buy what he/she actually wants most...if you give something else, there is bound to be an utility loss." Which is a famous argument against giving anything other than money at Christmas. Quoting from memory, an economist colleague calculated the societal utility loss of Christmas presents to something like 0.7 perent of GDP each year.
...back to the topic: the empirical fact that you overheard your girlfriend say she loved a present she received from someone else, strengthens the above suspicion that she said what she said to you because what she really cares about is what she thinks you think about giving presents.
>When other people's behavior baffles me, I try to think of an example where I make the same mistake; this usually shows up pretty fast, and I get appropriately humbled. But I'm having trouble. There are things that are close - part of me will always refuse to believe that people enjoy living in New York City, and whenever I talk to friends in New York I have to resist the urge to ask them if they're okay, or whether I can help them move. But it stays at the level of intellectual curiosity; I would never refuse to drive an NYC friend to the airport because I don't believe them when they say they want to go back home.
You probably do the same thing, just in reverse, by overvaluing peoples' stated preferences and undervaluing their unstated/unspoken/implicit desires.
Related: In college I wasn’t great at spending money. I would go to parties thrown by my friend who would buy most of the alcohol, and the first couple times I feebly tried to pay her back she refused and said she wouldn’t let anyone give her money. Naive me gave up and took her at her word. Fast forward a few months and she texts me to meet up out of the blue. She’s pretty upset, both at me and a few other friends, for giving up on paying her back, leading her to pretty much run out of money. Embarrassed as all heck I gave her whatever was in my wallet and our friendship continued on, a little worse than before.
Since then I’ve learned that in polite (American?) society you should take repaying debts as a non-compromising value. There’s too much pressure for people to misrepresent their preferences, and too high of a potential price for messing it up, to ever leave a debt hanging. (Bonus: people will like and trust you more too!)
In effect she wanted the social virtue/benefit of being someone who was generous and wealthy without the associated (literal) cost.
This strikes me as a common theme in many of these situations. People want to present (internally or externally) as virtuous but do not actually want to bear the consequences of that. As I tell my kids, it's not a sacrifice if you don't give something up.
I think the failure to take preferences into account makes more sense if you look at it through a signaling framework. Giving presents and throwing a welcome party (from the perspective of the giver/host) is less about optimizing the recipient's welfare, and more about signaling. So when you give chocolates on Valentine's day you famously don't ask yourself how hungry the recipient is, but rather how many chocolates you need to give them in order to signal how much you care. Likewise when the hosts welcome you and your friend to their B&B, their primary concern is to signal how impressive they are as hosts - your welfare as guests is of secondary concern.
You are assuming throughout this that people are _supposed_ to respond to your stated preferences. That's probably pretty ingrained from the culture you're used to but is really not how most people operate, I think. I'd bet that most Americans aren't used to people who have stated preferences _at all_, and would both (a) find it uncomfortable and off-putting and (b) do a bad job of respecting it.
I've been unlucky enough to see this play out for most of my life regarding food. Somehow basically everyone I ever talked to remained absolutely certain I must secretly like the foods I told them I found intolerable, and no amount of me trying it in front of them and saying "I find this intolerable and wont eat it this time, or any time in future" made them stop giving it to me. I still find it happens all the time with spice in particular, where I ask if something is spicy because I have no tolerance for it and they say no, and when I try it and it's intolerably spicy they say "well its not THAT spicy". It's a stranger case though I feel, since surely they have their own foods that they don't like but other people do, so it should be easy enough to model someone else.
With spice in particular, this might actually be not just a case of modeling failure, not noticeability thresholds.
I suspect my own spice tolerance has degraded over the last few years since I no longer cook many meals exclusively for myself, but it used to be that with at least some brands of salsa, I actually could not tell by taste the difference between their "mild" and "hot" salsas, because the levels of spice in both were below my noticeability threshold.
If you asked me if something was spicy, and I thought there was a fair chance it was supposed to be spicy, I would have had to tell you "I don't know," but if I didn't think it was supposed to be spicy, I would probably say "no."
I have the same issue with my mom. I like spicy food. She can't tolerate it, and is seemingly sensitive to individual molecules of capsaicin. I can often tell her for certain that she can't safely eat a dish, but I can't reliably tell her that she can.
My wife and I have a similar issue with thrill rides, where my tolerance is much below hers. (But somewhat idiosyncratic: I can deal with fairly intense simulators and centrifuges, but the drops on a children's roller coaster are outside my comfort zone.) After she goes on a ride alone she may be able to tell me to stay away for sure, but she's rarely comfortable saying I'd be fine. An intolerable drop for me may not even register as a drop to someone with a higher threshold.
Many (maybe most) people are deontologists about interpersonal interaction. There's a certain range of culturally-approved-of ways to be nice, and these people feel they ought to be nice, even if compromising that would make people happier. They care about doing what they're supposed to do, and satisfying people's stated preference is a weak node in that network, so tweaking its value doesn't change their behavior much.
It makes sense that those who take ideas seriously tend to be better at respecting preferences, because they care less about social norms and propriety.
While certainly "do the things that are socially acceptable" is a form of deontology, there's a lot more forms of deontology than that. Kantian morality rejects some social norms directly as perfect duty (e.g. white lies), and imperfect duty can potentially hit almost all the others.
>>my girlfriend had told me unprompted that she found getting holiday presents weird and awkward and would prefer I not give her anything. I'd challenged her on this - what if I try really hard to pick something you like? - what if I leave it on your doorstep and you're under no obligation to demonstrate any emotion to me? - satisfied myself that this wasn't some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation, and agreed not to get her a holiday present.
>>I mock, but one of my girlfriend's friends gave her a present and she loved it.
What might be going on (I guess only because it's like that with me) is that your girlfriend hated receiving gifts-out-of-obligation and likes gifts given for any other reason. Telling people you hate gifts is about the only way to remove that obligation and ensure you get gifts only when people really do want to give you gifts. That's really confusing, though - I am telling people I hate gifts on Christmas and birthday and like them any other day, that works a bit better.
On the main subject - my first thought was that maybe old people just come from different cultures where words mean different things? Where saying "my friend hates talking" meant "we don't want to bother you, but would love to chat actually". My older relatives' stories have a lot of that - mothers saying they hate sweets because children loved them and there were only so many to go around, that sort of thing.
But then I remembered I have been told numerous times explicitly that my preferences are wrong and I am dumb and evil and inhuman for having them. Not even weird preferences - normal tastes like not liking honey or swamps. That might be the same language barrier where "I don't like honey" translates into "All your effort to get me this jar of honey is worthless, I hate you and hope you die in pain!!1!!11" because it was unthinkable to refuse food some time ago? So I must be unthinkably evil to do so now?
I was discussing something similar and my interpretation is that most people are bad at *expressing* preferences, so for most people a policy of "assume people like the same things other people like and ignore any instructions otherwise until they've violently rejected something at least three times" works BETTER than trying to ask what people like or listen to what they request.
An example you might fight more familiar is if you're living with someone, and they say, "they're fine with X" or "they like you to do X" but whenever you do X they get upset or angry and whenever you talk about X they get upset and angry -- I think if X isn't a big deal, it's natural for many people to just avoid it most of the time, even if that wasn't what their cohabitee says they want. Because X is something where the other person doesn't completely know what they want.
I speculate that a LOT of people don't clearly know or be able to explain what they want because people are complicated and because no-one can understand themselves COMPLETELY, and for people living in that system learning how to deal with people by trial and error works better than listening. And people with atypical preferences or people who are good at expressing preferences get caught in the cracks of those societies, but the society rumbles on.
I sometimes think of it as, multiple people represent a complicated interacting system, that might be modelled like "every person mostly understands themselves and communicates through a narrow bandwidth channel" or "no-one understands anything, everyone just does what seems to work, and behaviours evolve in the shared system"
Principle of charity (at some level of granularity) says that if people ignore what people ask for, that strategy probably WORKS for them compared to anything else they've tried (but maybe not compared to "spending decades learning to understand people better")
Part of the problem is that people often misrepresent their preferences. Two examples off the top of my head: the girlfriend who insisted she didn't want a Valentine's Day present only to be hurt when I didn't get her one; the woman who told me she wasn't interested in dating me, but who became exasperated when I didn't ask her again, later telling me that I should have "tried harder".
Because people's revealed preferences often contradict their expressed preferences, the calculation is much harder than: "go along with whatever they say".
I haven't been reading your blog very long, maybe 3 months or so and this is my first comment. I'd rather it be about the material but you seem like someone who might take this notation fine. Something that has been distracting me is that the periods are on the outside of quotations! I might be misinformed or otherwise mistaken but I'm used to them going on the inside and believe that is the correct punctuation in those cases. I believe it's a little more up for debate on question marks and exclamation marks (although I prefer them inside) but I think it is standard for periods. I know this is relatively small and I do want to note that the posts are otherwise very well written and edited.
I recognize other forms of writing that are not American English use different rules, but I presume you're following the rules of American English given your double quote usage. Additionally, a quote ending in an exclamation would be the terminal point instead of also adding a period. Sorry this is grammatical but you clearly have well-edited posts which means it won't change without someone noting it. Thanks for all the great content to think and read about.
Speaking only for myself-- I used to put periods outside quotation marks because periods indicate the end of the sentence, so having quotation marks dragging the sentence out past the period was irritating.
I have occasionally typed a period before the quotation marks to indicate the end of the sentence being quoted and another period after the quotation marks to indicate the end of the whole sentence, but that looked too weird.
Anyway I've gotten used to having the period inside the quotation marks, so I'm doing conventional punctuation these days, but as for the future, who knows?
This has been discussed in comments before, though I can't find it since Google doesn't seem to index the comments on Substack. My hypothesis is that Scott, having a philosophy degree, is following a convention common among philosophers, where punctuation marks go inside the quotes if they are actually part of what is being quoted. So, typically, if you are quoting an entire sentence, the ending period will go inside the quotes, but if you are just quoting a word, and that word just happens to fall at the end of your sentence, the ending period will go outside the quotes.
I think that this one is ultimately pretty simple.
Most people are nearly fundamentally incapable of behaving differently than they would by default.
I think this statement has a lot of explanatory power for so many of the seemingly baffling things that 'normies' do. It's a big question why this is the case, but I've come to take it as a pretty fundamental truth.
As someone coming from the Guess culture (60's communist Czechoslovakia) and trying to be Ask myself (my kids already are, no problem - I still sometimes struggle), I tend to understand both the actions of Guessers and the frustration of Askers.
I think your frame — "Why Is It Hard To Acknowledge Preferences?" — blinds you to the frame of the B&B owners. From their point of view, you are asking them "When my friend arrives would you please be rude to her?" It's hardly surprising that they would demur.
I can identify with both of your examples.
I am an introvert. My wife's family is large and Mediterranean (think: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) Whenever I visit them, the attention is overwhelming. Fortunately, they have one of those Mediterranean flat roofs that I can sneak off to when it gets too much for me. As soon as my mother-in-law discovers my absence, she'll send someone to come and sit with me because I shouldn't be on my own. She would be delinquent in her hosting obligations to do otherwise. She would be rude.
After 30 years, she finally understands (sort of). When my in-laws visit us across thousands of miles and, often after several years, they will walk in the house, say Hello Hello, then immediately go to another room because "K does not like to be bothered."
Mother-in-law is trying her best to learn from experience but B&B owners don't have sustained opportunities for learning like this. The rule is "Don't be rude to guests". Even if a guest asks them to be rude.
On the gift-giving thing, I explain to every guest who is visiting us that they should not bring a gift because it will upset my wife. At the end of every visit (I mean EVERY visit), the guest will say 'I know you said not to bring a gift but this is "just a small gift"/"a very nice gift"/"is something that I know you will appreciate". EVERY time it ends in tears and shouting and our guests leaving with bad feelings all around.
I don't like gifts either and have learned how to say "Thank you. It's just what I always wanted." but my wife does not have that skill. Her phobia of gifts is too deep.
Our closest friends have learned to make a joke of it now ("Hello! I didn't bring you anything!") but others still bring gifts.
B&B owners don't have this opportunity for learning because they only interact with you once.
These are great stories! It strikes me that at the point we feel harmed by something that is a normal occurrence in the world (gift giving in this context), then it's almost like a phobia isn't it? Like someone with a bridge phobia who needs to cross a bridge to get to work. It's very hard to go through the world never being offered a gift.
I had a client once who coped with her anxiety by giving her friends a list of topics they could not raise with her because those topics caused her anxiety. She handed them the responsibility of remembering and avoiding. She felt this was a perfectly reasonable accommodation to ask of them for her anxiety. The trick is that lots of people won't agree that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask and so the anxious person is still left not being able to create a world in which they can perfectly avoid a thing that causes them pain. Which of course is why the standard treatment for a lot of anxiety and trauma is exposure therapy -- to learn in a safe environment how to turn towards and tolerate the thing that distresses us until we learn that we can tolerate the feelings it raises and then the distress decreases.
I don't mean any critique of your wife's behavior. We all do versions of this in bigger or smaller ways (anyone want to talk about dentists?). I'm more in this moment taken with how "preference" overlaps in a lot of places with trauma and how the tactic of trying to avoid the thing that causes the difficult feelings is likely to leave us feeling more vulnerable and brittle rather than less.
Just to add to my anecdote. My wife had a group of friends who liked to meet up for each other’s birthday. My wife said, every year, I’ll come if you promise not to buy me any presents. Every year they bought her presents until, eventually, my wife cut off all contact with them because it was too stressful.
We moved house recently and had to decide what to do with 10 years worth of still-wrapped birthday presents in the garage.
I'm not good at taking ideas seriously but I'm good at updating to others' preferences (well, at least I think so). I feel like different mechanisms are responsible for it. Taking ideas seriously is a cognitive exercise and acknowledging preferences is... respect? I'm afraid I'll harm a person by insisting or ignoring.
- "Sequence thinking involves making a decision based on a single model of the world: breaking down the decision into a set of key questions, taking one’s best guess on each question, and accepting the conclusion that is implied by the set of best guesses (an excellent example of this sort of thinking is Robin Hanson’s discussion of cryonics). It has the form: “A, and B, and C … and N; therefore X.” Sequence thinking has the advantage of making one’s assumptions and beliefs highly transparent, and as such it is often associated with finding ways to make counterintuitive comparisons.
- Cluster thinking – generally the more common kind of thinking – involves approaching a decision from multiple perspectives (which might also be called “mental models”), observing which decision would be implied by each perspective, and weighing the perspectives in order to arrive at a final decision. Cluster thinking has the form: “Perspective 1 implies X; perspective 2 implies not-X; perspective 3 implies X; … therefore, weighing these different perspectives and taking into account how much uncertainty I have about each, X.” Each perspective might represent a relatively crude or limited pattern-match (e.g., “This plan seems similar to other plans that have had bad results”), or a highly complex model; the different perspectives are combined by weighing their conclusions against each other, rather than by constructing a single unified model that tries to account for all available information.
A key difference with “sequence thinking” is the handling of certainty/robustness (by which I mean the opposite of Knightian uncertainty) associated with each perspective. Perspectives associated with high uncertainty are in some sense “sandboxed” in cluster thinking: they are stopped from carrying strong weight in the final decision, even when such perspectives involve extreme claims (e.g., a low-certainty argument that “animal welfare is 100,000x as promising a cause as global poverty” receives no more weight than if it were an argument that “animal welfare is 10x as promising a cause as global poverty”).
Finally, cluster thinking is often (though not necessarily) associated with what I call “regression to normality”: the stranger and more unusual the action-relevant implications of a perspective, the higher the bar for taking it seriously (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”)."
People who are "good at taking ideas seriously" _quickly_ would be predominantly sequence thinkers, most people would be cluster thinkers. Holden is a self-described cluster thinker who wrote the post pretty much to explain his style of reasoning (when prioritizing EA causes) to sequence thinkers.
And Scott and the hyper-introvert friend apparently don't understand the cultural norms associated with a B&B. The friend would probably be happier with a conventional hotel or the sort of Airbnb where you can check in with zero human contact.
Lots of commenters are mentioning that mildly lying about your preferences, but then having your requests violated to everyone’s eventual delight is a pretty common social dance.
Back in the 80s while in Beijing, I offered my bus seat to an elderly woman. As I stood up she put me in an arm lock and drove me back down into the seat. Also hilarious.
That is so funny, the comment about "he has no rearing!" (which is how that would translate in an Irish context) is exactly the kind of thing people here would say about that kind of violation of the unwritten social rules. Thanks for sharing the link!
Some people just have a hard time altering their default behavior. Case in point: My father-in-law is quite hard of hearing (and won't wear hearing aids). When I'm with him in social settings, I discretely ask friends & relatives to speak louder when they engage with him. I've found that most people can't seem to do this. At best, they'll start by increasing their volume -- but then they'll quickly go back to normal volume. Even health-care professionals do this during doctor's appointments. It's very frustrating.
This reminds me of an incident where a distant relative was trying to insist on my brother eating. My brother at the time didn't like his eating habits to be the subject of other people's wishes and generally doesn't like taking food from other people. So he refused, she persisted two or three times before giving up. I felt this was a little obnoxious, even if it came from a place of caring, but my wife (who was born in India, I was born in the US) felt like this was part of being a good host.
I think there is an inherent tension between making sure people are taken care of (or feel taken care of) and making sure people have their preferences respected (or feel that their preferences are respected). I think most people around the world would consider both of those things to be important and good things, but I think there is a big variation, largely but not entirely driven by culture, of where people would say, it's okay not to respect this person's preferences in this aspect, they need to be taken care of vs we can't take care of this person, we need to respect their wishes. There is also variation depending on situation, for instance in the traditional Indian culture of my parents, pushing food on people is an especially expected behavior.
When you think about treating someone "nicely" or being "considerate" of someone, it encompasses both taking care of them and respecting their preferences, but because of culture people will approach this differently, erring one way or another.
There's a normative issue here: I think the world/society is less of a nice place if friendly old B&B owners aren't chatty with you, even if it's your directly expressed preference. You *should* learn to appreciate this interaction, your preference is wrong. The thing about respecting a preference for not talking to each other or not giving each other gifts is that if the preference becomes more acceptable than we eventually are by default not talking to each other and not giving each other gifts. This may sound fine to you, but I assure you it's not fine for those of us who want to talk to each other and give each other gifts.
I am sympathetic to this view that friendliness is worth valuing and tolerating as best we can wherever it shows up (there will be exceptions). I think my amendment to it is something like "and it's also good to let people be who they are as much as possible." Let the B&B people be their chatty selves and let introverts or people with social anxiety be curt in their responses. Let's all be less judgmental of each other and remember that we all have different preferences and needs guiding us. When people with very different preferences or capacities bump into each other, let's consider that as fine and normal, not something broken or wrong that needs to be fixed with criticism.
I think there may be a perceived prevailing wisdom, true or not, carried through the generations that recognizes that:
1) Explicitly stating one's preferences that run counter to predominant culture can come at a greater cost to that individual than that individual just rolling with the punches.
And/Or
2) Catering to folks' preferences that run counter to norms too often isn't particularly good for the group or the individual.
Summarized: From an individual perspective, it can be good for one's mental state and fortitude to accept that folks may rub you the wrong way sometimes, and that's ok, and may come at less cost than making a stink about it. Pick your battles.
Or another way to look at it. Persistently stating to people a desire for them to cease acts that run counter to your preferences seems like a road toward a less resilient self. Of course there are thresholds an nuance to consider.
Something important is being missed here. I've lived in CA, the midwest, the south, and the southwest for extended periods of time, and this is just a cultural miscommunication.
I'd wager your hosts were culturally midwestern or southern. There's a strong cultural norm of pretend-declining gifts and favors with the expectation that the giver will ignore the polite declining and provide a gift/favor anyways. People who were raised in that tradition just ignore the words of people who claim they don't want pleasant things, like favors or presents or conversation.
The culturally-appropriate way of preventing conversation on your friend's behalf would have been for you to hang out and talk with the hosts during her arrival, and quickly point out how tired she was and subtly show them that the hospitable thing to do is to excuse her from conversation and let her go rest.
Essentially you should have showed them that their normal hospitable norm, making pleasant conversation, was inappropriate because of how tired your friend was and needed to be replaced by a more hospitable solution.
Experience has taught that some people lie about their preferences and the penalty for believing the lie and acting on it is usually much worse than violating someone's sincerely stated true preference.
How much are people *actually* listening instead of waiting to talk during "small talk?" Small talk is not about exchanging information; it's about building emotional rapport. Lots of semi-rehearsed lines and jokes in the waiting in those conversations too.
The couple chatted with your friend because the couple enjoyed it, and having the opportunity to chat with strangers is part of why they run a B&B. Chatting with them is part of the cost of staying there. Similarly, many people enjoy giving presents, and accepting presents from them is the cost of being their friend. Your grandmother was trying to console you over the fact that your girlfriend was being mean/rude to you.
Also, B&B hosts sometimes give you the Q&A treatment to figure out if you might be a problem. People who answer their innocuous questions casually and consistently are less likely to be up to no good.
For whatever it's worth, my father used to be like this. (He's still alive but has gotten a little better with age, actually. Or maybe it's distance. Or he just doesn't feel as responsible for me as an adult.)
I found that going overboard on the context for the altered preference sometimes helped in persuading him to acknowledge the unusual preference. "Here is why I do this. Here are the consequences of me not doing this. Here is what you've done. Here is what I'd like you to do. Here's how acting differently will help me. etc." Bonus points if it's possible to bring up some formally acknowledged difference from a respected authority like "I have been diagnosed with ADHD so my experience is different than yours." Of course, that only works to the extent that someone recognizes psychological expertise, which is not universally a given. For those who are skeptical of psychological expertise, an artificial impediment to, say, someone's visual ability (like glasses that distort an image) coupled with asking them to read and telling them they're not trying when they can't has been anecdotally helpful in getting others to understand dyslexia without relying on an appeal to psychological authority.
An attempt at quick communications without context, in contrast, would just get dismissed.
Why do you assume that the host couple should believe you when you are asking them to do something extraordinary for a person they have not met yet? If I was running any kind of public accommodation I would train the staff to respond to requests that guests make for themselves, or perhaps for a child or another person who is present and clearly associated with the person making the request, but to be very wary of requests by one guest that are to be applied to another guest without checking with that person first. What if you had assured the old couple that your friend enjoyed being greeted by having a glass of ice water thrown in her face? You seriously expect them to take your word for it? You put them in an impossible situation, and now you are judging them because they acted with reasonable caution. And why was your friend unable to make this request herself? And if both of you had, and been ignored, you had the option of upping your warning. A bright pink piece of paper with the words "Please don't talk to me - socially anxious" pinned to her shirt should do the trick.
Phase 1: Everyone communicates their preferences honestly. Sometimes people are 'nice' and have preferences that are good for others in various ways—either because they caa, so they prefer to do favors for others or to decline favors others would do them. People like associating with these nice people, which makes it advantageous to be one.
Phase 2: Non-nice people notice that it's advantageous to be perceived as nice, and that they too can be perceived as nice if they express some false preferences. So lots of them start doing this—not too much, since they don't actually want to be performing/foregoing favors all the time, but a bit.
Phase 3: Most people are falsifying their preferences a bit. One consequence is that when somebody exaggerates their desire to perform a favor, the other person will usually exaggerate their desire to decline it. Another consequence is that expressing a-bit-nicer-than-honest-average preferences is average behavior and means you're only perceived as average niceness. So if you want to be perceived as nicer-than-average, you need to falsify your preferences a bit more, which you can now safely do without having to actually perform too many favors.
I know several people have commented things to this effect, but I still want to emphasize them because I think they’re important and I see them as blind spots in this post.
First: in some cultures people may have reason to believe you’re deliberately downplaying your own preferences in order to avoid looking greedy or like you’re taking advantage of them.
My family comes partially from Portugal, and in Portuguese culture, when you go to someone’s house, even unannounced, they WILL offer you food and drink. And you are EXPECTED to refuse, whether you want it or not. If you accept right away, you look like a greedy bastard. So you refuse, they insist, you refuse again, they insist again, and finally you “give in” and say, “Okay, since you’re SO insistent, I guess I can have a bite.”
If you actually don’t want food, expect them to continue insisting for a good while, until they finally realize that you’re not just partaking in the social ritual and that you actually, truly, don’t want anything.
In my experience, this kind of culture is more common among older people around the world than it is among younger folks, maybe having something to do with how older people tended to live in more tight-knit communities, where gaining a reputation for being greedy would matter a lot more.
For that matter, gaining a reputation for being generous, whether that generosity is wanted or unwanted, also mattered a lot, which maybe explains why old people are so resistant to change this behaviour.
Second: even outside of cultures like these, there are people out there that deliberately understate their preferences. You might have seen some of them in your practice: people with self-esteem issues, people who have a history of dealing with manipulative or abusive people, people who feel like they’re a burden to others, and so on.
These people may very well say things like “No, it’s fine, I don’t need anything,” but that comes with an unstated appendix of something like “…because I don’t really deserve the effort, it’s not worth these people’s time to do something nice for someone like me,” or “…because every time someone did this for me it was half-hearted, insincere, or an attempt to manipulate me,” or something along those lines.
These kinds of people could actually be thrilled if someone actually went through the trouble to sincerely do something nice for them, but they’ve been so frequently primed to expect disappointment in their lives that they say, both to themselves and to others, “No, I don’t want or need that.”
I suspect that the guy in the abusive relationship may be in this situation: he may not expect that he can do better in another relationship, and he sees this as better than eternal loneliness. Or, maybe, he intellectually understands that he can do better, but emotionally he doesn’t really FEEL what that actually means (in a Mental Mountains type way).
The key point between these two examples is that, especially in older cultures, deciding whether or not to honour someone’s preferences often isn’t as straightforward as listening to them and accepting the surface-level understanding. You have to understand them, their culture, and whether or not they may be lying to you or to themselves. And then you make a judgement as best you can with the information you have, and sometimes that judgement is wrong.
And sometimes, even when you know that judgement is wrong, you might still do it anyway, because you’ve decided (consciously or subconsciously) that this is the reputation you want to build. After all, you did just describe the B&B owners as “very, very nice” instead of “annoying assholes who wouldn’t leave us alone.”
"And you are EXPECTED to refuse, whether you want it or not. If you accept right away, you look like a greedy bastard."
Exactly, that's the whole point of the little dance! The host offers hospitality, and to refuse hospitality is a grave insult, because you're insinuating that they are too poor to be able to spare the items or that you think you're better than them. But accepting straight away is RUDE GREEDY BAD MANNERS - "you'd nearly snap the hand off them!" so you refuse and wait to be politely pressed to accept.
That way, everyone saves face and gains social credit: the host shows off their hospitality and generosity (which was a big virtue in Irish society, partly because of poverty post-Famine) by offering and then insisting (otherwise by accepting the first refusal, that is meanness and greed on the host's part) and the guest shows their good breeding by polite refusal and then politely allowing themselves to be pressed to accept.
The British have their own jokes about this, about the Scottish meanness which says to a guest who arrives at meal time "You'll have had your tea" (so they won't have to offer hospitality) and the Irish version of that is the jokes about Cavan people (so mean they eat their dinner out of a drawer - the idea being that if an unexpected visitor calls, they can close the drawer and pretend not to have a meal ready so they don't have to share or offer to the visitor).
I think another factor here is that we don't communicate our preferences honestly and emphatically enough.
I have a similar issue with elderly relatives (I'm extroverted, but don't like to hear the same story for the 10th time, or sometimes the story is just not interesting). But I never tell them "I'm sorry but this story doesn't interest me. I wish we could connect on a deeper level, or talk about something else. I feel like I'm not even here when you tell me these things."
Instead, we opt for very subtle cues (e.g. not reacting or encouraging less) that either are not picked up by the elderly (due to changing norms, blunter senses) or are not a strong enough signal to overcome the desire to continue the current behavior.
I agree there are other factors here, but have we tried to really give the speakers credit for wanting what is also good for us, and made sure they understand?
There's a thing I've done which has worked in the short run. I haven't tried it with elderly people.
Person starts to retell a story. I smile, jump in, and tell some more of the story. I aim for an emotional tone of "I was paying so much attention that I remember the thing you were going to say."
I do this too and also don't know how well it lands with people, but it does seem to work in situations where the re-told story is intended to get to another story they haven't told.
One of the issues I hear running in the background of this discussion (not your comment, I'm just expanding here) is: "I want something more than is being offered in this interaction, I'm frustrated I can't get it." The something more might be less interaction, not hearing a story repeated, connecting on a deeper level, whatever. A feeling/voice comes up in us that says "I don't like how this is going, I want it to be different, how can I make this go more to my liking?"
I think that voice can in some situations, like with very close friends and loved ones, help a relationship grow. But I think in other situations, what's mainly called for is patience and acceptance.
Many old folks as they age genuinely cannot remember if they told that story before. Being reminded they have told it before will make them self-conscious and confused about what to offer when the thing they had to offer seems not to be adequate for the listener. There is a limit on how much behavior change a person is capable of on the spot in social situations once they've gotten the message the listener doesn't seem thrilled with how it's going.
It is good that we get better at articulating our needs clearly when they are *needs* -- I'm not sure it's good that we all get better at articulating our preferences more. This is where I insert one of my favorite quotes attributed to someone called the Third Zen Patriarch of China: "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences."
Having lots of preferences -- including things like not having to hear stories retold by elders -- is at the core of the suffering that Buddhists talk about. To have a lot of preferences is to move through the world with a lot of friction.
Personal review: I notice that I have some sort of implicit preference ranking system that I use to decide which preferences to disregard.
For example, a barbeque party in the distant pre-crisis era: I am manning the grill, taking steak order.
Someone is vegan, so I produce a kinda eggplant harrisa steak like object. No problem.
One comes in well, and I produce a well steak. No problem.
The next comes in well, and I make an argument that the dude was, infact, Wrong; and that he actually wants a medium steak. I convince him to try the medium steak. He prefers it, and now is a medium steak guy.
Why him? Why not the other well steak guy? Getting told you are wrong about your preferences isn't good and I know this, so why did I think it was worth it with well steak guy #2?
I notice this with other things as well; that for some people who don't want presents, I don't buy them presents. For others, I still buy them presents.
There is some sort of complicated evolved heuristic here, because feel like I have a better than 50% rate of hits on this sort of thing, and I bet most other present-buyers do as well.
But, maybe only if I'm in a group of people who share an identity with me? Like, only within that identity?
It may have nothing at all to do with you. It's possible the second well guy was better at signaling that he was open to persuasion and learning. For all we know, the first guy would also have preferred medium, but he sent the wrong signals about the force of his convictions and/or willingness to learn more.
Or it could entirely be you. I'm just observing that nonverbal subconscious communication has an active "speaker" as well as active "listener."
Yeah, I think this hits at an important point- sometimes people express a preference that when talked out of, they are happy they have been talked out of. I needed to be convinced that roller coasters weren't too scary, and then I loved roller coasters. My guess is that people get a dopamine reward for correctly guessing that the preference expressed "should be" changed, and then overgeneralize to preferences that "shouldn't be" changed
I am forty-seven years old now. Which means I am old enough to start to have preferences harden, and young enough to realize that my preferences are hardening.
As people get older their preferences get more locked-in. If you want to view it in Bayesian terms, then we've gotten a lot more data about what other people prefer and updated our views appropriately. Or you can see it in terms of habituation: Older people have more time to get into habits regarding their actions and beliefs.
You'll see this behavior more often as you get older. Which is why it's polite to gently acknowledge other peoples' ignorance of your preferences, even when you say something about it. You'll be there too, someday, and you'll probably appreciate someone who treats you respectfully and doesn't make a mountain out of a molehill.
How much are people *actually* listening instead of waiting to talk in those situations? Small talk is not about exchanging information; it's about building emotional rapport. Lots of semi-rehearsed lines and jokes in the waiting in those conversations too.
This is a good post but I think it’s important to keep in mind that some people really do say they want one thing when in fact they want another. For example if you ever get to know midwesterners, especially upper Midwesterners, You’ll find that they always refuse everything and never ask for hardly anything even though they often want both things. They need to have it either offered multiple times or people need to volunteer the thing they obviously need multiple times.
Folks often aren’t honest about their preferences. Or they state preferences that they believe will be received best whether or not it is true.
It’s also true that we often want and don’t want something at the same time
Company of others is a case in point
Sometimes we want to be alone until someone is there or vice versa
There’s a constant dance of what people say and mean
You touched on the social dimension, but I think one thing that’s updated since the ‘60s is the idea that the culture should accommodate the individual. I’m an introvert who started a business. I didn’t want to get on sales calls. I lamented that the customers wouldn’t buy without a call, but eventually I needed the business so I just got on the phone and became decent at sales. I’m lazy, and I grew up rail thin, but I want to be strong into my ‘90s if I’m lucky enough to live that long. So I took up weight lifting. Instead of complaining the weights wouldn’t accommodate me, etc etc. There’s validity to the “society should accommodate my preferences” argument, and contexts where that’s true (for instance if I have a life threatening allergy or genuine phobia that requires therapy), and there’s validity to the idea that the individual should endeavor to be adaptable, and contexts it’s easy to imagine that (stoic anyone ?). But that’s the frame difference I see playing out.
What cultures do a good job of accommodating different levels of sociability?
One of my friends was surprised when she invited a lot of sf fans to a party, and some of them would spend some time reading. She wasn't offended and she threw more parties for sf fans, but reading at parties isn't mainstream behavior.
Thank you for writing this! I have this problem all the time, to the point that I've more or less stopped interacting with "normal" people.
(My favorite ACX/SSC post are the ones that explain something I know or think, but are not sure how to communicate. It's super validating when someone who better than me at putting words together, explains my experience. This makes me feel less gaslighted by the wold.)
My own theory why some people can do this update while other can't, is that weirdos respect other weirdos. If you have had this happen to you enough times, you understand on an emotional level that there is a lot of human variation, and you are less likely to believe others whey they say they are different, regardless of how they are different.
I also think that mental diagnoses and personality types are meant to fix this problem. "No really, I am different, a doctor said so". Or maybe you've seen all the Facebook posts and memes, that circulated a while back, that where just about saying "introverts exists" over and over, in the hope that some people will get the message.
Preferences are often formed from bad experiences. Maybe she didn't like gifts because people who have given her gifts in the past didn't actually know what she liked, and so it was always a disappointing experience; feeling disappointment can be worse than being the odd duck out. It think it probably is true that "everyone likes gifts that aren't disappointing", which then explains why your friend liked a gift that wasn't disappointing.
An additional possible complication, people don't know themselves as well as they think they do. Stated preferences can be a statement of ignorance as often as it is a statement of knowledge. There are many examples of that in this thread as well.
I seem to have two different registers for preferences, one individual and one cultural, and I wonder if others here are the same way.
With respect to individuals, I have the same difficult updating my prior as Scott describes; I gave my son birthday presents for several years after he made it very clear he didn't like receiving gifts. (He's my son! It's his birthday!)
Yet I have often visited other countries/cultures where I am told things analogous to "people here don't like presents", and I have no difficulty at all internalizing that, instantly and thoroughly. To the extent that if a person from that culture says they "like presents", I tend to disbelieve them.
For example, I lived for a while on a Pacific island where I was told on arrival that people there did not share meals (some complicated caste arrangement where individuals could only eat food that was harvested by someone of the correct caste, etc). This seemed largely true. So when an island native then invited me to share I meal, I assumed that I should decline - surely this person was trying to be polite in what they thought was the Western way but didn't really want to share a meal. My entire set of assumed preferences had been inverted, for entirely rational and evidence based reasons.
I think in the situations Scott describes, these two preference 'registers' are in conflict, and resolving the conflict isn't a matter of reason but of judgement - whether this is a situation in which assumed cultural preferences trump individual preferences, or vice versa.
This is probably posted too late for Scott to notice, but if you're in the same situation again I would suggest just telling them your friend has a migraine. 'Don't make smalltalk with people who have a migraine' is much more natural for people to act on than 'Don't make smalltalk with people who you're told are introverted', and for interactions which are relatively limited (you're not going to become friends with the B&B owners) it's a harmless lie.
I'm always interested in the differing views on the ethics of these kind of white lies. I'm with you on this because my sense is we don't owe strangers the truth. We owe them civility and respect as fellow humans, but not any degree of self-disclosure that doesn't meet our needs in that moment.
If the goal in a situation like this is to achieve a particular outcome, rather than say to advocate for the legitimacy of someone's unusual preferences (there might be moments to do that too), then I support uttering whatever respectful words are most likely to achieve the desired outcome.
I work with a lot of folks who have chronic illness and this is a common dilemma among that group -- how do I say "no thank you " to X invitation or expectation without offending, confusing, inviting judgment, or requiring more effort when I'm already exhausted?" It's really helpful for people in those not-center-of-the-bellcurve situations to have some short sentences handy: "Whew, long day, please excuse me if I had straight to the room" or "Please excuse my lack of chattiness, I'm wiped and am going to go rest."
Most people's model of introverts is that they can manage short social interactions just fine, they just don't seek it out in large groups for hours every day. There's a certain civility that's still expected of us and if we can't pull it off, the signal your average person is going to need is more like "feeling unwell." A person who has severe social anxiety will still need coping scripts for the multitude of random social interactions people encounter when traveling, including a willingness to "seem rude" by delivering monosyllabic answers to questions and then internal tools to not feel guilty about that.
Asking other people to change their behavior doesn't strike me as an effective coping tool, but lying in some situations does. I'm sure that says something about me, perhaps not all good.
Sometimes my friends and coworkers, here in Minnesota, in the upper Midwestern United States ask me why I, a diehard Democrat, support Mike Bloomberg. "Isn't he some kind of malevont, out-of-touch conservative billionaire"? No, actually, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are so many reasons my wife, my kids and I support Mike. We are New Yorkers, born and raised, and know what Mike did for New York -- and will do for America if we give him the opportunity. He used to be our mayor, but, to be frank, we do not think of Mike as our former mayor, we think of him as a good friend. He cares about common Americans, their needs, ideas and dreams.
"Isn't Mike one of those greedy, humorless, petty billionaires we've seen on movies and TV series, a Trump-like figure?", my friends ask. Not at all, Mike is kind, generous and likeable. Trump was the most divisive president in modern American history. Mike, on the other hand, is a uniter, not a divider. Mike believes in consensus-building and genuine democracy. Mike is a successful businessman, not someone who only played one on TV. Mike is smart and hard-working. He will invest and policing and crime prevention to protect our kids from drugs, pornography and violence. Mike will invest in America's decaying infrastructure. Mike believes in a strong military as a deterrence against foreign aggression and supports our troops. Mike will bring back from Asia well-paying jobs to reverse the opioid crisis tide and revitalize our communities. Mike will invest heavily in our public schools and make sure every child learns to read, write and count by age 8 or earlier.
I like Mike and so will you. Mike gets things done.
This is either a very late comment for the previous election or a very early comment for the next one in 2024; will Bloomberg run again and if so, for which party? If your crystal ball lets you know the result, Thiago, tell us too so we can all place our bets with the bookies then clean up!
I have no idea if this is a temporary blip or if, like many's the horse race, Yang's early lead was always destined to be overtaken. I do claim that I have previously commented that I felt it much more likely someone who had been in local government before would be the more 'natural' choice than Yang, and Adams was one of those I felt who seemed more likely.
My opinion is, they are probably Americans. America is not ready for an Asian-American NYC mayor (The same way, it was not ready for an Asian-American president -- as Yang helped to prove).
It is different. America was not ready to have another Republican president right after Bush II (McCain's numbers melted with the stock market ones) and was less ready to have a female president named Clinton than it was to have a Black president named Hussein.
This is definitely "That's not how it's done"ism, a complex my mother-in-law has to such an extreme that my wife has come up with a whole vocabulary to describe it.
This doesn't require being dumb or malicious (MIL is definitely not) but it does require a lack of confidence in your judgments. It's the need for a script for interactions combined with a strong need for external validation.
I know this won't make any sense to people in this community - it made little sense to me. Why would a need for external validation cause you to ignore the preferences of others? But it's almost a performance - the idea that The Judge is watching and that if your interactions deviate from the script, The Judge will know and banish you from something called Polite Society. The Judge isn't really one person, it's a crowd of folks that generally does not exist. You hear this on TV sometimes as "what would the neighbors think?"
For instance, my wife is tomboyish almost to the point of parody. Yet when planning our wedding, MIL constantly suggested traditional wedding trappings - lacy table cloths, monogrammed napkins, etc. She didn't suggest these things out of malice/desire to control the wedding/narcissism. In fact, she was consistently hurt that she couldn't seem to understand what my wife wanted. In greater fact, these weren't really things my MIL was interested in.
But in her mind a wedding was a show put on for the benefit of your friends and family - and there was a way these things are supposed to look. Even if everyone involved wanted it to be a different way, some undefined Other would turn its gaze upon us and not see A Wedding unless the napkins were monogrammed.
This is easy for me to mock just because I am completely the opposite. But it's a vital component to the human experience. Some research indicates that a lot of the rise in anxiety comes from the massive stress of choice - we do not have defined roles anymore and that can be good. More often it is alienating and paralyzing. The idea that there is One Correct Way To Be A Person is deeply harmful to folks who exist outside the mainstream. But having a coherent identity in a coherent society isn't entirely a bad gig. In fact for the majority of folks it's much better to perform a role than it is to float through life wondering what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Even if that means sometimes making small talk with somebody who clearly doesn't want to make small talk because That's How It's Done.
I know this comment is 85 years long, but one last note: when my wife decided she wanted to stay home after we have kids she mentioned it offhand to someone in our younger peer group. This person was scandalized. Even though I'm relatively sure that two working parents is the norm, this person was convinced she was bowing to either pressure from me (I assure you she isn't) or from Society. The response was essentially, "...but you can't do that. That's How It's Done."
Freeing someone from the tyranny of "how it's done" is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. The convenient part is, they're already vulnerable to peer pressure, otherwise they wouldn't care in the first place.
The thing is, some people who have a dream of further career are pressured out of that career by someone, and express the same sentiment. It seems like it's a miscalibration of a good instinct. Something that starts out "check to make sure that is actually their preference if there's a history of other people expressing this only because they are uncomfortable/feel pressure/something else" turns into "refuse to believe anyone expressing this preference"
One possibility: when we hear someone state their preferences, and we want to understand the underlying mechanism that caused this statement to be made, we use our own internal mechanisms (which we can interrogate) as a stand-in for the other person's (which we can't).
So we ask "what would lead *me* to make a statement like 'I don't want presents.'" One of the hypotheses might be "because I no longer want presents." But others might include "I don't want the other person to feel burdened with present-giving" and so forth... and those might seem to be more likely explanations, given that they *would* be more likely explanations to explain *your* behavior.
The problem is that the experimental model available for you to test your hypotheses on is not universally representative.
I've found that people will usually respect my preferences, except for cheese. In my country, if I tell anyone I don't like cheese; this results in frantic attempts to make me "try" cheese. My current theory is that there is a mind-controlling parasite in cheese, to which I am immune, and those around me are compelled to infect me; sort of like "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers".
I've found that people will usually respect my preferences, except for cheese. In my country, if I tell anyone I don't like cheese; this results in frantic attempts to make me "try" cheese. My current theory is that there is a mind-controlling parasite in cheese, to which I am immune, and those around me are compelled to infect me; sort of like "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers".
The prevalence of social contradictions around things like gift-giving also has to factor in - saying that you don't want a gift when you actually do is common enough that it certainly gives the "everyone loves gifts" crowd ammunition. This is even formalized in some cultures to the point where it's a cultural expectation to express a contradictory sentiment toward gifts.
People with unusual preferences are acutely aware that not everyone across the population has the same preferences. People with socially accepted preferences are not required to come to terms with that fact personally, and so are less likely to become aware of it.
Just as the AirBnB hosts find it difficult to understand, either experientially or conceptually, how someone like Scott's friend could exist, so Scott finds it difficult to experientially relate to how the AirBnB hosts could have such a conceptual blind spot. But at least Scott has the conceptual framework to understand rationally why his hosts are the way they are.
Enjoyed the article very much. (Prompted a lot of new thought, which probably is most one could ask for in a Sunday morning read.) On the other hand... Preferences are sometime (often?) not set in stone, can be fleeting, whimsical, just expressed in the moment. Could also be because no chance offered itself to even know otherwise. Of course it's rude (and suboptimal) to "force-feed" someone other options, just to expand their horizons or whatever missionary motivation one might have. But it's worth acknowledging, including from my own experience, that sometimes being led to chose something initially not preferred did lead to a change of preference or at least to a valued change of perspective later. Another facet is, that we are not as constant of an entity as we or others sometimes believe. We are essentially different people in different circumstances, in different company, or just over time. I remember being annoyed by being "pigeonholed" into a preference that I once might have expressed casually.
"Maybe this woman is rejecting me and telling me to go away and saying she isn't attracted to me because she actually isn't attracted to me...nah, must just be one of those games women play."
Luckily that's (i) dramatic fiction; (ii) literally set in a mirror opposite universe; (iii) written fifty years ago; so we can be glad nothing like that is going on in the real world today.
Thinking there is a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy angle to this, which is: ppl can tend towards validating responses or invalidating responses. If you tend to invalidate, it can take work to get yourself to make validating responses. This tracks with your idea “taking ideas seriously.” If my gf says no presents please and I believe she means it, to not get her a present is to validate (show understanding and acceptance of) her preference, even if you or your grandma doesnt agree with it. To get her a present is to invalidate her preference. Of course, real life never feels this simple.
The story sounds like a simple case of miscommunication to me.
"My friend is introverted and probably would prefer to be taken straight to their room" just isn't (nearly) a strong-enough-phrased request/report to prompt them to overwrite their priors and habits of a lifetime.
If you phrased it in a way where you were unambiguously making an appeal to their sympathy and compassion for others, do you think they wouldn't have complied?
I mean, if it's an intimate 1-to-1 personal relationship, I can understand insisting on people taking you literally, but there are so many people out there who are acting based on reflex and habit and acclimation, it seems kind of weird to me that you would expect them to understand the seriousness of the request just because you literally and unadornedly recited to them the essential facts of the case.
Like, there is a way to refuse a cup of tea, if you really want to avoid a second offer, and it's not saying "I don't want a cup of tea". you put on a serious frown and say "Oh no, I can't stand tea. It makes me feel weak. I tried to give the stuff a a chance, I really tried, but I can't stand the stuff. If you and I are friends, then don't ask me about tea." You put it in an emotionally unambiguously way. You ensure that the request is transferred on the emotional level as well as on the literal one.
I think this adds something important. There are cases of people ignoring every single signal, but more often people miss a light-touch signal. Especially when you combine this with the fact that some light-touch signals are intentionally false to be polite.
I may have 2 alternative, possibly slightly less charitable interpretations:
1. People develop social algorithms which become fixed so much, that they are impossible to update or override, even in situations, when it's clear that they shouldn't be applied.
2. We know (on some level) that the other person would prefer if we didn't use this social algorithm, but we use it nevertheless to signal (to others or to ourselves) our pro-social/altruistic attitude.
to me this is just about broader social consequences. If people hear that you got her a present and she didn't like it, she looks bad. If you try to explain to someone at a party that your girlfriend doesn't like presents, you're guaranteed to look worse than if you just got the present. They don't update on your preferences because they care more about looking good to a broad audience than you specifically
There are absolutely times when people express a preference they don't have. If my wife tells me she doesn't want anything special for her birthday, it's possible that's true, or it's also possible that she would kind of like to feel special but doesn't feel like asking to feel special. I should update my prior based on my past experience with her- has she been mad about me not making a big deal about her birthday in the past? Has she tried to downplay something as a test to see if I will take the bait?
Any time there's a potential for a false signal, that makes it possible for type 1 AND type 2 errors, which means people can overoptimize for avoiding one error at the expense of the other
I've experienced this. A few years ago, I embraced minimalism. I got rid of about 70% of all my possessions, and enjoyed having a vastly tidier and more spacious home.
When people asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would tell them I actively want nothing. I was trying to eliminate clutter. And if I wanted something, I would already have bought it myself.
But they would continue to buy me gifts I didn't want. It took several years of me bluntly saying "If you buy me anything, I'll probably just give it away." Before they finally gave up.
Possibly the constant stress of "The golden Rule" treating others the way you would like to be treated from early childhood until adolescents has conditioned people (In the US at least) to reference their own wishes as a marker for acceptable social interaction. This may be highly successful in monoculture society, but in a homogenized society where peoples preferences differ, the selfishness of this methodology becomes apparent.
When I am sick, I want foremost to be left alone with minimal interaction. Don't make me soup, down come stroke my forehead, don't ask me if you "can do anything for me". My wife on the other hand wants to be doted on, sympathy should be constantly verbalized and lots and lots of chicken noodle soup. Needless to say, this caused issues until we came to the understanding that the golden rule was shit.
Now bought in our household is the real golden rule.
The Golden Rule: Treat people as they want to be treated. if you don't know, ask.
Everything is Bayesian though. If you received compelling enough evidence that gravity is fake/works in a different way, you could update that prior too. It’s a question of degree of certainty, and therefore these facts exist on more of a quantitative (though perhaps exponential) continuum than in a bunch of qualitative categories
And even more importantly, there's often an expectation to politely *pretend* to refuse a gift before caving and accepting it.
OMG I have a card giving/sending friend like this! She takes such pleasure in selecting them and writing thoughtful notes in them. When she finds one she thinks is just right for a certain person or purpose she buys it and keeps it until the opportunity to use it arises.
I know it’s important to her, so I try to show appreciation and pleasure, but man ......
But not so much appreciation or pleasure that she thinks it makes me happy and is en outages to continue or, heaven forfend, increase the card sending. It’s a delicate balance.
My mother also does this, with cards and letters, and (worst of all) newspaper clippings!
But I've accepted that there's no 'affordable' means of me stopping her from doing it, but I've also 'pre-forgiven' myself for just throwing them away.
Is there some practical reason why you feel obligated to keep them at all? Would your mother actually know?
Your 'ritual' seems pretty low-cost. I was hoping to convince you that at least it's possible that it's 'okay' for you to not even do that, if you really don't want to – subject to the specific costs and benefits of you doing so (e.g. your mother discovering that you're not even keeping them as you are and being upset).
I actually keep the cards and letters from my own mom – I do throw away the 'clippings'. That turned out to be _extremely_ costly to me (for detailed personal reasons)! But I also realized that there's an interesting 'value' in _collections_ of things apart from the strict sum of values of the individual items, so I'm glad I've kept probably a good proportion of the cards and letters (and they do, alone among my mementos, take up several 'shoeboxes').
I think a couple of things are going on here.
One is that I think a lot of people don’t have different mental categories for different “kinds” of facts. To those people, “everyone likes presents!” Is the same kind of fact as “gravity makes you fall!”. There maybe nuances but once you learn the basic thing you don’t change your mind about it.
The other thing is that I think we have a lot of habits and behaviors that don’t actually refer to our beliefs unless we consciously force them to. For example, I have a fear of heights which has been gradually going away through exposure, but at no point did knowing for a fact that a certain structure was safe to be on eliminate the fear: it simply was not a big part of whatever mental calculation which that was preventing me from stepping out onto a clear glass floor. In conversations, I think people build up a sort of habit of interacting in a certain way that has worked ok for them over a long period and it takes a serious effort of will or serious (Rude) interruption to break the flow because the habit is not frequently checking with reality to see if it’s working anymore.
This makes me think working memory slots are a big deal because they determine the dimensionality of your basic building blocks of reality.
If you think about what a 'preference' is from a computing perspective, it's a comparison operator. If you start thinking about it, you can consider all value systems this way: they're comparison operators that tell you, given two possible alternatives, which choice is better. Your beliefs about other people's preferences can be implemented the same way.
Now, consider the fact that comparison operators are extremely important to get correct. You've highlighted a number of errors in your post, thigns people tend to get wrong. So what if we consider the hypothesis that a person having the ability to "play around with" comparison operators might cause them serious harm?
In the same way that an ai which can easily change its utilty function would probably just wirehead itself, might we consider that humans with malleable preferences would have gotten weeded out of the gene pool early on?
Maybe this is a built-in-protection mechanism: we do have some ability to change what preferences we hold - or what preferences we think others hold - but because it can be super dangerous to get these wrong, maybe we're just insanely slow to update them, because whatever built-in evolutionary hook you have is almost certainly better than a randomly selected comparison operator.
I like the idea that stable memeplexes are stable partially by installing type safety.
You don't even need to look far for the evolutionary reason: we are deeply tribal animals, and one of the worst thing that can happen to such a species is to have a bad leader -- a Pied Piper who will lead you off a cliff. So the individual has very good self-preservation reasons to not give up his own preferences easily.
Another way to put it is that a modern OS has to have defenses against viruses, things that change its "preferences" for what it's going to do next. People need similar defenses against memetic viruses -- ideas that come from others that propose to change the individual's preferences.
I absolutely agree this is evolutionary beneficial because of the tribal aspect. A tribe superseded the individual as an organism at some point (because tribal configurations survive better than individuals alone). So some being more resistant to tribal "mutations" like that "pied piper leader" would offer an advantage and that tribe would be more likely to survive.
My instinct is that Scott is right about the link to taking ideas seriously/openness to changing priors.
The other part of the story that I think isn't really touched on in the examples is that acting in accordance with the unusual preferences can be uncomfortable for the person doing it. The B&B couple aren't just thinking about the enjoyment of the person they're talking to; they're playing a role which they are familiar with and which they associate with smooth and positive interactions. The person who doesn't give a holiday gift doesn't just think about the interaction with the giftee, but also the social awkwardness at the gathering, having to explain to other people that they didn't get a gift, and so on.
I agree. B&B hosts are supposed to be friendly and chatty and that’s probably what’s expected of them most of the time. I generally avoid B&Bs for this reason and prefer the AirBnB contactless experience of keypad entry and text messages if I need anything.
Yes! Best reason ever to go to a nice impersonal hotel!!!!
For years I had a massage therapist who would only talk if I talked, and would stop as soon as I did. Took me ages to figure out what he was doing; he only ever responded, never initiated an exchange. It was SO relaxing! If I felt chatty, he chatted, if I did not, he shut the hell up!
Now if only there were a way to get taxi/ Uber drivers to follow that rule.
Right? Uber Select or some of their more expensive options has an option to tell them you don’t want to talk but you pay a premium to do so!
Headphones.
Preferably noise canceling ones.
Love it.
My stepbrother who did the Uber thing for a while mentioned that he tended to get significantly better tips from riders he chatted with. I imagine that once one realizes this then it becomes the default option to engage with your passengers because it's likely to benefit you; not to mention it's something that helps pass the time in a job that's not particularly exciting. I would also imagine that these incentives create some natural selection pressure where extroverted chatty types are more likely to stick with the job since they're getting paid better and probably having fun with the whole constantly meeting new strangers thing.
In my experience if you just say something like "hey I know you drivers love to chat but I'm just not in a chatty mood, can we have a nice quiet ride?" then that's all it takes. No need to select some fancy Uber option...if you really want to pay extra for a silent ride then pay it as a tip that all goes to the driver for respecting your wishes :)
I've stayed in quite a few airbnbs, find chatty hosts super annoying, and had never had this problem. Maybe I've been lucky?
Airbnb and traditional B&Bs have different cultural norms.
Right -- this was the explanation that came to my mind as I was reading the post.
For some people, intentionally not performing these social niceties (small talk; gift giving) is going to feel very awkward and strange. If you've spent 20 years welcoming guests to your B&B, conspicuously ignoring a guest is going to feel a lot like rudeness, however much you're assured by a third party that this is the right thing to do.
Imagine that instead you're a B&B owner, and a guest informs you that their friend loves being patted on the head as part of being greeted. I would guess that you probably wouldn't pat their friend on the head upon arrival -- it would just feel too weird, preferences be damned.
Thank you. Manners! Indeed, I'm approaching 70, and I find "introverts" very selfish in their demands that everyone accommodate their wishes to remain cold and distanced because their tender sensitivities can't give any more than that. They don't want to know you, even briefly, because they (supposedly?) already have their own people and you will never be one of them. So your existence is only a bother to them, except for the bed and breakfast you can provide. For which you have been paid, so transaction completed, now go away. I am also perplexed by why being an introvert is so fashionable now.
Sounds like I feel as threatened by them as they do by the likes of me.
Imagine a person who loves smoking cigars and a different person who cannot stand cigar smoke.
In my mind, the difference is that the extrovert's desire/need to chat can be met by any number of other people who can be sought out deliberately, whereas the introvert's preference for not so much interaction can only be met by whoever is right there with them in the moment.
Why isn't the situation perfectly symmetric? An extrovert surrounded by mumchance introverts is unhappy, and would have to go looking for other extroverts to find companionship. An introvert surrounded by chatty extroverts is unhappy, and would have to go looking for a quiet company of introverts to be happy.
Because in a world made up entirely of comfortable introverts, the social fabric would break down. Not to say introvert preferences shouldn't be heard and accommodated, especially between friends, but there are lots of conceivable reasons why humans would be socialized, or even hardwired to view such preferences and behaviours as undesirable.
I fear I may have not made myself clear: what I mean is, Karen seemed to suggest that the discomfort an introvert among extroverts feel is harder than the discomfort an extrovert among introverts feel, and I don't understand why that should be so. The situation seems equally distressful in both directions.
Strictly speaking, the introvert just has to leave and go somewhere where there isn't anyone else at all to be happy.
Unfortunately, until we get some more improvements in robotics, a bed and breakfast has to be operated by humans.
You know - I was thinking that the categories shift over generations! I feel like the older categories for what is now being categorized as "introvert" are words like, "recluse," "hermit," "loner," "eccentric." Of those four, I think only "hermit" has a chance of having a positive spin! (but mostly not) In Scott's example, "guy is happy in his abusive relationship" is a category that... the only word for it I'm coming up with for it (in present-day lingo) is "codependent," which has a very negative resonance indeed!
I think I'm like you - VERY uncomfortable having a "purely transactional" interaction - even if will only see this human standing before me for a transitory moment - I don't want them to think I'm saying they're "not worth giving them the time of day"!
> "Sounds like I feel as threatened by them as they do by the likes of me." <-- I love this moment of reflection you had here! :)
> I am also perplexed by why being an introvert is so fashionable now.
MaruP, may I attempt to characterize what this "introvert" category is in a way that is compelling, and attempt to answer ideas in the question "why is being an introvert so fashionable now"? :) (I think it's a "Rationality-Community-thing" to try to get people to change their minds, and I think this would make a fun conversation!)
According to a British friend in her 60s, behaviours characterized as "introvert" and worse in the US today, were characterized as "good manners" in her youth. She's aware that Americans have different standards, and aren't really trying to be rude - but her first emotional response to much polite American behaviour is still "what a rude ..." even after living in the US for decades.
Remindfs me of all those studies of cultural differences in "personal space," meaning how close you can stand to someone before they think you're creepy versus how far away you can stand before they think you're silently signaling he needs a shower.
This is a good example!
It's something that people can and do adapt to, but often on auto-pilot, we default to the norm of the place where we lived most recently! ...and estimating/re-calibrating can be kinda uncomfortable! As you adjust, you might even have the sense that you are literally doing something ethically wrong!
So, this might be me prioritizing a theory that I like a little too quickly but... urbanization? The UK was more thoroughly urbanized before us, right? [I don't actually know if that's the case.] So then a huge percentage of society lives in a place where you -cannot- get to know all the people you pass on a daily basis.
There's a wonderful line a Flannery O'Connor story where the POV char notices with an uncomfortable pang that "City people's eyes don't 'catch at' you as you pass by the way country folks' do." (I'm paraphrasing.) I read this aloud to an relative who'd grown up in rural U.S. - also in her '60s - a few years back. She was on the verge of tears almost immediately. (She'd been living in a huge city for the last several years at that time.)
Doesn't really mesh with my experience of within-country variation in the UK. The most extraverted subcultures are working class inhabitants of northern cities like Liverpool and Newcastle - precisely those created by the Industrial Revolution. Introversion codes southern, rural or suburban and middle class.
(Among white people whose ancestors have been in the country for some generations - black and eastern European cultures are more extraverted and East Asian cultures even more intraverted, but this doesn't tell us much about the effects of the Industrial Revolution.)
You don't have a right to impose yourself on other people.
Very true. But in determining if something is an imposition or not, there are quiet assumptions that do a lot of heavy lifting. We aren't talking about people who are simply walking along on the street. We're talking about people who have already agreed to some form of interaction and have divergent needs and assumptions about how that action should be shaped.
As noted above, "simply walking along the street" carries expectations about how people are supposed to interact or not interact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJCHXnCRgts&ab_channel=YeahRussia
A Russian compares Russian and American customs about smiling and friendliness.
I was very surprised that video wasn't to a clip of Yakov Smirnoff stand up.
My favorite "extroverts are vicious" anecdote involved an office party, where I and another person were conversing on a topic that interested us, which happened to be related to our profession.
We were angrily told not to do this. The purpose of the party was for everyone to have fun, and us talking shop apparently guaranteed that no fun would be had. From the way it was phrased, I couldn't be sure whether our conversation was equivalent to publicly torturing each other (i.e. the problem was that we were not having "fun") or if it was merely that mention of work caused agony to the coworker in question.
We complied. I also never attended another office party as long as I worked with that team.
I am guilty of being profoundly disappointed when work colleagues "talk shop" at social events. In my opinion, the reason I am well paid is because I am paid to think hard about topics that are both boring and difficult (the worst possible combination). If such topics were more interesting, I shouldn't be paid as much. And the fact that you are willing to discuss work topics for free, voluntarily of your free choice, indicates you are likely very overpaid. I would never voluntarily spend a second of my brain energy contemplating topics that I'm paid to think about for free. The free stuff is the intrinsically rewarding fun stuff.
I had the good fortune to start my career in a state of "wow, they pay me to do this - good thing they don't know I'd pay for the fun of doing it". That was the technical part - the dealing with people/managers/presentations/red tape was never fun, but until I rose to a certain level, it didn't take much of my time and energy.
IIRC, this was the last job where I still had fun - after that I was promoted into the wall-to-wall-BS range. My salary went way up, but I'm still not sure that it was adequate compensation.
A related example, perhaps - my primary care doctor. She's come to hate her job, insurance BS and all, and has been cutting back her hours etc. And then she spends her vacations volunteering for Medicins sans Frontiers. She also seems to love teaching, and participating in research studies. Basically, she loves parts of her job, and does them very well - but hates the rest.
Put another way - maybe you should reexamine your assumption that work is only valuable if it's painful to do.
I agree that plenty of work is valuable without pay...all the things that one does for free, for their own benefit or intrinsic reward, including volunteering, etc. But I have always thought that unpleasant work, such as very boring work or dealing with difficult people, should be paid more than enjoyable work and vice versa. When people claim to love their jobs I'm always secretly wondering why their boss doesn't cut their pay then (unless of course the only part they love is the status and compensation, which is a complex knot to untie). In my life I've worked a range of different occupations from minimum wage to several hundred dollars per hour and I can see zero relation between how "hard" or draining or unpleasant or difficult the job was with the compensation, which doesn't seem right. In fact the wages were mostly determined by the level of anti-competitive industry protections in place (licensing boards, purposely limited supply, unions, etc). Your example says to me that given many medical professionals are intrinsically rewarded in healing people, their wages would likely be much lower if they sold their services on a free market where anyone could offer them, rather than strictly limited numbers of licensed physicians controlled by a professional groups dedicated to maintaining the status, prestige, and compensation of doctors.
Anyway, to get back on topic, I think the pain your coworker was expressing was dismay that you were essentially doing labor for free at an event meant for enjoyment. They probably hated their job, and I can relate to that. It *is* very difficult to comprehend that others actually find something interesting or enjoyable that one doesn't. I feel the same way when people talk about sports endlessly, though for entirely different reasons.
If you've ever loved your job you should count yourself as endlessly fortunate.
This is the reason I stopped being a middle-manager and reverted back to being an ordinary employee again (I do teaching&research in a university).
When you rise in the hierarchy, you suddenly realize that your underlings now have a right to come to you with their problems, and you have an obligation to talk with them about their problems. Endless meetings.
You also realize that all the fun problems people have, they solve themselves. It is the difficult problems that land on your desk.
I think you've miscast what you are being paid for.
Sure, you are being paid to work on things that are generally considered boring. But sometimes that will manifest as you being bored, and sometimes it will manifest as Déformation professionnelle - you'll start to find the things interesting.
So finding them interesting is not actually an indicator that the work doesn't merit pay as you wouldn't have that developed interest if it weren't for the salary.
(one could also make the standard arguments about how pay is about supply and demand and comparative advantage, i.e. pay is not intrinsically linked to how much you personally enjoy the job, but rather about how the pool of labour enjoys it)
> In my opinion, the reason I am well paid is because I am paid to think hard about topics that are both boring and difficult (the worst possible combination). If such topics were more interesting, I shouldn't be paid as much.
I don't think that's correct in an unqualified sense. Certainly some people may be willing to accept less if they enjoyed the work, but the work is not objectively less valuable to the business just because they enjoy it. You're mostly being paid is proportional to the value of your work *to the business*. It has little to do with you, and considerations like yours cause only very minor deviations from this mean.
> I would never voluntarily spend a second of my brain energy contemplating topics that I'm paid to think about for free.
So you think carpenters shouldn't talk shop with other carpenters, exchange tips and tricks they might have learned and otherwise share experience and knowledge. It's a bizarre way to look at natural human behaviour IMO, but to each their own.
My guess- if the conversation could have been interpreted as "doing work"- i.e. it was about how to solve a problem at work or something- you and the other person are then "working" at an event that was intended to be recreational and non-work related. If others see that you are using the time to "conference" about work, it could create pressure for others to do the same, turning the event into a work conference instead of a non-working social event.
A similar thing also happened to me; reading your description triggered me.
In my case, instead of a party, it was a business trip; a rare opportunity to meet in person our remote colleagues from another country. So we spent the day at their office, and in the evening we just socialized in a hotel, drinking beer. I don't like the small talk, but I can drink and sit quietly, and the extraverts around me don't mind to do all the talking.
Except, now there was also a foreign colleague with whom I happen to share a hobby, and we were sitting at the same end of the table, so we started talking about the hobby. Immediately we were interrupted by the extraverts and chastised for "not having fun, and discussing work". (Our hobby is also related to programming.) Thus ended my opportunity to actually enjoy a part of the evening.
Next time I was invited to hang out and have fun, I politely excused myself saying I was too tired.
Hearing these anecdotes- I wonder if the "upper middle-class convention of pretending to like your work* because it flags as what successful people do" gets flipped in workplaces where you have a vocal pool of people who hate their work - maybe even hate their work specifically b/c of its difficulty...
...and viewed as a rude and unnecessary "flex"...like showing off that you're "sooo smart."
I guess that would make it kind of forbidden to say, "no, we actually LOVE this topic!"
Still, it sounds like you were pretty miserable, Viliam. (and DinoNerd!) When I have a conversation with an outcome that sucks like that, I often obsess over what I would have said "if I had to do it again." (though at first I would come up with very ridiculous ideas where I just imagine the world unreasonably accomodating me, I eventually come up with good ones for some of them!) Have either of you thought of what response you might try if this happened today?
* I'm referencing of this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
I think this was less about work as such, and more about social conventions for small talk. If I instead started debating math, the reaction would probably be the same.
The officially fun topics to debate in your free time are: sport, travel, movies. Maybe I forgot a few. Sucks to be the person who enjoys debating something else.
Specifically, sucks to be a nerd. Which is quite ironic in software development. But I notice a general trend that software development becomes less and less nerdy. Maybe because in the past only genuinely obsessive people were willing to spend the effort necessary to learn it; and these days, many normies are there for money, and nerds have become a minority.
Aren't extroverts equally selfish in regards to their demands to that others perform conversation with them for their own pleasure? Just because you want to pretend that there is some deeper connection with random people you encounter doesn't make the rest of want to play pretend with you.
Socializing, especially with strangers, can be more energetically expensive for some people than others.
Imagine being rich and inviting someone to a high-end restaurant and they decline the invitation. You conclude they must not be your friend or want to be with you because otherwise they'd spend time with you when a more accurate expanation is that they simply can't afford the restaurant's prices.
If you're wealthy and always have been, the notion that something might 'cost too much' might not even occur to you.
In Scott's example I feel like the first interaction (greeting, beginning to get to know the person) is a social nicety, just deal with it, that sort of thing. But Scott said that the couple continued to talk their ears off for the rest of their stay, and I feel like "I don't want to be socially required to engage in small talk constantly with someone whom I'm simply paying for a service" is a very reasonable boundary to assert (while maybe "You must forego your standard greetings that make you comfortable because I don't appreciate them" is not).
AirBnB blurs the line a bit, if that's what the original post is referring to. In some ways it's a bit more like having a short term room mate and less like going to a hotel. It may be entirely reasonable to assert a boundary. But I think the assumption of a primarily transactional relationship may not be held by all parties initially, or even considered proper by all parties.
Asserting a purely transactional relationship when a person assumed something else can be a big thing with people. The book "From the Soil" ( A Chinese anthropological work) described how villagers in Imperial China would go to the trouble of selling their products in an entirely different village so that they could deal 'without feelings.' Persian culture tends to emphasize that people going into business together first become friends for the sake of the business.
I have nothing against someone trying to climb a particular social hill. I think the phrase 'simply paying for a service' might underestimate the strength of the adverse preconception.
This strikes me as a nearly perfect example of when we take our own "way of being" as the obvious and correct default, and therefore ascribe fault or wrongdoing to others who don't share our Obviously Correct Views, perhaps by ascribing bad manners or some form of personality defect to them. Everything about this comment can be inverted to the introverts point of view and it would come out something like:
"Manners! I find 'extroverts' very selfish in their demands that everyone accommodate their wishes to be imposing and inconsiderate, because their tender sensitivities can't handle not constantly being the center of someone's attention. They don't want to let you have a moment of peace, even briefly, because they (apparently) can never have enough people and attention in their life so feel entitled to monopolize every little bit of time you have. So your existence is only a transactional opportunity for them to demand you serve their endless need to be distracted from their own internal emptiness."
No doubt you would find this both uncharitable and wildly unconvincing. But I don't really see any fundamental difference between this and your post. It's not clear to me why an introvert's reluctance to accommodate an extrovert's desires is "bad manners," but not equally bad manners for the extrovert to be reluctant to accommodate an introvert's desires.
From my take, I don't think it's "suddenly fashionable" to be introverted now. My read of the situation (no doubt colored by my lifelong introversion) is that there have always been lots of introverts, but the social scene and social protocol has been thoroughly dominated by extroverts. For a long time, most of us were compelled to some degree or another to fake extroversion, which has created a lot of needless misery. Lately though (and thankfully in my view), the preferences of introverts has been gaining some recognition and given a bit of space. And swarms of introverts thought to themselves "Oh thank god" and were happy to take advantage of this small accommodation. To an extrovert, who has been used to getting their own way all the time, this may feel like introversion has suddenly become "fashionable" and they are now being wrongly denied something they have become so accustom to that they feel it to be an entitlement. But to an introvert, reactions like yours look like someone who is used to having 100% control and now finds that they only have 90% control and are outraged at the unfairness of it all.
this sounds like instance of the distress of the privileged: https://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/
Every interaction I have with you is HUGELY expensive. If you run a B&B, I'm at the end of a LONG stressful trip. What I want is a room, a bed, and SILENCE. I'm going to do the bare minimum of speaking to you, and resent and despise you for every word you say beyond the bare minimum level of formal politeness.
If Mr. B&B Owner thinks that's "rude" that's his problem. He's providing a service to me, and if he insists on imposing on my spoons, I will not be kind when I write my review.
If he leaves me alone. I'll be much kinder, indeed glowing.
But I'll allow him the freedom to choose how he wants to interact with me.
I think of it more as a form of entertainment for them. One reason they are running a bed and breakfast and not doing something else with their lives is because they like getting to meet people, learning about them, and having a little something to gossip about with each other later.
I think in a lot of these cases it's more than just discomfort from deviating from the norm; there are good reasons for the norms in place, too. If I was welcoming a stranger into my home I'd want to chat with them too, if only to assure myself they weren't secretly a serial killer or someone else I wouldn't want in my house. It also helps create social bonds that may come to be helpful in the future. If someone said they'd rather be directed straight to their room as if they were in some faceless hotel I'd be quite offended.
In fairness, there may be a difference in the near-universality of some of these. We all know that some people prefer to live in big cities and others do not. Many of us just have never heard of someone being averse to polite, friendly welcoming. Similarly for receiving a present from a loved one. I’m not in any way diminishing the validity of your friend’s feelings; just that they seem a lot more unusual. To extend this a lot farther than either of those examples, if someone assured you that they would very much appreciate if you would smash his hand with a hammer, that preference would probably be sufficiently unusual, as a purely descriptive matter, that you would probably decline without regard to the truthfulness of his preference. Again—I’m not equating that with your examples. I’m just trying to illustrate a broader point.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there (no pun intended). Scott knows more neurodivergent people and is therefore less fazed by their unusual requests and preferences than others, such as the B&B hosts, would be.
Yea, another way of thinking about it is the cost to you as a greeter. If a person has some really obscure preferences, such as having their hand smashed with a hammer, if you have the wrong information smashing their hand would be costly to you. So simply sticking with the norms and not smashing the hand is a safe option to fall back on. If their preference is sufficiently obscure you're safe in the knowledge that basically nobody else has a leg up on you, as they won't be smashing that person's hand with a hammer either.
Sticking to a cultural norm is also a safe default option, because even if normal treatment is annoying to some people they'll always understand that you're "just following the norms" and can't get mad at you
Yep. Might be you don't even have the wrong information, but you're missing nuisance from an unfamiliar convention and missing nuances is often a bigger faux pas.
"Yes, I do like having my hand smashed with a hammer, but obviously not on a Tuesday. All hand-smashers know that that's a rest day. How rude of you".
Maybe for most congregations, but I'm a Seventh Day Hand-ventist, and we avoid hammering each other on Mondays
This goes back to the other minds fallacy. The thinking of the hotel people, when hearing your friend was an introvert, may have been "he's shy, he's from the city where people are rude, let's show him some hospitality."
I think Scott's framing of "inability to respect preferences" sort of priviliges a hypothesis that come from Scott's rationalist mind state.
Most people (and this is more true of rationalists as well then most would care to admit) don't just communicate at face value.
It is illogical to assume that they do, and the "not respecting preferences" seems to spring from this unspoken assumption.
I think this is a particular tricky cognitive bias for rationalists, particularly those on the spectrum.
It reminds me of the TOS episode "The Galileo Seven" where Spock keeps getting surprised everyone else isnt acting logically. I thought that episode was poor writing of the character, as it is not logical to assume others will act logically.
Some people refuse to admit/allow deviations from the norm, and I think others may confuse their own preferences with facts or properties of external objects. I had a boyfriend in my youth who would always pick out the nut variety of a thing (ice cream bar, candy bar, etc.) for me even though I had told him many times that I didn't like nuts. He would then claim that the, e.g., walnut chocolate bar was "objectively the best one."
Yeah, I have an otherwise kind and generous family member who seems to have trouble distinguishing their preferences from those of other people.
Lack of theory of mind, really. People like this are often jerks, in my experience. I’ll have to think about how/why, though.
Preferences are often mutually exclusive, so if you can't distinguish your preferences from those of other people, you're going to look like a jerk a lot. It's confusing in the candy bar example, since the boyfriend doesn't get to eat the candy bar himself. But if the example is instead changed to "Choosing somewhere to go for dinner" or "Choosing which radio station to listen to", if I think your preference is the same as mine, I'm just going to pick what I want all the time. This looks like ignoring your preference because I don't care, which is a jerky thing to do. Plus, effective kindness often requires knowing what other people want.
I agree, and even if you can't imagine someone not liking nuts, for example, it does feel awfully disrespectful to not take their word for it, or care enough to remember. Perhaps that's where the 'jerk' experiences arise.
I think this is getting worse now then it used to be. It's the social trust decline thing. People used to have develop this skill to some extent. Now people group together in clicks with known specific perfomances and preferences- it's odd. In some ways it's an ultra-conformist era- there are just far many choices to conform to that can be easily accessed and the role of how to conform quickly understood.
Why they are jerks? That's sort of obvious. They can't model others, so they tend to be entirely self-oriented.
My mom always buys me cakes and boxes of candy when I visit her even though she knows I am on a low carb diet. There may be something a little passive-aggressive going on with that. But mostly she just wants to eat that stuff and getting it for me so she can "share" is as good an excuse as any. Plus mothers always want to feed their children. It's sort of an instinct.
A lot of people have a problem with objective/subjective distinctions. It may be something so obvious to us that we casually overestimate others' basic familiarity with ontology.
So true! I remember having to tell a smart, well-educated and not young acquaintance who was claiming the right to his own opinion in a dispute centering around the proportion of people in Calgary that are Ukrainian or descended from Ukrainians that while we are all entitled to our own preferences, we are not entitled to our own facts.
Epistemic Status: Exploratory
I see an alternative mental model for this scenario. In short: people don't acknowledge _weird_ preferences, for very restrictive definitions of weird
Your original example is a perfect one. There is a default social expectation that your friend's preference violates. When normies, who don't know your friend and don't know _why_ you hold the preferences you do, when they encounter preferences that violate the default social expectation, they're maybe making a little error correction. They're subconsciously assuming you have expressed the incorrect preference and they're 'helping' you out by ignoring your stated preference.
There's tons and tons of social precedent for this dynamic. Look at just about everything in dating, for example. For most people when they're dating, if you make no assumptions whatsoever about social context, and take everything they say at literal face value, you will most likely be hopelessly confused and stay single. There is an element of presumed mind-reading involved, and a consequent implied social burden of making your own mind legible for others.
This is infuriating for rationalists (myself included) but it makes sense when you keep in mind that we are all already five-sigma deviants from average here, on dimensions most people don't even know exist. When you or your friend or I say "hey I'm really introverted, I need my space, I appreciate your concern but please don't bother me when I'm here", we actually mean it. But when most people say that, they don't mean that. They mean who knows what. Maybe they mean "I am scared and alone in a foreign city and too nervous to engage with you", in which case the response of being especially friendly and welcoming is the _correct_ one, even though they specifically told them not to.
A lot of scenarios like this that I see rationalists get perplexed over, I think you can easily explain a lot of them with something like "most people take as a default assumption that everyone is normal". And _typical people_ would appreciate that friendliness.
So from the B&B proprietor's perspective, they disregarded your stated preferences, and then you two were annoyed and they were like "huh what'd I do?". But the _last ten people_ they had, they did the same thing, but they got positive responses. So, 10 positive responses and 1 negative response, they're gonna continue doing it
As an aside: I don't know if you literally mean a B&B or if you just mean AirB&B, but it is my understanding that at _actual_ Bed-And-Breakfast places, some level of engagement by the hosts is expected. That's why it's a bed _and breakfast_ instead of just a bed; you have someone there cooking for you. Your situation could be not a part of a wider pattern of disregarding preferences, but rather just an idiosyncratic situation based on a mismatch in expected social connotation
Yeah I think that this comment section will become a bit of an echo chamber for exactly the reason you suspect - rationalists tend way more toward reason, logic, and explicit preferences, while non-rationalists (who I often handwave as my parents' generation) tend toward emotion and blind belief (caution, r=way less than 1 here :) ).
Nope, it didn't turn out to be an echo chamber. It turns out that there's a lot of individual variation and it's a fraught subject.
I don't think of it as emotion vs rationality
I think of it as more like, cold calculating computational rationality vs complex intuitive heuristic rationality. The kind of rationality that rationalists tend to celebrate is the kind that is very very vulnerable to not seeing illegible things. As I get older, I find that most of the important things in life are illegible
“So from the B&B proprietor's perspective, they disregarded your stated preferences, and then you two were annoyed and they were like "huh what'd I do?". But the _last ten people_ they had, they did the same thing, but they got positive responses. So, 10 positive responses and 1 negative response, they're gonna continue doing it”
I’ve seen someone I am close to ignore their partner’s stated preferences to insist they would enjoy going on a boat, even though the partner was pleading and terrified of going on the water. I tried to step in but he insisted his partner would love it. The partner relented, had a great time on the boat, and seemed really happy afterwards that they went. So while my own MO is to always respect people’s preferences, I can’t deny that people do get feedback that stated preferences are often shortsighted/false.
This is also how I feel.
Reality is that most people are really really bad at understanding, reifying, and communicating their own preferences, and it seems that evolution thought it was easier to just give most people an assumption on default preferences than it was to make them capable of more introspection
Or even just at differentiating between ‘I am afraid of boats/water’ and ‘I don’t like boats/water’.
Which is also the difference between an introvert/low sociability person and someone with social anxiety. You can have both, but they ain’t the same thing
I agree. I've had good experiences in the past with people ignoring my (weird) stated preferences. For example, I say I'm perfectly happy to get the bill when I got out to dinner with poor student friends, but they often insist on splitting the bill anyway. On reflection, I think I feel better when the bill is split evenly, even though that's less fair. The more I age, the more I find that treating myself like a normal person makes me feel better than respecting the weird preferences I think I have.
Probably a lot of people behave like this? We state our preferences in a way that signals openness / generosity / humility / other positive qualities, while trusting that other people will treat us as if we were closed-minded / miserly / etc, thereby having our cake and eating it.
> The more I age, the more I find that treating myself like a normal person makes me feel better than respecting the weird preferences I think I have.
I've also come to this, and it's from two directions simultaneously
On the one hand, it really helps in social and romantic scenarios. It's all fine and good to dream about meeting another autistic programmer gf, but supply and demand being what it is, if your social success depends on "find someone who just so happens to be the same weird I am", that's a real long-shot strategy. If, instead, we all just got over ourselves and acted more normal, we would have radically better success. I like having success.
On the other hand, I've undergone something of a stage 4 -> stage 5 transition (in the David Chapman sense https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence). One of the interesting things this has done has been to make me keenly aware of the failings of rational/legible systems, as well as given me a lot of humility regarding what we (think we) know about Being Smart. From my perspective, I've really started to appreciate how a lot of human 'irrationality' is actually smarter and more optimal and more pro-social, even if I can't immediately see how this is true. There is a lot of mundane wisdom in habit and tradition, even if we aren't aware of it.
There is quite a bit of wisdom in this answer also.
going to a b&b and asking them not to talk to you is like going to a barber and asking them not to cut your hair.
Or asking the barber not to talk to you
I think people are confounding the classic bed and breakfast experience with the modern airbnb experience. Classic B&B, yes, expect to interact with the hosts - they will be serving your breakfast, after all. This is not at all true for airbnb. I have used many airbnbs without interacting with the host at all.
I agree. It’s part of the B&B product. I’m not a fan of mandatory chit chat so I’ve never stayed at one.
I've done AirBnB a few times and never seen the host once.
I’m referring to something else. Before AirBB there were charming- if you are into it - little places typically run by a retired couple where there was a full court press of friendliness. You would sit at their kitchen table and chat with them while they cooked your bacon and eggs plus home frys and keep an eye on your coffee cup.
AirBNB is a different animal.
I was going to say "yes, but Scott's story was about an AirBnB" . . . and I just checked and I was wrong, even in the original email version.
I may have to update some of my priors because I had a wrong basic fact this whole time.
I think it's more of a defense mechanism to convince oneself that one's worldview is the 'correct' one - my preference that I'm not allowed to express except anonymously on the internet (or to extremely close friends) is that white privilege is not a thing anymore and that affirm action is stupid and ultimately hurts more people than it helps (yeah, opinion prob =/= preference here but it's the first thing that comes to mind).
However, god forbid that I as a white male ever say that, because the 'right' path has already been defined by the screeching majority - just like other, softer, non-political preferences like 'everyone enjoys small talk' and 'people LOVE presents' have also been completely internalized. It takes a level of self-awareness that unfortunately most people aren't capable of to escape that mindset.
A preference is very different from a belief about objective facts. "Affirmative action is net harmful" is objectively true or false as a statement about the world whereas "I'd rather not have a cup of tea right now" is purely about what's going on inside your mind.
Fair. For whatever reason I couldn't get it out of my head as applicable here, but your comment nicely illustrates the difference. Thanks!
"Affirmative action is net harmful" is not "objectively true or false"; it requires both a factual position on AA's effects and a value judgement about whether that outcome is better than the alternative.
That is true but either way it's much more tied up in disputed questions of fact than preferences are.
Huh? How is:
> "I'd rather not have a cup of tea right now" is purely about what's going on inside your mind.
Not also an objective fact? In fact, like most things, there's lots of possible 'objective facts' related to the above, e.g. is the person engaging in that verbal behavior lying, 'being polite', or or are they wrong about their own preferences?
It's an objective fact whether a given person has a given preference or not. But if you and I have different preferences that doesn't mean one of us is objectively wrong
> But if you and I have different preferences that doesn't mean one of us is objectively wrong
I agree, practically at least!
But the way your other comment was written seemed to imply that 'things going on inside someone's mind' weren't objective facts (at all), which seems just wrong.
It was a little sloppy wording but the point is that there's an important distinction between beliefs and preferences.
Isn't the simplest explanation for the b&b scenario that they like small talk more than they believe your friend doesn't like small talk, and so feel justified in expecting small talk from them anyway?
Yea, this is most likely what happened.
There's also the problem of cultural norms, which for those of us more on the analytic scale are really hard to suss out and so going back to a base axiom ("Everyone likes to talk about themselves!") seems more safe.
Imagine if you took your girlfriend at her word when you started to pick up the check on your first date and she said "Oh, I can pick that up". Even if she said it again, I would be inclined to see this as a cultural norm or a standard that I should still pick up the check.
Naturally, there are women for whom my insisting to pick up the check would be a clear sign of what Scott points out in this post. Thankfully for me, my British now-wife is of the opposite caliber and had (social) expectations that I would continue to graciously insist on paying.
There are definitely some cultural scripts that work this way. A host is supposed to be self-deprecating about the quality of their food, and the guest is supposed to say they love it. You're supposed to offer someone a gift at the holidays, they're supposed to say "no, you don't have to", and then you're supposed to give it to them anyway.
Breaking these scripts with people you know well is fine. But to break it with a new acquaintance is to insist on honesty and trust - and while honesty and trust *sound* like good things, they can be very dangerous things in some cultural contexts. (Related to why people at polite dinner parties aren't supposed to mention religion or politics.)
[Re a proposed game of Truth or Dare] “There are good reasons people don’t go around telling people their most intimate thoughts. Games like this can be really dangerous.”
“I don’t see what’s ‘dangerous’ about it.”
“You don’t have to. Other people have. That’s how it became a convention — people saw the harm excessive candor could do. That’s why there are conventions, so people don’t have to go around repeating the same mistakes over and over again.”
--Metropolitan (1990)
I think an even more interesting thing with these people is if you try to tell them to stop directly they will continue talking!
My grandmother when she starts a story she’s told me 4 times will refuse to acknowledge my interruptions and interjections informing her that she had just already told me recently.
By far though the most annoying feature of these nice older people is that the questions often lead to a long drawn out monologue about themselves.
It is almost a strategy so they can talk at you and make it hard for you to stop them.
There's also the idea that 'respecting one's elders' seems to be fast falling by the wayside as a common belief, and that today's adult generation doesn't understand or respect that rule, while the older generation does, and both arrive at expectations of their own preferences being met for different reasons.
I think it’s a cognitive issue that arrises in most people at a certain age for everyone. My grandmother was not always like that, but right as she turned 70 she became a broken record. I don’t believe it’s a conscious mechanism, I’ve tested distracting them when they won’t stop and that usually seems to work.
Most people like talking about themselves and we work to listen to others perhaps it could also be their ability to self regulate is degrading.
You have to understand... we can access any information or order anything we want at the touch of a button.
In her day, she had to walk 15 miles uphill (both ways) in the snow with no shoes just to get a cabbage to boil in a pot to share with her 15 siblings, and that was breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the week, and god darn it, she was greatful she didn't fall down in the snow.
Because at night, the ice weasels come.
This sort of thing was plausible when I was a kid and old people said it. They grew up in the 30s with Naziism and the Great Depression. Today's 70 year olds were kids in the 60s. Unless they're black, they were not experiencing any kind of tenement/sharecropper level hardship in the 60s, at least not in the U.S.
Well, it's possible that she can't process "Alec doesn't want to hear this story again" without also coming to the conclusion that "Alec thinks I'm a boring useless old fart," so she's emotionally blocked from the seemingly-trivial insight by the fact that, for her, it is necessarily attached to a much bigger and sad insight.
Now I’m sad. Always a good reminder.
Too bad she doesn’t think instead ‘ah, I will have to tell a different one of my fascinating stories’ instead.
Hmmm, would that work? Tell her you know that story and ask her to tell you about something else right away?
Or just listen politely to the story again and react appropriately. Remember that your grandparents won't be around for much longer, and once they're gone you'll probably say "Man, I'd give anything to spend one more afternoon with grandma listening to her old stories again".
Also, remember that your elders probably had a lot of patience for _your_ stupid ramblings back when you were a kid.
I guess I should credit you for having more social courage to put this in writing than I did, because I had the same thought. My grandmother died almost 30 years ago, and I loved her dearly. My memory of her face, her voice, the gentleness with which she would pat my head when I was small and sat in her lap are fading now, and it feels horribly like she almost never existed at all. If I could have her back for a day I'd listen to any number of stupid boring stories.
Suggestion- Act interested and and ask complicated questions till she loses interest. Everytime she tells the same story, ask questions. not just trivial details- but like "so given you said x, what was different y that year?" Follow up.
She will be glad you are engaged, but either 1) you get her to talking about different things 2) she can no longer just repeat herself and loses interest
also, try telling your own anecdotes that might be relevant.
The questions will work best if they involve areas that challenge her, and highlight possible philosophical differences, without being obviously confrontational.
I once had a friend and colleague who just loved to tell anecdotes. One day he started in on an anecdote which (like so many of them) was about his friend Claudio, and I was suddenly gripped with a sheer determination that, whatever it took, I was not going to hear this one. At first I gently demurred: I have heard a great many Claudio stories, I think I'll skip this one. No, seriously, I don't want you to tell me this story. Stop. Please stop. Stop now. Eventually I was curled up on my chair, fingers in my ears, almost screaming "it won't stop why can't I make it stop". This finally, was such an unexpected reaction (and it was obvious that I would not be able to hear him over the screaming) that he actually did stop, and looked at me with a very confused look on his face.
There was a pause, and I looked at him, and whispered "has it stopped" before gingerly taking my fingers out of my ears, and began to relax. At which he said "so, anyway, Claudio...". After the *second* session of putting my fingers in my ears and screaming, he finally relented.
I have a saying: as polite as possible, as rude as necessary.
Pretty sure he was deliberately messing with you with this one.
I'm not so sure. There are people in my own family just like this. Once they start talking, nothing you say or do will stop them until they've said their piece.
My father has things he thinks he *has* to say.
I finally realized that David Mantel was telling the literal truth when he said he had to say something. He had a lot to say.
I found him very wearing because I felt like I wasn't allowed to be in the conversation. If I was following my ideas of politeness, I didn't get to say anything.
And yet he said, apparently sincerely, that he respected me.
I finally asked him if he minded if I interrupted him, and he said he didn't mind. He was almost certainly telling the truth.
But there'd been so many years of my getting tired of listening to him that I didn't get back in touch. And then he died.
I'm not sure what to take away from this. I don't feel regret about not getting in touch again, but it might have been a good idea.
No, he sincerely is like that.
(I'll never get over the fact that the period goes before the closing quotation marks)
Aha! The same as the bracket problem! There are those, myself included, who will argue unto death that whether the quotation mark or bracket goes inside our outside the period depends on whether the quotes/parentheses set off the whole sentence (period inside) or only the last part of it.
I also have strong opinions about the Oxford comma, but will spare you.
Don't spare me, I got curious.
Perhaps because I tend to write by ear, to me it makes perfect sense to have a comma before the last in a list (two is not a list). There is a natural pause there. But others feel strongly that insisting on that comma is just pedantic and insufferable ....
Perhaps it's both.
Haha. I would have guessed that insisting on the lack of comma was seen as pedantic. Good to know.
"Eats, shoots & leaves" is the title of a famous book that include this subject.
I like the Oxford comma because it's less ambiguous, e.g. sometimes it's not clear if the last clause in a list separated by commas is one item or two – consistently using an Oxford comma avoids that problem. It's way easier to visually parse.
I'm not even a native English speaker and I haven't read much about this topic either - just enough to know that what's intuitive to me is definitely not remotely how it's done. My priorities would be:
1. If it's inside the quotation marks and it's a standard character (whatever that means, but not brackets of course [] ), then it should have come from the stuff being quoted!
2. You shouldn't need to look inside the quotation marks to know how to punctuate what's outside.
Exactly!
That's called "logical" or "British-style" quoting, and is what has been taught in British schools since the 1990s. As someone older than that, I was originally taught the other form, which is that a punctuation mark at the end of a quotation goes outside the quotation marks.
If my quotation is a sentence and also ends the sentence that contains the quotation, I tend to end with .". (full stop - close quote - full stop) which is wrong according to both rules.
But it's so perfectly clear! I love it, and would totally use that, if it wouldn't throw people off so badly.
Sometimes I have to remind myself not to go toooooo far, as the goal still is to communicate.
I've never noticed a problem doing this! Do it! Let's change the world :)
I do it with questions sometimes when no one is paying attention, e.g. "can I quote you a quick question?".
Jargon File on "logical punctuation" http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html
Ha!
Dang is that spot on:
> it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.
Yes! Tho I don't think of it so much as counter-intuitive as just _worng_ (ha).
This is really interesting:
> Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style ‘new’ or ‘logical’ quoting. This returns British English to the style many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and German) have been using all along.
So English has (yet again) been a weird outlier, and seemingly for some weird fashion/fad pertaining to the supposed "aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text"? I'm shocked but not surprised :)
I never understand why it isn't context-dependent:
1. He said "My name is Inigo Montoya, prepared to die." Makes sense!
2. Your password is "InigoMontaya". Also makes sense!
Putting the period inside the quotes in your 2nd example is just where I draw the line. That's just wrong.
I agree. I understand it's the convention (at least I think it is), but I can rarely bring myself to do it. Periods are another weird problem, because they both end sentences and certain abbreviations, so e.g.:
1) You should not abbreviate "inches" as "in."
2) You should not abbreviate "inches" as "in.".
3) You should not abbreviate "inches" as "in."
Yeesh.
Aren't [1] and [3] the same?
I think [2] is the clear winner!
Yes, (3) was supposed to be "in". I'm used to comment systems that allow editing and I type too fast.
I agree with you that (2) is least ambiguous, but copy-editors the world over would reject it, alas. In principle the problem occurs with any punctuation:
(4) Can you believe she said "Ask the Mr.!"?
...and it can get worse:
(5) Can you believe she said "I'm a 'Mr.'!"?
Who the fuck are "copy editors" to stop us, especially nowadays?! :)
I think a general rule of 'punctuation inside a quote is part of what's being quoted' makes [4] and [5] much less ambiguous.
As-is, per the 'copy-editors' rules, it's generally impossible to (un-ambiguously) convey what '!' and '?' normally mean when quoted:
> Can you believe that she said "Who's that?"!
I'm going to keep pretending like I don't how to rewrite the above 'correctly'.
Nah – it's perfectly understandable, better, and the only downside is that it just 'feels wrong' to (probably overly-)conscientious people :)
We can just change the rules; especially when it's a small enough change that it doesn't actually significantly impact communication.
Or do you also object _every time_ someone sends you a message that fails to follow any rule? (I don't _like_ it when people, e.g. don't capitalize _any_ letters in text, but I don't complain about it.)
But the password hash is overly conscientious, and that's who ultimately needs to understand the password. If your password is "elehpant" and you write it as "elephant", you might has well have input "butt". And passwords can have punctuation marks within - most sites even force you to sprinkle some. So I think passwords would be a case where communication demands precise rules.
I use square brackets for search, and I might use them for passwords as well. Hopefully, there's less ambiguity.
I use Markdown 'code span' syntax, e.g. "This is code: `code`" for 'precise text like what you would input into computer code'. Passwords seem to fit that use case very well.
> But the password hash is overly conscientious, and that's who ultimately needs to understand the password.
Huh? I'm confused as to whether we have anything like the same idea of 'conscientiousness' if you think a "password hash" (function?) is conscientious at all.
But you _seem_ to be agreeing with me that precision would be important in the case where you want to communicate a password. My point is that extra precision is useful in other scenarios and the cost seems pretty minimal to me (ignoring the almost inevtiable blitzkrieg by grammar Nazis).
I believe we agree and just have been misunderstanding each other since my "Putting the period [...]" reply. (I'll take the blame)
I know. That’s how a copy editor wants it but I always think it looks wrong.
You might enjoy this book
https://www.amazon.com/Dreyers-English-Utterly-Correct-Clarity/dp/0812995708/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=dwyers+english&qid=1620313481&sprefix=dwyers&sr=8-1
Thanks
Don't fall into that trap! Punctuation is for us and we're free to change it to be more sensible!
I deliberately _include_ (relevant) punctuation in quotation marks now, and, if the quote is at the end of a sentence, punctation _after_ the ending quotation mark.
It's more sensible! Fuck the old rules!
My first idea is something like this:
People don't actually have explicit models of other people. They have patterns of behavior that are distributed across many different situations. When I say I have a mental model of an introvert, what I really mean is that I have behavioral patches that tagged 'introvert', and when it's time to deal with one I swap in the behavioral patches instead of my default behaviors.
This means that if you tell a person that your friend is an introvert, and they don't already have the relevant patches for all sorts of different situations, they find it very hard to change, because there isn't such a thing as a centralized "models of people" database where they can update a handful of traits. They have this entire distributed-across-life-situations pattern set that is hard to change.
My personal observation is that people who are generally smart are good at adapting and people who don't seem that smart are worse, and my inference is that doing this distributed system update is pretty cognitively expensive.
Clarification: I totally have what FEELS LIKE a mental model of an introvert, but my idea is that this is illusory / downstream of the distributed behavior-metis set. I notice I'll nod and consciously register other people's preferences I find both unusual and complex, but when the time comes to act on that conscious information I get confused and flub it a surprisingly high fraction of the time.
well, "introvert" is just a sign that points to sets of similar types. There are different introverts- or more correctly, there are different people to whom a label introvert can apply and describe the territory.
I think this largely depends. Some people do the mental model thing, some people see others as more individual. It's also a culture/context thing. Some people categorize some groups of people as types and others as individuals (this happens with racism)
Lots of people lie about their preferences, either because they don't know them, they don't think it's okay or polite to hold the preferences they do, or to manipulate others. Most people implicitly know this, and that makes someone claiming they have unusual preferences weaker evidence that they actually do than you'd think if you assumed everybody was honest about their preferences.
I came here to say this. Anecdotal example: when my mom turned 50 and I wished her a happy birthday she said she didn't want her birthday acknowledged anymore because getting old makes her sad. So on her 51st I treated it like any other day and she was upset I forgot her birthday.
Generally when people express an unusual preference like hating presents or birthdays I take them at face value and respect the preference but I always wonder in the back of my mind if it's a trap.
50 is one of those milestone birthdays, so it is a big step on the "you are getting older and now death is coming closer" realisation. So your mother probably was being honest when she didn't want that acknowledged or celebrated. But a year later, she was now used to being 50, she didn't feel all that different, it wasn't so bad - and thus ignoring her birthday did feel uncaring.
People change preferences or don't even know what preferences they have. It is hard to figure out, and you weren't wrong in what you did - you were only doing what she asked! - but sometimes you have to dig a little.
Like Scott's girlfriend - she probably was honest about "Mandated holiday/occasion gift-giving makes me feel weird" but equally she was pleased to get a gift. The unexpected small, thoughtful gift from someone who knows you well is a nice thing to get, whereas having to tell someone what big expensive present you want for the birthday/Christmas deal feels like a lot of trouble and leaves the recipient trying to decide how expensive is *too* expensive and if the giver will think that what they asked for is *too* expensive and that they are being greedy etc. so it's more trouble than it's worth. The cliché bunch of red roses can be unwelcome because it's the cliché, don't have to think about it, gift, but a small bouquet of something colourful or sweet-smelling, or maybe they really like cacti! - that's different. That's showing you put thought into something that would please them and you know them well enough to know their tastes, and it's just "I saw this and thought of you and it makes me happy to make you happy" with no score-keeping. That's important; it doesn't work if it's "I got you that cactus so now you owe me the favour of letting me watch the game" and so on.
>> Lots of people lie about their preferences, either because they don't know them, they don't think it's okay or polite to hold the preferences they do, or to manipulate others.
> I came here to say this. Anecdotal example: when my mom turned 50 and I wished her a happy birthday she said she didn't want her birthday acknowledged anymore because getting old makes her sad. So on her 51st I treated it like any other day and she was upset I forgot her birthday.
You came to the wrong conclusion. Lots of people lie about their preferences. But there's no reason to think your mother was lying here. I feel the same way about my birthday. Acknowledging it is bad. Not acknowledging it is not great either. The problem comes from the fact that *the birthday itself* is bad. You can't fix that. No matter what you do, you'll be part of a bad situation, because there is no option for the situation to be good.
The tactful thing to do, I guess, is to treat it like a special day without specifically acknowledging it's her birthday. :-/
I agree, lying about preferences is the biggest reason for this behavior I've experienced. Especially for the gift giving anecdote. There's such a strong norm against asking for gifts that basically any denial of a preference for gifts should be meet with strong suspicion.
I'm also reminded of the Japanese norm of refusing things the first time, with the expectation that they will be offered multiple times with increasing insistence.
For anyone unwittingly trying the similar tactic of offering to pay for my meal without wanting me to accept, please be advised that I hate fake-fighting about the bill and I will accept your offer to pay even if I know you don't sincerely want to pay. I really don't care who pays, as long as we don't have to fake-argue about it. If you suggest I pay for the whole thing, I will probably oblige. I'll consider it an exchange whereby I pay you not to make me argue about who is going to pay the bill.
This would make for an interesting game- Name preferences you have that you feel others would look down on.
(In the punk scene for example, I have seen people hide their NOFX and Offspring records)
Yes, I think way too many people are overthinking this. People lie about preferences all the time. They *particularly* lie about not having common preferences that other people might find burdensome to satisfy. So when you tell someone that you don't have a particular very common preference, the proper Bayesian updating is "it is now only 90% certain that they have this preference, and they will most likely be pleased by my efforts to satisfy it".
I mean, technically this whole community is about overthinking things and yes, I agree, that he completely left out the normie habit of falsifying preferences. Hell, in many circles one might expect that Scott telling his hosts to ignore his friend was a prank.
I agree - sometimes it's even expected to lie about certain things, like gift giving.
"Maybe I'm biased / placebo-ed / just seeing things"
Nope. Based on the article, you're just the same person you are complaining about, what we plebs refer to as an "ass".
Like the rest of us.
Why do you make this conclusion?
Just a thought. Even though your friend didn't like the talking, both of you left thinking they were actually nice. Maybe that's the (hansonianly hidden?) motivation.
I’m in the weird position that (despite my own lack of social skills) I feel, rightly or wrongly, extremely confident of what’s going on here, and it wasn’t a possibility even mentioned in the post. The B&B hosts thought that you and your friend were engaging in “Jewish grandmother behavior.” I.e., “I’m completely fine, I’ll just sit here in the dark, I don’t need anything” — meaning I *do* need something, I want you to help / engage with me, but I want you to freely offer it, without my needing to explicitly request it. The hosts thought that you and your friend just “didn’t want to cause trouble” by “expecting” or “demanding” small talk, so that by making small talk anyway, they were being all the nicer to you. As your story illustrates, this is one of *the* stereotypical behaviors of neurotypicals that confuse nerds, the literal-minded, and those on the spectrum. (Or am I missing details of the story that would invalidate this explanation?)
The weird thing about this is that it was Scott who told them, after nicely engaging,that the friend, who wasn't even there, didn't like that.
Also, in the girlfriend/presents case, Scott's first hypothesis was that it might actually be "some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation", which makes me think that Scott is not so clueless with these dynamics and there may be other details that make him not consider your hypothesis as too likely for the B&B case.
I think you're right that Scott, and people like him, aren't "clueless" – but they do want, and actually can achieve with similar people, honest 'object level' communication.
But it's _also_ the case that even 'normies' _regularly_ fail to communicate with each other because of these same dynamics, sometimes to _spectacularly_ disastrous effects, and that a lot of these failures could _easily_ be avoided or greatly mitigated by actual honest and direct communication.
I am not expert in social situations, but I am not sure this explanation is correct. Telling somebody you are introverted seems like an oddly specific way to say "Don't mind me [but secretly do talk to me]". I can't imagine a non-introvert ever telling somebody they were introverted in the hopes of secretly wanting conversation.
To people who are familiar with the concept of "introvert" and with people self-labeling as such (i.e., anyone who is reading this site, among others) your reasoning sounds reasonable. But people who aren't familiar with the trope will just think, "that's odd that this person is doing the usual pretending-to-seem-low-maintenance thing with an unusual new word - kids these days!"
The chain of inferences in their mind would be "introverted just a fancy word for "shy", so she is shy, therefore we need to be extra nice and welcoming to help her feel at home."
Maybe some PUA flirtation type strategy.
Do you not know about Guess cultures vs Ask cultures? TLDR: Anyone who has internalized Guess culture will automatically ignore any statement like "I don't want a present" or "I don't want extensive hospitality", because in a Guess culture, making those statements is (merely) proper courtesy and the proper response is to ignore them.
Yes, I think this is the correct answer. The things Scott mentioned may have had a causal role in creating Guess culture, but the culture is now somewhat independent of those things.
Speculation: Guess culture vs. Ask culture is also ties to extroversion vs. introversion. Two extroverts might actually know each others’ preferences better than they know their own, given the amount of time and effort devoted to paying attention to others instead of self-reflection. Vice versa with introverts.
+1 for this being a Guess vs Ask disconnect. As far as I understand Guess Culture, there is no string of (polite) words you can utter that will convince someone that you don't want the standard thing. At least I haven't found one that reliably works.
There probably is such a string of words, but it takes several months of repeated interactions to say that string.
Yes, agreed. But I would frame that as you having slowly acquainted the other person with Ask Culture.
However, as Deiseach mentions downthread, Guess Culture also has some default ways of asking for some less standard things, such as "if you don't want tea, refuse three times". Perhaps part of my problem is lack of practice with Guess Culture. It doesn't work for truly weird or unexpected preferences, though.
Guess cultures tend to be culturally homogeneous - you don't need to ask/explain/believe polite protestations, because everyone just KNOWS what is appropriate in this situation. Ask cultures are often heterogeneous ones; since we can't reliably guess or count on others to guess correctly, we must be (uncouthly) specific.
Perhaps the B&B couple grew up within a homogeneous culture, and now are in a heterogeneous one but haven't adapted well.
I suspect that your grandmother did think that your girlfriend was lying *to herself*. It's an important distinction. The happy boyfriend in the miserable relationship demonstrates our capacity for self deception quite well. Perhaps old people underestimate youngsters ability to know what they want; and simultaneously overestimate their ability to know what youngsters want. (Drawing on their experiences as a former youngster)
I call this sort of thing the Golden Rule Fallacy: applying "do to others as you'd like them to do to you" too literally or narrowly. "I like chocolate cake, so I'll buy everyone else chocolate cake" rather than being able to abstract away a level and go "I like it when people buy me my favourite cake, so I'll buy them *their* favourite cake."
People forcing small talk onto introverts is a good example.
Going back the other way, if a new person joins a group I'm in, I have to make an effort to remember "they might feel more welcomed if I talk to them" rather than thinking "I'm sure they won't want me to bother them."
I've heard something like this called "The Platinum Rule". Rather than "Treat others as you wish to be treated", it's more like "Treat people as you think THEY would prefer to be treated".
+1 for The Platinum Rule
I like how in the bobverse books, they come across some aliens and to them, that's the Silver Rule, while "Do onto others as they would wish done onto themselves" is the golden rule.
That's a good point!
Jordan Peterson wrote/said something I thought was very interesting about The Golden Rule: treating people as you would want to be treated _doesn't_ mean treating them exactly as they verbally/explicitly demand or request.
It's very common for people to _later_ appreciate someone else's behavior that, at the time, they didn't want (or thought that they didn't want).
I think of it as something like the 'consequentialism corollary' of The Golden Rule: treat people as you'd want to be treated _from the perspective of the 'wisest version' of yourself_.
That's like the opposite of Scott's point. That's like a licence for people like the B&B owners to ignore the stated wishes of Scott's friend and think they know better. It doesn't allow for people genuinely having different preferences from "the wisest version of yourself".
Platinum Rule > Golden Rule > consequentialism corollary.
Well, I think it's technically much worse than what you describe – you have to be able to accurately predict the entire evolution of the universe that's part of any future 'light cones' of causality (for which you're 'responsible').
But part of why I can imagine some people, like the B&B hosts in the example, 'ignoring' people's explicitly stated preferences is that that's a very common thing to do, e.g. with young children.
I'm more (naturally) an 'ask culture' person myself, so I don't like people ignoring my own explicitly communicated preferences, and, because I don't like that, I generally don't do that to others (even when they probably _would_ want me to do so).
But ultimately there's no escaping that, per the degree to which you are (or assume) responsibility for someone, or their wellbeing at all (which we should, to some degree), then you can't _just_ satisfy their explicit preferences and wash your hands of the consequences. You have to actually try to know whether it's better or worse to give them what they say they want, or give them what you think would be best. And sometimes you really will know better!
I think part of the issue here might be that Scott is an "ask culture" person who is puzzled by "guess culture" people:
https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#830421
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/change-life-asker-guesser
Wow, thank you for those links! Fascinating.
Agreed. (Guess culture people confuse me.)
I'm not one for casual genetic explanations but how talkative/unthinkingly social you are seems like one that could easily be influenced by the genome. They may very well have intended to say less but their nature is just to overly socialize without realizing it.
As you get older, your neuroplasticity decreases, and you become less likely to update priors. Certainly you wouldn't do it just from a stranger saying something.
> part of me will always refuse to believe that people enjoy living in New York City, and whenever I talk to friends in New York I have to resist the urge to ask them if they're okay
So my specific reasons for sorta liking it here aside - I will point out that you live in America's second-densest urban area, so evidently you do enjoy some of the consequences of density (probably more "having enough people to be able to surround myself with like-minded people" than "lots of traffic") in a way that would be equally incomprehensible to a lot of more rural people.
(Granted that NYC has some extra disadvantages mostly unrelated to density, like terrible trash management. But if you model "why do I like Berkeley"+"what if those disadvantages just bothered me less", it seems resolvable)
Can you think of another axis on which many people would place SF and NYC on opposite ends?
The east-west axis?
Yeah, it must be this. Scott just can't understand why people might want to celebrate new year sooner.
I don't like the Bay but I have some close friends here who I'm incapable of leaving no matter how tempting it is.
What cities do you like? I want to move back to the US (currently an expat), but after living in Asia's relatively well-built cities it's hard for me to judge which American cities are actually liveable these days.
Unfortunately I find that people are very often wrong about this kind of thing.
For several years it was something like common wisdom that Jar Jar Binks was the reason why The Phantom Menace was bad. People may genuinely not remember the degree to which the character (and actor) were held responsible for the film's crappiness, followed closely in blame by Jake Lloyd's performance. It wasn't until many years later that the zeitgeist shifted, in no small part because of the Red Letter Media reviews, to more of a view that The Phantom Menace and the prequels in general were bad because the script/story was extremely bad and Jar Jar was more of a symptom of a larger and more insuperable badness.
So I think here we have an instance of literally millions of people being wrong about their preferences. And if you pay attention to art criticism, this is more the norm than the exception. People usually do know when they don't like a piece of art (music, fiction, film, etc.), but they are usually wrong about why they don't like it. In other words, if you fixed the specific thing they said they didn't like, they would probably still not like it. What we do is form immediate visceral/nonverbal/emotional reactions, and then confabulate an explanation for that reaction. If you've trained yourself by actually trying to create art, or do art criticism for a living or something, then your odds of being right about why you don't like a thing are probably better ... but even then, it's not a sure thing. A movie critic's ability to point out a poor shot framing doesn't actually mean the shot framing was the *reason* she didn't like the movie.
If people self-knowledge about their artistic preferences is this poor, then why should we expect their self-knowledge about other domains to be that much better? More data? Maybe. But what if you've just confabulated your preferences as a way of justifying what are actually contingent emotional responses? You got yelled at really loud for writing in a library book when you were three years old, and now you hate libraries, and you say it's because of the smell. But the reason you hate the smell ... is because of the first thing. And if the smell was fixed, you would still hate libraries.
Yes, confabulation seems like a good explanation of why people are resistant to this (though, of course, they wouldn't put it that way themselves!)
I mean, there are legitimately different reasons to like or dislike TPM, and I think you might be claiming more of a change in individuals' preferences than reflects reality.
Some people just don't like comedy. The comedy in TPM consists mostly of Jar Jar (there's a little bit with droids as well). If someone found the amount of comedy intolerable, they're not wrong to say they hated it because of Jar Jar. (I don't like comedy, but Jar Jar wasn't enough to make me say TPM as a whole was bad; I actually like it.)
> People usually do know when they don't like a piece of art (music, fiction, film, etc.), but they are usually wrong about why they don't like it.
The Red Letter Media guys call this out explicitly when they say: "You might not have noticed -- but your brain did.".
I'm now going to commit blasphemy. The two numbered Star Wars movies I liked the most were The Last Jedi and Attack of the Clones, in that order.
Really? I don't run in truly deep-geek circles but everyone of my group just thought that Jar Jar was a horrifyingly bad nugget of awful in a generally bad stew; fun to talk about but whose removal wouldn't have made the meal tasty.
Why doesn't a simple model apply? Assume most people a) operate largely by social norms/defaults, b) don't have much occasion to modify their behavior, c) don't have a burning desire to satisfy other people's oddball preferences. This would predict that people will acknowledge preferences more when:
1. They don't have to violate usual social norms to do so
2. They are used to accommodating behavior of this kind
3. The behavior is unusual
Let's apply to the original example. Not exchanging a pleasant word with a guest/neighbor is in many parts of the US seen as *extremely rude.* Further, finding such chit-chat deeply unpleasant is *unusual.* And it sounds like your hosts are not used to accommodating unusual behavioral norms. So we should not be surprised that a brief/causal conversation did not shift their conduct, or (from their perspective) cause them to rudely ignore a guest. Also, old people are often chatty!
Prediction: the hosts would have done far better acknowledging a more usual preference that did not require norm-violation. E.g., "Please don't make noise before 8am, we keep late hours on vacation."
I don't see a contradiction. If the goal of kindness is to feel kind then just letting things be maybe good for others but not very rewarding. Put another way, many acts of kindness are a little selfish.
- the hosts also wanted to feel hospitable
- the gift giver also wanted to feel great at gift giving
- the therapist also wanted to feel competent
Maybe all the protagonist in the article are rational.
It takes a certain dose humility, selflessness and/or respect to not seek credit for other's joys.
There is a French saying that roughly translates to, “to know all is to forgive all.”
You can’t understand NYC (Manhattan) but if someone walked you through their day - work is 8 min away, best friend is 3 min away, doctor is 11 min, favorite restaurant 9 min, favorite bar 4 min, supermarket 6 min, I’m sure you could understand.
Respectfully, this the opposite of my own experience of living in Manhattan. Among the innumerable aggravations the city provides are that the overhead of traveling anywhere is substantial due to the necessity of walking to / from and waiting for a subway and then travel along it including various stops that are not one's own--basically, it's impossible to get anywhere in under 20 minutes and that's under essentially optimal conditions. The irony of New York's cheek-by-jowl construction is that while its density is definitionally "things are closer together," it takes longer to travel a mile or two in New York (and heaven forbid somewhere more remote like Coney Island) than to travel ten miles in a rural area, with the various indignities of public transit as an added bonus.
As someone who deeply hates driving - an environment that forces me to concentrate on travel - and is entirely capable of walking to a subway stop station, catching a subway, exiting the subway and walking to my destination without consciously stopping reading my book, I tend to regard driving as being an enormously inferior mode of transport, to the point that I will happily take a great deal longer by public transit than suffer the hardship of driving.
Also, I've never driven anywhere in less than 20 minutes. Checking the oil, coolant and washer fluid levels before leaving, plus finding parking and parking safely, plus getting into and out of a car, which is never an easy or graceful process, is going to add up to an easy 20 minutes to get anywhere.
Checking the *washer fluid* levels before leaving on a five-minute trip? You're doing it wrong. You're doing it *painfully* wrong, which is why you find it an unpleasant experience. Even with oil and coolant, there's no need to check more often than every time you fill the gas tank. I'm guessing you've been trained so thoroughly to do this wrong that you couldn't do it right without feeling bad about yourself, which leaves you in an ugly trap w/re the utility of convenient short driving trips.
When I drive to the nearest grocery store, it is literally a two-minute trip. Literally literally, and much more convenient than a ten-minute walk while trying to carry a week's groceries.
How do you get into and out of a car that fast?
You have to open the door, sit on the seat, lift one leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill, then, squeeze your knee under the wheel with one hand while pushing against the frame of the car with the other to get enough leverage to twist your body to turn your back into the seat, then lift the other leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill. Then you have to belt up, then catch your breath enough that you can concentrate on the road, and only then drive.
And getting out is worse, because getting your feet out and turning your body is now uphill, and you have to make sure not to hit your head on the top of the door frame.
Checking oil, coolant and washer fluid takes no time compared to the physical process of getting into and out of a car.
I've never checked oil, coolant, or washer fluid once in my life.
Not to be rude, but are you a larger person? Or do you possibly have a physical disability of some kind?
I'm a fairly big guy (>6' tall and fairly stocky) and I haven't had that much trouble getting into the driver's seat of a car in my life. Maybe I need to adjust the mirrors and steering column if someone else has been driving it, but even then the process is still under thirty seconds tops.
I injured my knees and back playing football as a college freshman - about 30 years ago, and before I learned to drive. I don't generally think of myself as disabled, but I do have very limited flexibility, which is probably why getting into and out of cars is so hard.
Also, I'm 1.98m tall, ie about 6'5.5"; the few extra centimetres make a surprising amount of difference - I regularly find I can't get the seat to go back far enough to get my knees comfortable with my feet on the pedals.
At a petite 1.90 meters, I just plant myself in the seat facing about fifty degrees to the side, rotate my torso forward, put one hand on the steering wheel for support/leverage, lift my legs (using their own muscles) to the right height that I can then pivot them over the doorsill but under the steering wheel. I'd be surprised if it takes five seconds.
I can imagine cars small and ergonomically poor enough that I'd have the problems you describe, but that would only be a problem when I was renting sight unseen. You describe old injuries that might make getting into any car a chore, but you shouldn't settle for the experience you describe without shopping around - nor assume that the only answer would be an automotive behemoth like the Canyonero. I have a friend who was a full 2.05 meters and, after trying several models, found he fit comfortably in a Ford Focus.
How do you get into and out of a car that fast?
You have to open the door, sit on the seat, lift one leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill, then, squeeze your knee under the wheel with one hand while pushing against the frame of the car with the other to get enough leverage to twist your body to turn your back into the seat, then lift the other leg with both hands to get your foot over the doorsill. Then you have to belt up, then catch your breath enough that you can concentrate on the road, and only then drive.
And getting out is worse, because getting your feet out and turning your body is now uphill, and you have to make sure not to hit your head on the top of the door frame.
Checking oil, coolant and washer fluid takes no time compared to the physical process of getting into and out of a car.
If you live in a city w/a lot of slush, you need to know what your washer fluid level is! But checking each time is certainly not necessary. When I do use a car, it's car share, and I LOVE that the co-op takes care of all that. City living is great! My colleagues who live a similar distance from work get there sometimes faster than I do, and often much, much more slowly, but I always know how long it will take me, AND I can read a novel on the way. Plus those 10 min walks to get to and from the subway really add up, for my fitness. It means I can afford a doughnut stop on the way!
I was not clear; those colleagues who drive. They have chosen to live in neighbourhoods where housing is much cheaper, but transit sucks. What I pay extra for housing I gain in not owning and maintaining cars, and in lower aggravation.
I'll add my personal example.
Some time ago, my mother and I lived together for a few months. I had just started a diet. It took me forever to get her to learn that she wasn't helping by cooking for me, let alone yummy fatty food - she knows I usually like food so... that's that. And every time I had to tell her, or had to choose whether to eat or not what she had made, it felt like I was about to harm her much more than eating it would harm me.
One time, she noticed I was a little bit down, asked why, and I told her that in part it was because that day I had screwed up badly with my diet. Her response: go get ice-cream to cheer me up.
In the end she was much better, but it was a slower update than reasonable, and I had to compromise on the way. It seems to me like it was some sort of slow bayesian update together with the fact that she clearly got something herself out of cooking for me.
There is a certain subset of American office workers that will bake 100 dozen cookies for even the measliest maybe-holiday even if they know that every other person in the office is on a diet and would prefer no cookies.
I might be able to give you a small example of where you're doing this thing.
B&Bs are widely known as the place you stay if you want talkative hosts. If you don't want that, you stay in a hotel. I certainly avoid B&Bs most of the time for this reason.
Maybe I'm wrong about it being a widely known preference. Or maybe you didn't know this. Maybe it's your first time in a B&B. But I like to think there's at least a decent possibility that you were informed that B&Bs are hardcore into the talkative preference. It would explain the voice in your head that said they weren't going to respect your request for your friend's peace and quiet.
But you booked one. While these people are pretty obviously more on the "ignore preferences" side of things, would it be fair to call this specific case an instance of mutually ignored preferences? That is did you ignore that B&Bs were a talking space, booking one for an introverted person, much as they ignored that some people are introverted?
I do not mean to accuse. I'm genuinely curious if this narrative carries water, and if not, why not.
I'm not sure that the preference-ignorers are acting irrationally here. People are *really* bad at predicting what will make them happy, to the point where "things that usually make people happy" might actually be a better predictor than "things people say they want."
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, “People
Don’t know what they want until I tell them.” 2.14 trillion dollars say he wasn’t wrong.
"If I'd asked peple what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." (Henry Ford)
Well, no, 2.14 trillion dollars say he can convince people that they want things. There is a difference between satisfying an existing need and peddling addictive drugs.
Yep. I am very introverted and in the B&B situation I would absolutely be "please do not talk to me." But I usually do enjoy hearing hosts' stories and information about the area despite my reticence for smalltalk.
Would Scott prefer that the talkative BnB scenario had never happened? Probably not as it resulted in his essay. So in the end the hosts probably did the right thing.
This, but even moreso. They may think, "their preferences are wrong. This will not make them happy this time, but over the long run it will help them update their preferences." The movie Gran Torino is mostly about this dynamic.
What about paying attention to how people are reacting? If someone is relaxing during a conversation, that's one indicator, and if they're hunching and their is immobile, that's a different indicator.
I grant it isn't reliably that simple, since people can lie with body language, too, and are frequently under social pressure to do so.
People should absolutely respond to body language cues to the best of their ability. Sometimes the best of their ability isn't very good.
I'm another vote for the ask v guess dichotomy. A lot of my childhood experiences are of WANTING things and not making action for them / saying I DIDN'T want them, because that would be BAD and SELFISH and MORE WORDS FOR BAD.
I am no longer like this. But I expect there are more people who are like this than there are people who actually don't want a present, even if it's left on the doorstop with a signed note guaranteeing lack of expectation of reciprocity, etc.
A friend of mine has a totally different and (to me) mysterious mode of communication in which what they say often does not really mean anything. This might explain the phenomena you describe for at least some people because if what they say often does not mean anything, then what other people say might not mean anything to them.
Some examples to illustrate what I mean.
1) in the early days of covid, they described it as 'worse than world war 2' and several months later as 'just the flu'. What's stranger is that they recently met somebody who lived through world war 2 as a child and heard stories about rationing. We had this little exchange:
Them: 'I realise I do not actually know much about wwii after talking to them.'
Me: 'Now do you see why I think you were wrong to compare covid to wwii'
Them: 'No, I still think covid is worse'
Me: 'So you admit that you do not know much about wwii, but you still think covid is worse'
Them: 'Yes'
2) They often exaggerate in what I consider an extreme fashion, to the point where I can't tell what they're communicating. Imagine somebody using the same hyperbolic expression to describe many possible scenarios (e.g. 'all my friends say they like X' could correspond to '2 friends said X out of 30 friends i spoke to' or 'all the hundred or so friends I met in a party yesterday said they like X'). Sometimes I challenge them. One time, they got frustrated with me and complained: "You always exaggerate what I say". In their mind, they are not the ones exaggerating (despite literally exaggerating) but it is me who is exaggerating by interpreting their words badly.
3) Sometimes they say things that get to me, or frustrate me, or affect me in some way. To try to explain themselves, they often use the phrase 'it is *just* talking' or 'I am *just* talking'. I do not fully understand what it means, but I think it is something like 'you should not put weight on what I say because it is just a bunch of words out of my mouth'.
My overall takeaway from this is that there are people who often say things in which the literal words they choose have little weight on what they are communicating, and it is more context and emotion that do the communication.
Some people use words exclusively as tools to influence the internal state of those they are interacting with with no respect to the meanings of the words used. Don’t know if that’s what’s going on with your friend but when I read the part about exaggeration that’s what stood out (they want you to adopt the belief they are professing by making an appeal to normality, which is made stronger if more than two people they know hold it.) I believe this to be a somewhat common communication mode.
They are not trying to influence me, just telling me a story. Again, just speculating, but I think a another part of it is that they assume that I *do* know what they mean even though there is no possible way I could know what they mean. Almost like they have a weak theory of mind.
The point of telling a story *is* to influence you, though not necessarily in any deep or lasting way - it's just a way to get you to feel or think something in the moment (and maybe something less literal than what you or I would normally be trying to get someone to feel or think by telling a story).
Look at Harry Frankfurt's essay, "On Bullshit": http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
I just taught this a few weeks ago, and in the middle there's a story that might help understand the other side of this. Ludwig Wittgenstein gets mad at his friend who said she "feels like a dog who's been run over", because Wittgenstein thinks there's no way the friend could know what that's like! Most of us are fine with this level of non-literalness, but not Wittgenstein. And it sounds like your friend is way down on the opposite end from Wittgenstein.
BTW, the 'don't get offended/hurt/angry about what I said, I was just talking/joking/whatever' is often used as an easy out by people who meant every word they said but now want plausible deniability. They want to continue being aggressive to you while undermining your ability to confront them on it.
If they ever turn it back, to how unreasonable YOU are to have taken offense at what they said, and don't you have a sense of humour? Then you know.
Some people think "everyone is like me" and can't grasp others having different preferences.
I think the main benefit of MBTI and similar personality category exercises is just to break down the resistance and drive home that some people are different. (I'm thinking of a boss who wanted to reward me by dragging me to a minor league baseball game. It took some effort by this nerd to convince him that someone else would enjoy it more.)
There is a big debate in the autism community about labeling. Do you want to label someone as autistic. In the case of Scott’s friend, if he said she was autistic and was very uncomfortable with chit chat, I’m certain they would have respected that. But short of a “label” people are going to default to the preferences of the median customer/student, etc.
Yeah, part of the problem here is that Scott's idea of "introverted, doesn't like small talk" is different to most normal people's idea of "introverted, doesn't like small talk", because Scott tends to hang out with weird people.
As a proud normie, I'd describe myself as "introverted, doesn't like small talk" but to me that means I'm happiest with a couple of minutes of formulaic small talk and don't _really_ want to tell you my whole life story; it definitely doesn't mean that I fly into a panic at the sound of the words "how was your trip?"
For contrast, at one point when someone in a Chinese class I was taking asked me "how are you?", someone else saw me -- as usual -- struggling to respond and remarked "it's always such a hard question for you!"
I have a nasty suspicion that the more "normal" someone is, where I mostly mean "fits the local hegemonic paradigm", the less able they will be to conceive of people who aren't just like them. All things being equal, of course.
Or wearing my aggressive autistic hat, the less autistic they are. AFAICT, most non-autistics have a "theory of mind" that amounts to "if I introspect how I would feel in whatever situation, that will tell me what the other person feels".
Many people have a built in exception for other kinds of people, i.e. Them, who have somewhat inexplicable preferences - foreigners "talk funny"; women are inscrutable (aka "from Venus"); the local oppressed minority all conform to their local bad stereotype. ...
A few people overcome this built in limitation. AFAICT, anyone can do it, with effort, but it's easier for the non-hegemonic, and probably also for autistics qua autistics. But the few people who have really good social skills - not ordinary extrovert ability to interact well with folks similar to them - have clearly learned it.
I don't know whether it spills over to believing statements of preference - but I do know that a good salesperson can home in on why the customer is interested, what problem they are trying to solve, etc. That seems to me to be much the same thing, but often with less explicit information.
This sounds a lot like my understanding of W.E.B. DuBois's idea of "double consciousness" - a black person in the United States knows how black Americans think, and *also* (out of necessity) knows something about how white Americans think, whereas white Americans can usually get by with ignoring how black Americans think.
Your point is to generalize this to any cognitive minority.
This somehow fits well, in my mind, with the Guess/Ask distinction above. Must update that prior. Thank you!
That would suggest black Americans would be better able to pass a racial Turing test. I don't know if one has ever been carried out.
What do you mean by a "racial Turing test"?
I would assume "convince a stranger that you're a different race" (presumably over the phone or via text communication, rather than in-person; the last would be very difficult).
I recently saw a comedy skit where an old black phone salesman was tutoring a young black phone salesman: “no, you have to use your white voice”.
Sorry to Bother You is a movie with that premise.
I was thinking via text communication, as most Turing tests now use. I was also inspired by Bryan Caplan's idea of an "ideological Turing test". Turing himself was inspired by an existing game where you try to guess whether a man or woman wrote something.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
This is scarcely a year after Sorry to Bother You and BlackkKlansman were both fairly popular and award winnings film about exactly this thing.
I certainly know a lot more black Americans who can speak both General American and AAVE than white Americans who can do the same - and while that's not the same thing, it's certainly part of the story.
For what it's worth, the very best salesmen I have known are seriously introverted. They feel social signals with exquisite sensitivity, and they know damn well when the customer is resistant, bored, hostile, et cetera, but they press on anyway because it's their job.
I surmise an argument can be made that in some cases introversion is a result of *excess* sensitivity to social signals -- they bombard you too painfully, with too many implied tribal demands. At least in the case of this kind of salesman it seems to fit. They have phenomenal social antennae -- but that means it's as if everyone is shouting at them all the time, with all these social demands. Notice me, leave me alone, fulfill this or that drive, say I'm pretty/smart/powerful, ignore this faux pas, subscribe to my paranoia, et cetera.
Their awareness of the signals is what indeed makes them a good salesman -- but it's personally painful to them. After they finish the day, they have to go have a stiff drink, and some of them end up with drinking problems.
Your theory of "*excess* sensitivity" I think is part of what's going on, for some people.
Personally, I thought for years that I just didn't 'get' (most) people. I now think it's more like I'm _confused_, and overwhelmed, by all of the _conflicting_ info people 'give off'.
Well a lot of the skill (speaking strictly algorithmically) is probably an effective filter. That is, the way the neural net (the real one inside the skull) learns to detect meaningful patterns in nonverbal communication (or probably even verbal ha ha) is *after* the preprocessor in the sensory cortex strips out 99% of the information coming from the other person and only passes in what has a high probability of ending up meaningful.
After all, there's a similar division of labor at work in simpler sensory processing, e.g. detecting important objects in the visual field -- there's preprocessing layers, some in the retina itself, that do stuff like detect edges and motion, and it's this stripped-down priority-ranked data that gets fed to the visual cortex of the brain for final object detection. I think it's reasonable to assume more abstract "object" (e.g. emotional state) detection works in a similar way, there's a preprocessing filter that removes noise and low-significance dat, and there's a higher level pattern matcher that hooks up the intermediate data objects with meanings.
So if things are going wrong, it's totally possible that the problem is in either stage. Some people may have flaws in their pattern-matcher, some in their preprocessing filter, for example, and while both may result in lowered competence in detecting emotional state (for example), they may have quite different other symptoms, including quite different internal experiences.
In the case of the one woman I know in the sales biz, she's turned what would otherwise be a crippling flaw -- a poor ability to filter out and ignore the emotional state of others -- into a career strength. But she does have an alcohol problem, so there's a cost.
That's a very good point, about the relevant details of visual processing.
But I can also imagine a _lot_ of the same 'mind theorizing' even with my eyes closed; nor do I think that even the congenitally blind are totally 'emotionally blind'.
But it's still true that a lot of this info is or can be visual. And I'd expect other sensory perception to work similarly, even if it isn't quite as elaborate as vision is.
I think it's also significant that even people that are overall very good at reading other people can still fail spectacularly! Humans are hard to model!
I doubt the "autistics qua autistics" bit. I don't think it's *easier* so much as that the world keeps kicking us in the face until we figure it out. I'm pretty sure I started out with the same "everyone is just like me" null hypothesis as everyone else does - it's just that I was beaten and teased out of it by the time I was 12.
"Group A is subjected to beatings if they assume X, Group B gets told once or twice a year that ~X but assuming X gives them decent results in daily life" is more than enough reason for A to realise that ~X at a higher rate than B does.
It seems like you've overlooked a critical assumption you made: that the other person in the exchange, be it a B&B proprietor or a gift-giving grandma, doesn't have feelings and desires of their own. People open B&B's to talk to guests. That's pretty much the whole reason for the B&B's existence. If someone didn't want to have a conversation, they'd book an AirBnB or a hotel.
But let's dig into the B&B argument, because I think you've also failed to consider a number of relevant factors to the interaction.
Any B&B proprietor can reasonably assume that every guest that arrives has made a conscious decision to stay somewhere that will include conversation. Hotels and AirBnB's without contact are ubiquitous. Nobody forces BnB customers to stay there. That's a pretty strong prior!
So, with that prior in mind, these proprietors hear from one guest that that person's travel companion doesn't enjoy socialization, and asks the B&B proprietors to not socialize with one of their companions. Now, let's be honest here: that's a weird thing to say. It just is. Normal people do not make these types of requests. You can argue all day about whether that's good or bad, but I doubt you'd argue that it isn't true. This is not a class of request that is common and familiar. So that weakens the amount that the proprietors should be moving away from their prior.
On the request for no socialization: you're assuming agency for another person and their choices. From the context, you didn't express that this person was your significant other. So, by what right were the proprietors to assume that you had the authority to dictate the experiences of somebody else? Like, if I'm in line at a Starbucks, I have no right to tell the barista how to speak to the person in line behind me. That would be ridiculous. While this situation is different, the core principle is the same. It's simply weird to try and govern the interaction that a stranger has with somebody else, and especially so when you are not in a relationship with either of the parties involved. So the weirdness of you trying to govern an interaction between two third-parties when you have not indicated any right to do so continues to weaken the reasons for these proprietors to move away from their priors.
Continuing on: the friend arrives. The proprietors, having a strong prior for socializing with guests due to running a voluntary BnB and weak reasons to update because of an odd request from a travel companion of one of their guests, greet this friend. This friend does not express any objection to socialization, and their interaction only ends when you come out and end the interaction. If the friend didn't express any resistance to socialization, then the proprietors have no reason to assume that their prior about socialization was incorrect. Instead, it's more likely that you, Scott, were just being kind of odd. After all, you said that this friend didn't want to socialize, but they socialized anyways, and the friend raised no objection (presumably). So now they've got evidence that points them back towards their prior.
Throughout the rest of the stay, it sounds like you and your friend gave them no reason to update away from their prior of guests having chosen to stay there because of a desire for interaction. It sounds like you just quietly tolerated it all, growing more and more upset that these proprietors weren't reading your thoughts about you and your friend's desire to be left alone. Nothing was preventing you from asking them to leave you alone. But you didn't. And with each interaction, the proprietors would have their prior confirmed further. After all, if what you said was true, one or both of you would have actually, you know, requested to be left alone. But you didn't!
This is not society failing to be rational. Proper application of priors and a general sense of social decorum should have made it clear to you what happened. Either this is just a case of you failing to be sufficiently rational, or you have an oddly weak grasp on certain aspects of interaction in society.
On gift-giving: people express love and affection for another by giving gifts; it's one of the core love languages. For many people, the giving is as important as the receiving. Somebody refusing to accept gifts from a person who expresses love through gifts is shutting down that other person's ability to express love via their preference. Interactions like gift-giving are two-way streets.
This is my interpretation as well. There's a sense that one is a guest in their house when one goes to a B&B, not a consumer of a recreational service. The proprietor's social behavior is not on the list of options in the way what beverage you want for breakfast is. It strikes me that telling the proprietors one would prefer they not provide the service they provide (part of which is personal hospitality) is kind of like telling a fancy restaurant how they should take food orders, consult about wine pairings, or describe the specials.
Another thing I find interesting in this scenario is the assumption that people should be able to change their default way of socially interacting on the spot because a person expressed a preference that they do. There's a world of personality and habit manifested in a person's social behavior and we can't just flip it like a switch, even if we thought that was an appropriate ask (regardless of how old we are, though I get that age may have some effect on this).
Example: as a therapist, I tend to ask too many questions. I've been working on it for years, not because someone told me it's a problem but because I know it can get in the way. If a client said, "hey, could I ask you to stop asking questions quite so much?" I would consider that an entirely appropriate thing to ask of me, so that's not the problem; it's that it's a very deeply ingrained way I've always had of navigating social interactions and of expressing interest in a person, so it's really hard for me to change it, even with all the therapist training.
This situation seems not so much about people's inability to acknowledge other people's preferences, but more a situation where people are bringing different assumptions to the table. Scott's assumption seems to be that it's a reasonable, appropriate thing to ask people who run a B&B to greet a guest differently from how they greet all their guests and to expect them to comply because it was his preference that they do that. Who knows what the B&B proprietors were thinking, but one possibility is that they're thinking it's not really his place to tell them how to do their job.
Hmm, I routinely stayed in a B&B when I visited my mother, and it was always the same one? Why? Primarily because it was walking distance from mom's house, and no full scale hotels were that close. Secondarily - after the first visit - because the hostess is a wonderful cook, with her food far above typical hotel breakfast. (I made myself hungry just thinking about it.) Third, I did enjoy chatting with them, once I found out this was standard practice; but that was least important for me. (Actually, third may have been price, now that I think about it; the local hotels were pricier.)
Agree with this take. The kind of people who run a B&B usually a have a strong preference for socializing and smalltalk.
Scott likely viewed the interaction between him/his friend and the hosts in purely monetary terms. They paid in exchange for staying the the B&B and for that the hosts should make the stay as comfortable as possible, including by not having small talk. The hosts see the exchange implicitly different. They are paid not only monetarily but also by having small talk with their guests which they enjoy.
I think half the puzzle is what some are calling "Guess vs. Ask" culture. Someone also needs to say that this (and direct vs. indirect styles of communication) is often a male/female difference: "I don't really need a present from you" is a classic and stereotypical trap of wives and girlfriends everywhere. It goes right along with "I'm not mad, everything's fine" and "Yes, it's cool if you ditch me to go hang with your friends, do what you like."
But I also think that changing habits is hard. How many people here have wished at some time they could turn on a "smooth-talking extravert" switch at will? People naturally fall into the habits of how they're used to communicating with others.
Calling it a "trap" seems to be ignoring the fact that our culture is not at one point on the "guess"-"ask" continuum, but rather demands different levels of "guess" vs "ask" in male-female vs female-male interactions.
Seconding Kenny's comment. Your language about "stereotypical trap[s] of wives and girlfriends everywhere" is straight out of a men's rights forum playbook. Women who acknowledge that they *do* want gifts run the risk of being seen as greedy, demanding, gold-digging, shallow, materialistic, high-maintenance. Similarly, women who say, "I'm mad, everything is *not* fine" are unreasonable, hysterical, bitches, crazy - "I don't want you to ditch me, I want to spent time together"; needy, desperate, controlling, manipulative. Manipulating a partner is shitty behavior, regardless of gender. That said, classifying a woman saying "I don't really need a present from you" as a *trap* is as ungenerous and lazy as considering it a trap if a man says "Aw, cut it out!" when his partner shows him affection, because he might *deep down* really want to feel loved and cared for. Bullshit gender expectations are bullshit, and they're certainly not going to get any better if people keep buying into them.
Saying one doesn't want X when one does, in fact, want X is not in and of itself a trap. Saying one doesn't want X when asked, *and then punishing someone for not giving one X* - that's directly analogous to a baited trap, because it is encouraging someone to perform actions that one will punish them for.
The fact that some people have unrealistic expectations (which is a problem!) is not an excuse to lie about one's own requirements and then enforce them anyway. That only perpetuates the unrealistic expectations, because they'll see everyone claiming unrealistically-low requirements and assume the dishonesty is an isolated bad apple rather than systemic.
We agree on your first sentence, and I’m not sure what the rest of your comment is intended to do. Wency did not say that that using these phrases disingenuously and then punishing someone for believing them = traps: they said, These phrases *are* traps, and that they are gendered. Their comment assumes bad intent, as Scott was doing in the post above - bad intent that obtains across the whole categories of wives and girlfriends. These women are lying and playing games to manipulate men!
What I’m trying to point out is that it’s not that simple. Neither is it as simple as Ask vs. Guess culture. Humans suffer social repercussions for violating *others’* expectations for them - in American culture, broadly writ, women who openly want gifts are judged as greedy and selfish, and men who openly want affection are judged as weak and unmasculine. Punishing other people for not reading your mind is bullshit - we also agree there! But when there are social costs to saying what you really want, you are far less likely to say it - and that doesn’t make it a trap.
Well, my intention with the word "trap" wasn't to necessarily convey malevolence on the part of the woman. The "trap", as such, is often enough simply laid by nature, or by culture, take your pick. Though some women (and I'm sure men too, but more often women) do in fact lay traps in this specific way, which they might frame as a "test". I know this because I have in fact had a girlfriend use the phrase "It was a test, and you failed" when I took one of her statements literally after she insisted that I ought to take it literally.
I am happily married with children, and my wife would never intentionally ambush me in this way (which is certainly a factor in why she's my wife). But she does sometimes still communicate in ways that are indirect and that I find very unclear, even after years of insisting that she be direct. And meanwhile I sometimes think I've cracked the code of her indirect style, only to still manage to misunderstand something. As I said originally, change is hard.
But my original point in all of this was not to offer not a "men's rights forum handbook" approach or whatever, I don't really know or care what such a handbook would say, but what I see as a normie approach to Scott's problem. This is the kind of thing that married normie guys talk about with other married guys. And it's also considered something of a stereotype for young married men to say "My gal is different, she doesn't have an interest in gifts."
Now, maybe Scott's gal *is* different. But the point is that most people are accustomed to the idea that when a young man says his gal is different in this regard, 99% of the time she's not actually all that different, he's just misunderstanding her indirect communication style. And so most people who have learned this lesson will assume this is the mistake Scott is making, regardless of whatever insistence he makes to the contrary.
I've made this mistake before, and at this point my wife would need to signal her commitment by connecting my gift-giving to an automated doomsday device, if she wanted to stop me from giving her a gift at any occasion that might call for it.
I'm going to guess that this:
"And meanwhile I sometimes think I've cracked the code of her indirect style, only to still manage to misunderstand something."
...is exactly where she wants you to be. That is, if you ever "advanced" (as your male mind might consider it) to "I definitely cracked the code! I now understand everything!" she would consider that a problem and change the code.
That may sound pejorative, but I don't think it is. Men and women have some goals in communication with partners that differ, for excellent biological reasons, and I can see functional reasons why for women in general* there is value in keeping their male in a state of "I've almost cracked the code" indefinitely. Most men I know who are comfortable in very long-term (decades) relationships accept this and don't take it the wrong way (e.g. that she's yanking them around maliciously or narcissistically, which she is not, although [caveat] that behavior certainly does exist in some other cases).
-------------
* There are always individual exceptions of course.
It can help to frame it as "Hint vs. Ask". Thinking of Hint cultures as Guess cultures is very much a view from the outside. Is there a Hint framing for Ask cultures?
I'd say the presents thing isn't that she hates present as a concept, it's that the mental work required to figure out what present she'd want is usually not worth the present. I know it's like that for me. If I want something, I either just get it, or it's way too expensive to ask for it as a present. Figuring out something that is not both of these classes is work, and I rather not get any present than would be forced to do it (and realize I also committed other person to do work for thing that a minute ago I didn't even know I wanted). Thanking somebody for a useless present is also work (I am an introvert) but much less, so I'd be ok with it, so I'd be also better if I didn't have to do it. Of course if somebody manages to give an awesome present - which happens much more often than I'd have any right to hope for - I'd be very pleased. And mainly because I'd never think to ask for that thing as a present or buying it for myself.
Though could be that she also hates presents as a concept, or an a reciprocal obligation... But there are ways of hating presents without actually hating presents.
My solution to this is that I have a long list of out-of-print books I want and many friends who like visiting second-hand bookshops.
Speaking of denying deviance is even possible, there is a part of the game Gone Home where your sister notes how upset she is that your parents didn’t even get mad when she was outed as lesbian. Instead they insist she is confused or going through a phase that she will snap out of. The game is set in 1995, but I imagine the belief that people don’t know their own preferences continues in other areas where exposure is less common.
I think there are two layers to this. The first is that people are starting from a prior like "the average person likes presents." The second is that the prior is common knowledge: everybody knows that the average person likes presents—and, by extension, everyone knows that giving presents is a thoughtful thing to do.
If you give someone a present that they don't actually want, nobody can really fault you for it, because it's obvious you were only trying to be thoughtful. Conversely, if you don't give someone a present and it turns out they did want one after all, you've embarrassed yourself, and you don't have the excuse of a social norm to fall back on. Since there's almost no risk to giving a present, and some risk to not giving one, the socially-safe thing to do is to always give the present, even when the recipient says they don't want one.
Culture: a set of defined, normative customs and social forms. Your premise that "preferences" ought to be respected above "culture" is totally unworkable for a functioning people group. (As is evident of present day American society.)
When preferences are given a greater emphasis than culture, then there is only harmony when preferences accidently align. What if your friend's "preferences" were to show up, drop their pants and start sharting everywhere? That's rude. And - for better or worse - rudeness is defined by cultural standard, not "respecting preferences."
Would you go to a foreign country and expect that all yield their cultural norms to your preferences? It's basically what this screed against the elderly amounts to. The elderly grew up an intact culture that included "gift giving" and "inquisitiveness" actions of courtesy and friendliness, rather than the present, culturally-fractured mess, where everyone can neurotically assign a multiple possibility of meanings and intentions to any word or action.
That's a helpful tension to point out, between an individual's preferences and the glue of norms that hold a culture or group together. We are living here in the US in a kind of maximally individual-preference-oriented moment, it seems to me. Some of that experiment seems good because of all the pressure of an earlier time (and present-day in some other forms) to conform and the costs of that demand for conformity on people who are outliers in any number of ways.
Traveling has always seemed like an interesting friction point in that way -- people visiting other places in order to experience something new while wanting to feel varying degrees of safe and in control in what's familiar. That friction point can be an adventure or it can be a bit of a disaster depending on the expectations one brings to it. How much do we expect other people to bend to meet our preferences? How much do we imagine people *can* bend to meet our preferences? When the outcome isn't what we hoped, what's the story we tell about what went wrong and whose responsibility that is?
My current theory is that most people don't really have a theory of mind. They seriously don't understand that other people have preferences different from their own or preferences different from what they are supposed to have.
It takes unusual perceptiveness or enlightenment or something to really understand the range of preferences. Or maybe sociopathy.
Are you being facetious? If not, could you explain more?
This is partly self-observation-- I find it astonishingly hard to believe that many other people don't like science fiction or do like beer. These are so strongly contrary to my strongly felt and obviously intrinsically correct preferences.
Unlike many people, I don't have a theory about why people go around appearing to like beer or not like science fiction. The standard theories of why people have implausible preferences seems to be that they're just showing off or just wicked rather than that (as my default seems to be) that they're just intractably incomprehensible.
Actually, the case of science fiction is interesting because science fiction has become a *lot* more popular and respectable since the 70s. My theory is that strongly unrealistic fiction is a natural human taste, and the idea that such fiction is ridiculous is a modern weirdness which finally broke when Star Wars came along. However, this doesn't mean that all those people who didn't bother with the original Star Trek were just pretending they didn't like it.
Also, it's interesting politically-- I don't know whether my sample of people who are opposed to Social Justice is representative, but a lot of them seem to have a consensus that no one (or hardly anyone) could really believe that Social Justice is correct.
As for my bit at the end about sociopaths, they seem to really believe that most other people aren't sociopaths. They then use it as a handle, but at least they've got that little bit of truth.
I think you're overinterpreting the usual meaning of "theory of mind." As far as I know, it consists of no more than the realization that other people have preferences at all -- i.e. that they *have* an interior hidden life such as one experiences one's own self.
That one may be inaccurate in guessing *what* is going on in that hidden interior life is more along the lines of what they call "emotional intelligence" these days.
But even the step of assuming that others have a hidden inner life -- even if it is naively or incompetently assumed to be exactly the same as our own -- is rather a big step forward, in terms of our ability to live socially, as the cost of sociopathy demonstrates.
Me at a restaurant: "I would like the salmon, with nothing on it and nothing on my plate but the salmon." Most of the time I will be served a plate with a food item on it in addition to salmon.
https://youtu.be/PVLZy5UwKUs
Yup. tried to get plain spaghetti with butter at a restaurant for a kid who was in an 'I only eat plain plain things' phase. Explained very carefully, waiter seemed to get it. Brought spag with butter, artfully scattered with chopped parsley ..... If at least it had been a sprig on the side, easy to remove!
I think this is an underrated comment. There is a lot of story telling going on in other comments and a lot of it sounds quite convincing. But then I see this and think of course, someone who serves salmon 50 times a week and always with other items is deep in a heavily ingrained pattern of behavior and can easily write down your order, repeat it ten times to themselves, and still get it wrong, just because repeated behaviors become so automatic that it takes tremendous effort to do anything differently and most attempts fail.
I wonder to what extent this same type of thing might happen to a B&B owner who casually small talks hundreds of guests in their home a year. What fast food is to a personal chef, a B&B owner is to anyone else who sometimes meets new people. They can do it thoughtlessly in their sleep through pure muscle memory, but this also means it's harder for them to go against the muscle memory.
I think I fall into the category of people who take ideas seriously and who also update on what people say. The unfortunate consequence is I often end up being gullible!
There are generational differences in hospitality as well. Happy and conversational vs out of sight and mind is one them.
It could also be mental talk “ I’ll only talk a little to her, oh but she needs to know this before I finish, woah her bag looks just like my grand daughters, I wonder what ethnicity she is? Did you know I once went their on a cruise the locals were so nice.” , Soon they have completely forgotten about what you told them.
Also, if they are significantly older than you, their perception of time is vastly quicker and so what you find long and drawn out they believe is a quick greeting.
My theory: a lot of people, sub-consciously, hate their own life choices, but at a conscious level, if they can be assured everyone else is making the same choices, they can live with it. So they ignore data that is inconsistent with their own preferences.
Alternate but related theory: A lot of people like their own life choices, but only feel safe from being attacked for them if everyone else is making the same choices.
There are a couple things in what you write that I find particularly interesting. For one thing, it assumes that people only have one thing motivating them or informing them at any given moment.
So, your girlfriend who said she doesn't like presents was probably being completely honest. But, what you (and she) probably weren't accounting for was the fact that, even somebody who doesn't like presents, may experience inexplicable disappointment at not getting one on Christmas or a birthday. And she too might have that innate societal expectation. She may truly not like getting presents as she imagines herself receiving them. But the disappointment nonetheless happens. And so, when she gets a present, she is delighted in spite of herself.
Now take the lovely innkeepers. They probably have a couple of things informing them. One of those may be loneliness. And for people who are deeply lonely, it's incredibly hard to suppress the urge to socialize. So, they almost unconsciously don't hear what you're asking for. It's such anathema to them that anybody would turn away human interaction and friendliness, purely because in their experience and their loneliness, it is an irresistible opportunity. So they've taken their own experience and motivation, and used it as a buffer against your request. In fact, they probably didn't even register the request, because they can't even imagine that world in which everybody doesn't need the social interaction that's so nourishes them.
My point is that we always have conflicting motivations and experiences. I may very much love my partner who abuses me. I see the abuse as being the price of doing business so to speak. I haven't been in that situation personally, but I have stayed in relationships years longer than was healthy -- all the while justifying it to myself in ways that make no sense to me 10 years later (and I don't mean having children or something concrete like that as a justification).
It's the internal tension between our undistinguished desires and our conscious needs that makes it so difficult to act rationally in these circumstances. The tension that exists between what we hear or what we ourselves believe and what we are pulled to do by conflicting motivations, intentions, or experiences overpowers any attempt to talk and listen without undistinguished background experiences informing all that we hear and say.
Thank you, I was about to say some version of this, that we very often have conflicting preferences. I think it's less that we are irrational -- though that too -- but that we can have very rational but competing desires/needs and that can make the way we behave look irrational until we sort out which desire/need we choose to prioritize. I'd say a lot of the terrain of psychotherapy is people unable to resolve conflicting preferences on their own, often because some of their preferences are not yet conscious or acceptable to themselves.
Your example of people staying in relationships that are anywhere from not great to abusive is a good one. There are often many countervailing preferences keeping them there -- fear there will be nothing better, a need to not be alone, a desire to be sure the relationship can't be improved, a preference not to pay more for housing or to face greater economic insecurity, etc.
The other confounding factor that plays a role too is that even when we manage to communicate what feels like a clear preference, communication itself is very imperfect, and the more it happens between people who don't know each other well, the more imperfect it is. In my experience, most of us way overestimate how well our words are understood by others, even inside of close relationships. We think because we expressed a preference and it was not acted on that the problem is someone else's unwillingness or inability to act on it, when it may very well be they heard something fairly different from what we intended.
Thank you both for your extremely well stated reply but also the affirmation. One thing you said is especially salient, and I feel a bit regretful that I didn't distinguish the same thing. That is, that we always behave rationally unless we're insane. But, our rationality is derived from our own assumptions and that which informs us. It is perfectly rational to stay with an abusive spouse if what you believe is that you will never be loved again, or that by leaving this relationship you will put yourself in emotional or physical danger. Those beliefs make the decision to stay rational. And there are countless other examples of rational behavior that appears utterly irrational to somebody else. Actually, the economics of this are absolutely clear. People behave in their rational self-interest. But, what they believe is in their self-interest may be very much in conflict with how their self-interest is perceived by others. To paraphrase Tim Harford, when crime pays, being a criminal is rational.
There is ALWAYS an underlying logic. We may not agree with the premises people are using, but once you start from their premises, people's beliefs and choices make perfect sense. And 'insane' people are NOT an exception! If you truly believe the aliens are beaming thoughts into your head through the television, lining your hat with tinfoil is a very rational thing to do.
Half of therapy is getting people to examine their premises, and consider at least that there might be other reasonable ones available to them. Or another logical path they could follow, from their own premises.
Totally fair point! I stand corrected (?)... (Not sure if that's quite the right verb). Most importantly, thank you for advancing the point. One caveat, I know absolutely nothing about psychotherapy. So I am emphatically not speaking from that perspective, but rather from the perspective of ontology.
Maybe here we could distinguish between "being rational" and "having reasons"? Though as I say that, we could probably have a pretty interesting philosophical conversation about where the boundary between those two is and how would we know?
I think of being rational as following rules of logic (which includes reference to some agreed-on criteria of what constitutes evidence) while having reasons seems like could really be anything people might say to justify or explain anything.
In psychiatry/psychology we sometimes talk about whether a person has impaired "reality-testing" because a person experiencing psychosis may have reasons/explanations but there may be no discernible (troublesome word there) logic or evidence to support their reasons. I mean, and then there's just word salad where what's being conveyed isn't comprehensible at all.
My guess is this all exists on some kind of spectrum from the very precise logic of mathematical reasoning to the word salad of a person unhinged from reality as we know it. In-between there is where most of us live most of the time, and that includes lots and lots of garden-variety human delusion where we feel we're being perfectly rational because we can't see our own blind spots.
I mean, sure, you can be delusional and still proceed rationally from those delusional premises. There are some cases of incoherent thought, though, and others where people think doing X is stupid but do X anyway.
Years ago (decades, pre-internet) a couple who worked in our office said that they didn't watch TV. None of us could believe it. But now I hardly watch any TV either and I accept their preference.
My guess is that if someone has a preference that is way off the standard social environment we cannot project ourselves into their 'world' to understand them, and we prefer to avoid the uncertainty. We do this by ignoring the incongruity. It's a social radar ping that doesn't get reflected.
Before watching films/TV on other devices was a thing, I hadn't owned a TV in many years. My telco would constantly call to offer me their fantastic deals on cable, I could bundle it with the phone and internet and cell service I already had, save so much money etc etc. I would have to repeat three or four times that I didn't own a television before the callers could wind themselves down. Sometimes they never could. And of course, when I asked them, and their supervisors, to take me off that call list, they couldn't; the system had two options; existing customer 'already has cable with us' or 'doesn't yet have cable with us'. No toggle for 'doesn't own a TV'. Sigh.
Also had friends looking and looking around our place and finally asking 'where's your tv??' Especially after we had kids! Upper-middle class family, not religious or anything else whacko, raising CHILDREN without a tv? (Or a car.) Unimaginable!
I'm not as sure as you that the B&B people care about your friend's feelings -- it depends on what this means. My feeling about "nice," chatty people is that they are being chatty not out of generosity -- or not *primarily* out of generosity -- but primarily because they enjoy being chatty. Naturally they project their own preferences onto others, so they also have a reinforcing secondary motive, that they believe others will enjoy their chattiness. When a guest enters, they anticipate a double dopamine hit of doing something they like anyway while also pleasing the guest, and it's hard to give up on this.
The number one reason, by far, that I've been tempted to make similar claims than Scott's gf about present-giving is to give myself an out in having to buy presents myself, because I don't usually know what to pick. I wonder if Scott's gf was proactive when it was her turn to buy something or what.
I was going to say something very similar. Receiving a gift creates a (perceived) obligation to reciprocate. I'm terrible at choosing gifts, so it's easier to just say "no gifts please" -- even if I actually really enjoy receiving gifts. Granted, the rational thing here is probably for me to learn to choose gifts, but still...
When I was young, I thought the ideal gift was *exactly* what the recipient desired. But this goal makes gift-giving inherently illogical: what I think would be perfect for you will never be as accurate as what you pick out yourself, even if I discuss it extensively with you (and the normal tradition excludes that, it's supposed to be magical). So I should just give you cash or something. But that becomes silly when you're giving gifts to people who don't need cash, people who are at least as well off as yourself.
Then I thought: wait a minute, what kind of gift pleases *me* the most? (And it helped that by this time I was well off enough that I could more or less acquire anything I wanted, so it wasn't a question of 'I've always longed for X but can't afford it, and if only someone would get me X I'd be super duper happy.' So it was a question of: given there's nothing I really want I can't get myself, what would make me happiest to receive as a gift?
And put that way, it was clear: what pleased me most was a gift that reflected *the giver's tastes.* Something he or she found fascinating, desirable, interesting, cool. Because (1) I might discover something I liked that I didn't know I liked, and (2) even if not, I would discover something about the giver, and of course I valued the chance to understand the people who might give me gifts (friends, family) better.
So that changed my approach to gift giving. I would certainly still try to be as appropriate as I could be, think of what the recipient would like, but I no longer tried to make it "perfect -- just what they would have chosen for themselves." I would be thinking more along the lines of: what can I give them that reflects what I know and cherish, but from what I know about them (imperfectly), might be a discovery for them, something they *would not* have thought of getting for themselves.
It makes gift-giving "riskier" in some sense, but more fun, as risk and serendipitous reward kind of necessarily go together. You make a bunch of lame choices, where somebody has to say 'well the thought's the thing', but it's more than made up for by the occasional big hit "Wow! I never knew this existed!"
> what I think would be perfect for you will never be as accurate as what you pick out yourself
(Half of) your new approach somewhat makes sense in terms of the perfect gift though. You are giving something that you think they'd want but they wouldn't buy themselves. Arguably, that's more beneficial than giving them what they want the most but were going to buy anyway. And a great way to finding possible gifts is to think of stuff that you know well and they don't know, or don't trust they can choose well.
> what would make me happiest to receive as a gift?
And what would be the worst gifts?
Maybe a pet you didn't want?
Yeah I think giving living things that imply a long-term obligation is regrettable, under almost all circumstances. Even for children: I have gotten my children pets, but never as a surprise. Although honestly I think that stems more from my sympathy for the animal, I don't think it's fair to assign it to someone who I'm not 100% sure wants it. I would never give an adult, or child not mine, a pet. If I *received* a pet, even one I wanted, I'd probably be slightly horrified: what if I *didn't* want this animal? What a risk you took! And not a romantic, but rather a foolish and narcissistic risk.
I'm having a hard time identifying the worst gift I ever have received...but probably something along the lines you suggest, something that tied me to some long-term commitment if I didn't want some innocent third-party entity to suffer...that would be the right category.
I mean, it probably comes down to either that or taunting gifts (the most extreme possible taunting gift is an obvious suicide method, but lesser versions exist like giving a known atheist a bible, or giving a depressed person a "stop whining" self-help book or bracelet).
Oh sure, if we're going to admit the category of Trojan gifts then the worst would be an Amazon gift card envelope actually containing anthrax, or an antipersonnel mine wrapped up to look like a book. I wasn't thinking along those lines, because I thought the assumption arguendo was a lack of malevolent intent.
Tea is serious business! The Father Ted sketch is parodying something that is (or at least was, up until recent years), the very important signifier of hospitality. If someone visits your house, you offer them tea (including if you have tradesmen working on a job there). If you are going to have a cup of tea yourself and there's anyone else in the house, you offer to make them a cup as well. To have someone come into the house and not offer them hospitality? The height of meanness and maybe you even have "notions"!
And if you're visiting and are offered tea, you *never* accept the first time (that's why Mrs. Doyle continues to ask after Ted says "no" the first time). There's the little dance of courtesy you do - offer, be refused, offer again, usually say something "Ah sure, you'll have a quick cup out of your hand?" and then if they do want it, they say something "Well, if you're sure it's no trouble" or "As long as you're making it, I might as well". A third refusal really does mean "no, honestly, I don't want/don't have time to have it".
So that's why Mrs. Doyle is so insistent about making the tea - it's really a big deal!
l love this. Half-serious question: in all the British crime procedurals I watch, the detectives always accept the tea on the first offer when they go to interview someone in their home. Is there something different going on there or does TV just have less time to play out the obligatory refusals? I had thought it was rude to refuse any offer. And it's always seemed to me the shows' writers are often poking fun at the tea tradition, even inside of very serious shows, but I don't know enough to know for sure.
I would guess that this is an Irish-English difference.
It's partly the fact they are police - you don't lean on police, so people would be more likely to take their first no as an absolute no.
And it's partly the English class system; in England, that dance is appropriate in England with a guest who is a class equal, but not with a tradesman who is an inferior. If a tradesman is working in your house, you don't spend all that time going back and forth, you offer and they say yes or no. Many English middle-class (that's the English version of middle-class, which is higher up the social scale than the American) people will have the tea they drink themselves, which may well be loose tea, and is probably a varietal, possibly even a single-estate, and bags of blended tea (usually PG Tips or Yorkshire) for tradesmen - "Builder's tea" is strong tea made from bags with milk and lots of sugar, and is what most English people would default to offering to a plumber or electrician.
Police are a step up from tradesmen, so they would be offered the good tea, but they're not equals so you won't do the full dance.
Working-class people will make "builder's tea" for themselves, of course, and they might well do the dance with a tradesman - but they wouldn't dare with the police.
Incidentally, if you are offered and politely refuse, expecting to be reoffered and it's taken as a no, then you wait a few minutes and then come back and say something along the lines of "I'll take that cuppa now, if you don't mind".
Obviously, this is a bunch of stereotypes, which were probably more true 50 years ago than they are now, and there are always exceptions (and people getting it wrong; they don't show those sorts of social awkwardnesses on TV). And there are lots of people who just like a particular type of tea.
But I certainly know lots of people who keep a box of Yorkshire Tea bags in their kitchen just to make tea for tradesmen.
Thank you for the glimpse of how this tea dance works! I wonder if anyone's written about local variations in this.
Yorkshire Tea is okay. I wouldn't refuse it. But PG Tips is awful (then again, that's the "Irish like stronger blends" thing at work).
Down South here the joke is that the big divide is between Barry's tea and Lyon's tea (warning for strong language in linked video comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJtFEEU5flI ) Barry's tea *is* better, by the way.
Up North (of Ireland), they have their own blends like Punjana. That's a whole different argument.
People really have defaulted to using tea bags rather than loose tea; I grew up drinking loose leaf tea because that was what there was, but now we're always buying tea bags. Much more convenient, especially if you only want one cup for yourself.
There is an English-Irish difference (e.g. Irish tend to like stronger teas, so Kenyan and Indian blends) but mostly it's because the "ask, refuse, ask again" custom is old-fashioned and country folk type thing, it's going now if not already gone amongst younger people. Apart from that, I can't comment on English habits, but as you see from the cop shows, even when the filth come round to interrogate you, it's only polite to offer them a cuppa! 😁
There's something delicious about watching people observing very old traditions kind of grudgingly even when it really grates on them. Oh that does sound a little sick as I say it (not the tradition, but my sadistic glee about watching it).
"nah, must just be one of those games women play."
To be fair...
I think the request for others to abandon social norms of friendliness and politeness to accommodate niche preferences is, frankly, just rude. It is the duty of the one who is outside the norm to respect and appreciate the rules of the place they are in (it would be like tourists demanding foreigners in a strange land shake their hand instead of giving them the finger as a greeting, even if that went against all the customs of the foreign land)
Interestingly, this reveals a difference between the motel case and the girlfriend present case. In the former, the interaction was guided by public social norms and rituals and hence the request for alteration is rude. Whereas the girlfriend case is 1-1 personal interaction and this regulated by more flexible agreements.
I don't think "be warmly greeted and entertain numerous questions from owners of a bed and breakfast when you stay" is a public social norm, I think that's more idiosyncratic to these particular owners, in which case they're essentially supplanting others' preferences with their own in a 2-2 social interaction.
I don't think you've stayed in a bed and breakfast.
You might as well be going to a stuffy restaurant and asking them to sing happy birthday to your friend, or asking them to please not have the sommelier hover nearby until you sample the wine.
"Appreciating the atmosphere of a bed and breakfast or stuffy restaurant" is not necessarily a social norm, but once you find yourself a patron of one of these places, "when in Rome" absolutely trumps personal neurosis.
I've stayed in a few. Maybe all the ones I've stayed in were atypical, but this doesn't describe my experiences with any of them.
Or maybe the ones I've stayed in are atypical, but in my experience, if you don't want to chat with the proprietors, you stay at a Holiday Inn; the chit-chat is a selling point.
Replying to your followup-comment here (boy, imagine a world where comments were able to be edited after the fact - and while we're at it, imagine if one could use italics and boldface in these comments... sounds pretty much like science-fiction, I know): There's a difference between "expensive" and "stuffy". A proper "stuffy" restaurant can also be described as "snotty", if there isn't finger snapping to beckon the staff, it's probably just "expensive".
I don't know if I'd describe them as "stuffy" in that case, the service definitely didn't involve finger-snapping, but it did involve the staff being attentive enough that you should never need to flag someone down.
The finger-snaps are strictly reserved for intrastaff communication - a customer finger-snapping the staff would be perceived as obnoxious and would certainly result in a passive-aggressive approach to the rest of the meal's service.
As an aside, in my experience, while expensive restaurants (and I've never been rich enough to eat out at really fancy restaurants ordinarily, but I had a high school friend whose father is a very notable, wikipedia page-having restaurateur, and ate at a number of his restaurants,) are usually not in the practice of doing things which are obtrusively out-of-place in their atmosphere if you ask them to, I've found they're generally quite amenable to not doing things they usually do if you ask them to. In all cases I've found them to have actually thoughtful, not merely rote, service.
This.
Any serious high-end customer service professional will thoughtfully adapt to the needs of each guest, *especially* if those needs have been explicitly stated.
For example, I work for an high-end luxury brand hotel with a longer-than-you-would-believe literal checklist of mandated informational chitchat which is to be performed with each and every guest.
I've been explicitly instructed to use the chatty checklist with every guest and my bosses even hire secret shoppers to verify that I'm using it, but as a professional, I absolutely do not use that checklist unless I suspect someone is a secret shopper.
Instead, my first question to every guest is, "How was your trip in?" and depending on their answer, "Do you want to hear about the hotel?" Their answers determine the course of the encounter. If someone says they had a horrible day of travel and now they just want to get to their room, I produce a key as fast as humanly possible and send them off. Same thing if they merely seem grumpy, antsy, and/or disengaged.
Ideally, Scott's B&B proprietors would have had a similar strategy, but then it's worth noting that B&Bs usually aren't a luxury product.
This is fascinating! And I think captures the depth of the micro-cultures that exist out there in hospitality. The sensitivity you show in meeting guests where they are is remarkable and points to what someone said elsewhere here that in very high end service, the service is usually as deferential and unobtrusive as possible.
It seems to me B&B proprietors are going to see themselves as more equal to their guests in terms of conventional class markers. Around here where there are tons of B&Bs, they are often run by couples and families who live on the premises, if not in the same building, their family pets are on the premises, and they often "retired" to managing a B&B from high-status professional jobs. They're doing it as part lark and part extra income in retirement. They may hire a team of cleaners to clean the rooms or they may do it themselves, they almost always prepare and serve the food themselves, and they are largely not staffed by professionals from the hospitality industry where people have specialized training in customer service. The whole vibe is quaint, idiosyncratic, and homey -- that's what people seek out when choosing a B&B.
My guess is the retirees who are introverted rent out AirBnBs and the retirees who want the social engagement open B&Bs.
When we travel, we're always stepping into these microcultures, in addition to whatever larger culture surrounds where we're staying. The norms of the microcultures aren't typed up anywhere, but they're also well known, even when you travel in other countries.
I want to clarify when I said the B&B proprietors may see themselves as more equal to their guests, I meant more to say that they are more likely to behave like equals in a class sense. I didn't mean to suggest that people working in other places in hospitality don't perfectly well see themselves as equals to their guests -- it's more that their professional role requires them to perform the role a particular way, regardless of how they see themselves, if that makes sense.
I could understand this framing if the friend was the one hosting the B&B, and thus would be expected to be chatty with guests to maintain the usual social norms about hospitality.
I have more trouble seeing it this way in the situation as presented though. Being chatty with guests is a nice thing you do for them, to make them feel welcome in your home. This particular guest feels uncomfortable with being chatted at though. So doing it anyway is doing the opposite of making them feel welcome, enforcing your preference at their expense.
> It is the duty of the one who is outside the norm to respect and appreciate the rules of the place they are in (it would be like tourists demanding foreigners in a strange land shake their hand instead of giving them the finger as a greeting, even if that went against all the customs of the foreign land)
I can guarantee that every local who made their living off of tourists would learn and accommodate this preference, even if most tourists never complained.
The proprietors are in the same position; they're trying to sell you something. It's on them to conform to you.
Old people are like this. My dad (85) occasionally asks if I want a hot dog when I visit. I've been vegetarian for 20 years. The problem is that his brain now mostly remembers me as a kid who liked hot dogs. The memories of me as an vegetarian adult, in his head, are suppressed. This habitual behavior extends to other factors too and generally makes dealing with elderly aging parents a huge pain in the ass.
Great post, but missing two important points: (1) people are bad at knowing their own long term preferences (I.e. who to marry) and; (2) people are bad at communicating short term preferences. There are any number of reasons for #2, which all boil down to essentially: people express preferences to be seen a certain way, and often forgo speaking up for what would actually make them happy.
I think this explains a lot of kind old people ignoring your stated desires.
Douglas Hofstadter tells a story in one of his books about a friend of his who died. The friend had really liked rock music; DH hates it. At his memorial service, they played some of the friend's favorite songs, and DH comments that he kept thinking "This is terrible music, so it can't be appropriate to play that now!", despite knowing with his rational brain that it was a completely appropriate way to honor the friend and his taste.
I'm seeing the same dynamic pop up in a lot of the comments: elders are unwilling to withhold a nurturing/caring behavior from those who deny they need it.
I can see a lot of reasons this behavior would be culturally, if not biologically, hammered into us. People who openly express too much need are regarded as socially parasitic. Those individuals tend to be punished with a cold shoulder once their needs are deemed exaggerated.
Yet most of us need things from other people, socially or otherwise. Not wanting to appear burdensome, we've learned to signal "I'm not a parasite" by denying needs / asserting our own self reliance. And the providers (the parents, the grandparents, etc) have learned to offer anyway.
I wonder if this behavior is especially ingrained in generations who lived through times of scarcity. In my father's family, food is pushed on the young even if they don't want it, and the existence of vegetarianism is patently denied. But if you serve yourself too much lamb, you are considered greedy. This tradition comes from multiple generations who experienced hunger.
Those same generations generally emphasized self reliance while aggressively nurturing their children. This can feel like a contradiction to the young, who learn to play along by denying need while accepting resources.
Of course the old BnB people aren't offering food to people who aren't hungry. But perhaps they consider social contact a universal need, and their lives have taught them that the needful have a habit of denying need. In which case, the most rational thing is to provide anyway.
For what it's worth, I think it's also possible that older generations are used to eras of much higher pressure to conform to a standard social behavior model, because they lived through eras of savagely destructive social disunion. Someone who remembers the Vietnam War, or the Berlin Crisis, or race riots in the 60s, et cetera, may have a much greater concern for rampant individuality than is common today.
Indeed, the present time seems to me considerably more confident* than my, and even more so my parents' or grandparents' generation, that mild social disunion -- people insisting on their individual personality quirks being given broad public respect -- will NOT lead to destructive fission, chaos, riots, actual civil war.
------------
* Whether this is a foolish overconfidence or just a glorious liberation from stultifying stereotypes is the $25,000 question.
I often get the feeling that many of the issues here are the result of confusing fast thinking with slow thinking. ("Thinking Fast and Slow" Daniel Kahneman's.) You rationalists want everyone to be thinking slow. But it just doesn't happen that often, and when the darling B&B owners meet a new customer they naturally use fast thinking... be nice. Is there some Less Wrong or SSC posts that talk of this?
Yes. It's the difference between Heidegger's present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Rationalists prefer and trust the theoretical, conscious present-at-hand. But everyday life is lived in the immediate, unconscious ready-to-hand. Present-at-hand is a rare fallback mechanism for when things go wrong/unexpected.
People are wrong about their preferences all the time, I can think of times where I wasn't feeling like going out but my friends pressured me and I ended up having a great time. Or I didn't want to try a certain food but ended up liking it
I suspect this depends strongly on how weird you are. I have made the opposite experience. Throughout my childhood, distant family members, teachers and other adults pressured me to do things they thought were fun despite my protests that they are not fun to me, and I ended up disliking it pretty much every time.
Multi-day school trips were always the nadir of the year for me. Eventually, I got my parents to habitually deny the school permission to take me along, social fallout be damned. It was a substantial quality of life improvement.
I think there's a subtle point here as well, which I haven't seen discussed in the comments...
There's a big difference between you stating your own unusual preference, and reporting, second-hand, your friend's unusual preferences.
If you had said to the proprietors "I am very socially anxious, I would appreciate it if you don't interact with me", I think this might have had a chance of success. It's an unusual thing to ask, but hearing it direct from the person in question would carry some weight. But some guy just telling them that his travelling companion has some unusual preferences? This carries very little weight.
If you haven't established that you have any reason to be speaking for them (like they are your spouse, or child, or patient), their prior assumptions about how to treat people aren't going to be swayed.
Put yourself in a similar position. If someone tells you "my preference, when you greet me next time, is to stick your tongue out at me", you might well do it. But if someone tells you "my friend's preference, when you greet them next time, is to stick your tongue out at them", that's a whole different story. You could be lying, or mistaken, and either of these seems more likely than the possibility of your friend having such a strange request. And who are you to ask that of them, anyway?
That's a very good point. If I put myself in their shoes I would definitely attach far less confidence to something a soi-disant friend (not spouse or parent) tells me about somebody else, who isn't even there in person so I could watch the friend's face for nonverbal ratification, than I would about something he said about himself.
Huh. You're right.
It's even possible that the hosts were ready to react to Scott's friend's apparent discomfort and would stop talking, but she did such a good job at suffering in silence that they decided Scott was wrong.
I was in the middle of writing up a comment to the same effect.
Also, I wanted to add that the effect of the Bayesian update may not be as big as Scott expects in saying 'If you're bad at calibrating updates, maybe getting told "I don't want a present" isn't enough to convince you not to give someone a present.'
H = person X likes presents
E = Scott says X doesn't like presents
• estimate P(H) around 90% [the "Everybody loves presents!" prior]
• estimate P(E|¬H) around 90% [If X really doesn't like presents, Scott's probably telling the truth]
• estimate P(E|H) around 30% [all the doubts Scott said he checked when he heard it directly, plus the factors of 'how comfortable do _I_ feel _she_ would feel telling him', 'how good is Scott at reading the social cues that go with "you don't need to get me anything"', 'maybe he's actually trying to sabotage her' etc.]
...plug into Bayes...
P(¬H) was 10%, and after updating, P(¬H|E) is only 25%: it is still not likely that she dislikes presents, even though you say so.
(One might have different ideas about P(E|H); with the other assumptions it'd take P(E|H) < 10% to alter your prior to the point that you really think she doesn't like presents. But if you believe it is common for people to refuse gifts out of mere politeness, you are unlikely to estimate the probability that low.)
I think you need to add in to your thoughts on this subject the fact that updating mental models is effortful. Neurons need to burn a fair amount of glucose to do it. So an additional and I think very clarifying question here is: just how much effort do people consider it worth to contemplate certain updates?
For example, in your B&B case, I think it is entirely possible that the host couple might have considered it just totally not worth the mental effort to even bother firing up the frontal cortex to ponder whether this update was worth making. There are some good reasons for that:
* You were very transiently in their life. They're not going to see you again anyway. So why bother updating the standard "here's how we put our guests at ease" protocol?
* They're older. When you're younger, you worry a lot more about fitting in. When you get to be 65+ you tend to stop worrying about that stuff. You pretty much already know who you're going to get along with and who you won't by about 2 seconds into any interaction, and your motivation for *adjusting* your ability to get along with anyone that fits into the wrong category is low. Why bother? Life is short, you already know who you like and don't like, and you've been successfully sorting people for decades. So older people may very naturally be more likely to decide that pondering whether to adjust their mental model for new types of people is not worth the effort.
* There's actually a balance between both sides in this interaction, in terms of who updates his mental model. For example, it's possible the older couple thought: "Hey, you two are guests in *our* home, it's on *you* to adjust your mental models to fit in well with how things run in Our Home." Meanwhile you may have been thinking "Hey, we're the renters of your property/employers of you as contract cooks/housemaids, it's on *you* as the employees to adjust your mental model to suit your employers' tastes."
Id est, there's inherently a conflict between who has to adust, any time two parties that have conflicting models of social behaviour meet, and the two parties may not come to the same conclusion about how that mental effort is to be split, if it's split at all. (A B&B seems like a natural place for this problem, too, inasmuch as a lot of them are in actual personal homes, not commercial properties, so the precise line between "private guest" and "tenant" may be blurred, or not seen nearly the same way by the same people -- I'm a little curious how either you or the older couple would seen the same situation if (1) you had been nonpaying personal guests, or (2) it had been a fully commercial establishment, e.g. Best Western motel, and they were just the night manager and asst manager.)
* Finally, the value individuals put on low-friction social encounters, and their sensitivity to any abrasion, differs considerably. Some people are exquisitely sensitive, become almost social chameleons to avoid the tiniest hint of friction, and the cost of updating mental models seems cheap to them for the respite they get from being rubbed the wrong way. Other people are, for lack of a better phrase, made of much coarser fiber and really don't give a shit, or aren't even aware, of mild to moderate levels of abrasion, and so they evaluate the cost-benefit ratio of updating mental models quite differently.
It's also possible that this isn't a one shot interaction because B&B customers leave reviews, and the couple owning the B&B are getting bad reviews from people who don't want that chattiness.
Talking to people who really don't like it is less skilled for someone in a service industry than looking at people when you're talking with them to see how it's going over.
So you're seeing it from the "I'm the employer and their the employee and it's on them to do the heavy lifting in terms of updating mental models, unless they don't want to get paid [in this case by a good review]." Perfectly understandable. However, you might approach it differently if, say, you were running a B&B yourself, or if the situation did not involve paying strangers but rather, say, friends of friends to whom you were offering the favor of a place to crash for a few nights.
I think that if I were running a B&B I'd feel obligated (within some limits, which I don't presently have fully defined) to make it a pleasant experience for my customers, which doesn't mean I'd always succeed.
If it were a favor for friends of friends, the dynamics would be different.
Exactly. Which is why I think an underappreciated aspect of this whole story is the phrase "B&B". If the whole thing was about a visit to friends or family, or a stay in a hotel, it might come out quite different.
Hence it's perhaps less an issue of "people" having certain tendencies towards updating/not updating mental modes so much as that in different scenarios there are different expectations of who ought to do that work (or how it should be split between the parties), and in borderline cases you get the typical disputes over borders.
Yeah, but for every one or even two people who write "They wouldn't stop talking" reviews, if they take the opposite tack, there will be six or eight people writing "They were so rude and unfriendly!" reviews and that will damage their business a lot more, since most people *do* want the "friendly, homespun" touch.
Maybe there's an opportunity for niche businesses: introvert-friendly B&B and guesthouses. "When I arrived they never said a word, just threw the key of my room at me. 10/10, would stay there again!" 😁
Besides being naturally chatty old people, the B&B owners may have been caught doing the customer service performance; when you deal with the public, providing services, you do construct a particular persona that is smiley and upbeat. And it's hard to break the habit - several times, I've answered the phone at a new job repeating the standard greeting from the old job. So it's possible the owners did mean to try to avoid the "standard greeting small talk" but slipped and repeated the routine they used with all guests.
The ideal would be to be somewhat perceptive about who wants what.
I believe the only businesses that have achieved this required massive scale surveillance of behaviors the customers thought were being conducted in private, along with somewhat state of the art computing techniques widely considered "AI," and they still get bad reviews.
Sure, but the ideal is expensive, right? You want the ideal car, with ideal engineering, it's going to cost you 6 figures. If you want ideal customer service, you hire a personal concierge and train that person in your exact wants. If you want ideal interpersonal sensitivity in your innkeeper, you stay at the Four Seasons and fork out $400/night.
This is why I regularly draw a distinction between "friendly" and "nice." In my experience, a lot of people tend to conflate them, but they're very distinct qualities. A "friendly" person is quick to interact with others and engages in a lot of warm social behaviors, a "nice" person is attentive to other people's feelings and priorities. Some people are introverted but very nice, and may work hard to seem "friendly" with people who prefer that kind of behavior, while some friendly people are very inconsiderate or even downright cruel.
I've heard a lot of stories from people who knew Andre the Giant who described him as a really nice guy, but under this distinction, most of the accounts I've heard of him make him out to be a friendly but inconsiderate asshole, who wouldn't bother to think about how it might affect other people to be involved in his hard-partying behaviors no matter how they encouraged him to, and would occasionally do things which would physically hurt or endanger others because he wouldn't think too hard about how his actions might affect others as a tremendously powerful 500lb man.
Going further, deliberately hurtful bullies are often friendly and charismatic.
Sure. And people in the customer service/hospitality/personal care industry have an inverse problem, where the efforts they need to make in their job to be personable, warm, friendly, are overinterpreted by narcissistic customers: "I'm memorizing and using your name, Mr. First Class Passenger, and offering you a pillow and smiling warmly at you *because it's part of my job* and not because I find you sexy and want you to comment on my figure or ask me out."
I think this is a rational response to data points of people saying they are uninterested in something but are just being polite and actually are interested. How many people will politely say "Oh please, I don't want anything for my birthday" but in the end are delighted if they get one, versus people who are honest-to-goodness worse off for getting a present? More seriously, how many couples are there that have genuinely worrying fights at times, with words as bad as "I don't love you" and "I hate you," but still manage to stay together and seem (or at least claim to be) better for it than separating? And this goes doubly for "I was sure they were my friend and then they stabbed me in the back" or "She rejected my advances four times but I persisted and that's how I met your mother." Certainly such things are portrayed endlessly in movies and other media, enough to seep deeply into people's decisionmaking processes even if their relation to reality is skewed. And the older people are, the more they will have encountered these (real or fictional) cases.
People will constantly encounter situations like this, and I think these might be the cases messing up true "preference reading", rather than the (perhaps less frequent) signals of "people who say they want presents and actually do." I'm inclined to think that the strength of this effect would be muted the more serious the preference is; even if the hosts had a practice of giving a flower to every visitor I doubt they'd offer one to your friend if you said she's deathly allergic to flowers. However, that admittedly doesn't accord well with the abusive partner example.
My policy with my friends and much of my family is "I don't expect a present, but if you come up with something you think I might like, then I will be happy to receive it". That definitely can be rounded off to "I don't want anything for my birthday" - and I generally get something every three or four years per person when they find something they think I will like or that is on my list (I have a list of out-of-print books for friends who like second-hand bookshops).
There is a big difference between that and "I will be offended if you give me a present", but they both round off to the same words.
My steelman view of very nice people who don't acknowledge protests is that they have simply converged on a mentally efficient strategy (space: no person-specific lookup table needed, processing: minimize anxious time spent looking for hidden preference clues) with a small downside (oh no, they didn't want tea, but now they have tea). In the same vein, it's a low-cost energy-saving move in cultures with elaborate politeness rules.
Efficiently directing someone to their room is rude and violates social norms, which is high-risk. If your business depends on fickle consumer reviews where even a single poor review can tank your five-star rating, you're strongly incentivized to avoid social risk.
If you had provided harmlessly weird instructions, they might have cooperated. ("Greet her as Queen Cassandra.")
Providing instructions that expressly contravene social norms is too risky, and will be ignored. ("Greet her as Ugly Troll.")
If you follow social norms, you can always maintain your place in the hierarchy (or AirBnb ranking) by publicly invoking the norm. Most people would agree with the following statement: "My Granddaughter told me not to buy her a present. Buying presents is normal and good. I bought her a present and she's mad. She's unreasonable." Likewise no one is going to write an AirBnb review of "Proprietor was too friendly."
This generalizes to an individual's self-image, unconsciously:
1. Buying gifts makes me feel like I'm being caring and thoughtful.
2. Forgetting birthdays makes me feel thoughtless and bad.
3. Not buying a gift feels like forgetting a birthday which will make me feel bad.
4. Add in confusing gift-related norms, to further incentivize ignoring people's stated preferences.
5. Buy a gift.
Confusing gift-related norms include:
1. Decline gifts you want, in order to avoid the appearance of greed. See e.g. "We'll buy lunch." -> Recipient must decline twice before accepting.
2. Tests to make sure the partner really cares: "No need to buy me a gift, honey" -> Mad no gift was purchased.
3. Demonstrating thoughtfulness is the real point of the gift: "If I tell you what gift I want it doesn't count."
Given the above "ignore stated norm-breaking gift-related preferences" is a good default rule, and one I endorse.
If anything, a review that said "I asked them not to be friendly, but they were friendly to me - one star" is likely to strike a lot of potential customers the same way that a review that says "I was looking for a Chinese restaurant because I like sweet-and-sour pork but this place just has a bunch of things I can't pronounce on the menu" is going to strike a lot of other people.
Exactly. While "don't talk to me" is a legitimate preference, describing it in a review will make the reviewer look unhinged.
As a contrary data point, it would seem perfectly sensible to me, and I'd sympathize with the reviewer.
Likewise, and strongly.
"I told them I didn't want it, but they forced it on me anyway, because they knew they would enjoy it and they didn't particularly [care/register] that I'd said no..."
This is a relatively non-horrifying value of "it," but I try to stay the hell away from people running that algorithm, even when it's locally harmless. It potentially goes bad quick- not being able to set boundaries as simple as "Please stop talking at me" is social interaction with the safety *off*- and the usual compensating possibility- that you could make a lifelong friend- is off the table.
If they *honestly don't realize*, they *literally can't process* the communication, that's legit not their fault but also they're potentially *really dangerous*.
And... my uncharitable suspicion is that what's proposed is not *literal* inability. I could be way off base here, but I started to write a hypothetical about someone with a rare, potentially deadly food-allergy- which is the kind of thing you *really* need to worry about, if they actually *can't process* surprising preferences- but it felt like I was playing dumb. I guess I don't expect other people to *literally* believe this is a mental glitch rather than a goal-directed process.
I feel like maybe the "preferences" framework is throwing people off? Both of the central examples fall under the more narrow umbrella of "A preference to avoid being involuntarily subjected to a specific kind of social interaction, nominally friendly, over explicitly protests." Most of our cultural touchstones for illustrating why this is really bad involve sex, but I don't think sex is the *reason* it's bad. Masturbation seems morally neutral to me, so I don't think sex itself is bad. I think it's just a factor that makes for really evocative examples that illustrate the underlying bad thing.
If I leave a review like that, and someone hates my review, so what?
Nearly everyone would think I am nuts and ignore me. So what?
But the people who have really specific preferences would know not to rent from them. Which is what I (as the putative reviewer) wanted to happen.
I wouldn't phrase it that way, I'd say something like "I really wasn't up for conversation, I asked them not to talk, and they kept talking."
> ("Greet her as Queen Cassandra.")
Now you make me think of the "no brown M&M's" story.
Maybe a good guide is to introduce a totally nonsense idea, just to help the host's get into the mindset of doing things differently.
If you're looking for examples of where you are not respecting other people's preferences, you might start with the fact that the first line of text under that LessWrong post reads: "I, the author, no longer endorse this post." The second comment thread at the bottom links to a post named "Posts I repent of", in which the author states: "I would prefer it if no one linked to or promoted "Taking Ideas Seriously"."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-repent-of
The example you give to crystallize why you're so certain that people ignore others' preferences is similarly blinkered. Your girlfriend expressed a preference to you. Your response was to internally question her motivations for having it ("some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation"), to "challenge" her with questions about whether acting in direct opposition to this preference would be ok, and to share the whole situation with someone outside the relationship (ostensibly to ask for advice about whether or not to respect your girlfriend's preference). You focus on your grandmother as the person in this scenario who couldn't acknowledge people's preferences, but your own behavior treated your girlfriend's stated preference as both potentially untrue and potentially rooted in animus against you.
You say that you "think it's hard for conscious people thinking rationally to get this one wrong... but our emotional reasoning machinery gets stuff dumber than this wrong all the time." Do you think emotional reasoning machinery played a part in these two decisions you made? Maybe it *felt good* to you to read that article, and you shared it because you were focused on the good feelings it gave you and not the preferences of its author. Maybe someone before that girlfriend treated you badly, and you pushed back against her preference because you didn't want to comply and risk her getting mad and hurting you again (you mention women playing games twice, later in the post).
You are not alone! Humans generally act in ways that prioritize our own emotions and preferences over the emotions and preferences of others. But this is not a mystery, and you are not an outlier.
You had to "rescue" her? Therein lies the tale. For both of you I think.
But as to the respecting of preferences - it appears to me to be a "clash" of preferences. Why couldn't your girlfriend acknowledge the preference of the couple to be outgoing and friendly and, as they saw it, courteous. It made her uncomfortable. I would bet that the couple would have felt uncomfortable ignoring her or failing to greet her in a way they considered appropriate.
For someone as smart and informed and perceptive as you it surprises me that you frame this as "they" were deficient. From my perspective it was a typical interaction of two different personality types. For what it is worth, I identify more with your girlfriend but I manage to play act my way through those situations.
>But as to the respecting of preferences - it appears to me to be a "clash" of preferences. Why couldn't your girlfriend acknowledge the preference of the couple to be outgoing and friendly and, as they saw it, courteous. It made her uncomfortable. I would bet that the couple would have felt uncomfortable ignoring her or failing to greet her in a way they considered appropriate.
Essential element of asymmetry- Scott and his girlfriend were paying to stay at the Bed and Breakfast, the Bed and Breakfast proprietors were not paying to stay with them. When you stay at a hotel, they don't clean your room because they're so nice it pains them to think you might be troubled by a disorderly environment, they do it because you're a paying guest.
If you’re paying for a BnB experience, and then arrive and at the last minute say in an offhand way, “My friend doesn’t want what we paid for and your whole professional identity is constructed around”, you might... still get what you paid for.
If somebody told me to not welcome their friend who I was about to meet, I'd assume they were kidding, because that's a very strange request. Even more so if I'm the owner of a B&B. Like, if you don't like friendly small talk, don't stay at a B&B, Motel 6 is probably much cheaper anyway.
It's also a pretty rude preference to expect a random member of society to go along with. I wouldn't say it's so rude as to be objectionable just for asking, but at the same time, "please don't do what you usually do to help yourself feel at ease with the stranger who's about to be part of your general living quarters for the next few days" is definitely in the territory of "mensch-points for acquiescing to, no deductions for disregarding".
I think that's a good point - this *is* a stranger coming into someone's family home. Are they likely to steal the good silverware or set the bathroom on fire? You have no idea, so a little chit-chat when they arrive is a way of scoping them out. Maybe they are monosyllabic and don't engage in conversation because they're shy, or maybe they're on the run from the Feds and don't want you to recognise them from the TV news! Here's a news story about criminals targeting guest houses by pretending to be guests: https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/criminals-pose-as-guests-and-target-b-and-bs-guest-houses-in-brooklyn-31416226
Exactly so. I have spent a fair amount of time in a B&B owned by my sister in law, playing both the role of the guest and the help. Guests were given the key to the front door, and, if they were willing to ignore signs and perhaps look for keys on hooks could have gone anywhere in the house. One memorable case explained that he opened a door marked "private" because he figured the innkeeper was likely there. He was right, although not a very pleasant person.
It's almost certainly true that the innkeepers really did want to know something about Scott's friend, partly for purely defensive reasons. How many people would give a person unwilling to engage in polite conversation the run of their own dwelling, even if they had paid for it?
Epistemic status: Cherry-picked parameters from sample size of 1+eps
I’m gonna add another sample, and say that this kind behavior is international (Russia), and does seem to have a strong correlation with age and other factors. My paternal grandparents are strong example of this, while maternal grandparents are much less “affected”
A few factors that seem like they could be linked with “affected” vs “unaffected” (and also heavily correlated between themselves):
- Openness to new ideas
- Comfort with new technology (need help to read sms from simple phone vs comfortable with smartphones)
- Education level, both formal and informal
I bet you can get a really low rate at the B&B if you're a disembodied head.
In Indian culture, you're supposed to pressure visitors to eat. There's the inevitable "No, we cannot impose" and a predictable set of rounds of cajoling, "Oh, just eat a little", that goes on back and forth, until the guest says yes. This protocol is broken at great risk to the friendship.
You absolutely have to pressure people to eat more, as well. If they say no, they're in trouble. If you don't pressure them, you're in trouble. You might say things like, "You are so skinny!" to an overweight person.
Every culture has a version of this. Food is always involved. You say one thing but expect everyone to understand they're supposed to disagree with you.
I saw the Chinese version in the movie Joy Luck Club. The Chinese girl takes her white boyfriend to meet her parents. The mom serves food while criticizing her own cooking. The guest is supposed to disagree, but he says something like ok, ok, maybe you need to add more salt....and they hate him for saying that. :)
I don't think you have to be Chinese to wince at that. Your girlfriend is taking you to meet her parents. Her mother made a home-cooked meal and she is doing the "polite self-deprecation" thing in front of the guest - "this is just something plain, I'm sure you've had better elsewhere, don't expect a restaurant-quality meal" and so on.
And instead of smiling and choking it down even if it *did* taste like burnt sawdust, he goes "yeah, you're right, this is bad and you should have done it this way"? That will upset the girlfriend, the mother, the father, and probably the dog and the goldfish as well. *Later*, after you've had a couple of visits to the family home under your belt, *then* you can mention to your girlfriend "uh, your mother's cooking is a bit lacking, huh?" but not when you're on the first formal introductory visit and should be on your best behaviour to impress the inlaws!
Yes, but that's from the perspective of the hosts. This man might be quite literal in how he interpreted the question. He might not know the social nuances involved. You could also say that the onus is on the other side, to understand HIM!
> (the local four-year-old recently announced she had no sense of taste, something we're pretty sure is some kind of weird game she's playing with herself and not true at all)
Umm, have you had her tested for COVID ? We no longer live in the Before Times, when life was green and good, you know...
This was my same thought too. I feel like Scott & household would have the awareness of this but definitely an important question.
The answer is people are wrong or do not tell the truth about their own preferences. If you have children, life is a constant battle with a small person who is incorrect about their own preferences (though not always, which makes this hard). If you deal in an industry that depends on socially mediated success, lying about your own preferences is necessary to succeed. Dating is a consatnt battle of discerning hidden preferences.
If you violate someone's expressed preference in favor of a more universal ideal (or situation appropriate ideal) of preferences, you will find you get constant feedback that this is correct choice in the situation. (though again not always).
Thanks for writing this comment so I didn't have to.
People very frequently lie, consciously or unconsciously, about what they want. As a result, you'll generally get a better response by ignoring someone's stated preferences entirely and treating them the way you would anyone else.
The exceptions are generally people with some kind of genuine illness or disorder that they will usually take pains to make you aware of. Gluten is a good example: the vast majority of people who "don't eat gluten" would in fact enjoy a cookie, but the few who actually have celiac or a gluten allergy will make sure to tell you. I'm not sure how kindly-but-insistent old people handle this.
As a result, you'll generally get a better response by ignoring someone's stated preferences entirely and treating them the way you would anyone else.
I think this is very susceptible to evidence-filtering.
In college, strangers would regularly sit with me during meals and strike up conversations, perhaps supposing that eating alone meant I was lonely, and I would apologize and tell them that I was there to eat rather than make conversation, and would prefer not to talk. Having space and quiet is a preference I hold strongly enough that I'm prepared to be somewhat rude to fulfill it. But, if I'm stuck in a space with someone for an extended period, like at a B&B, and I've told them that I don't want to make conversation, and they do it anyway, I'm not going to complain, because my reasoning is that they've already demonstrated willingness to ignore my stated preferences, and protesting further is likely to cause an unpleasant argument rather than improving the situation.
For a strong introvert in particular, telling people off for violating your preferences can be *very* unpleasant. I hated telling off people who were just trying to be nice by talking to me at mealtimes. I just didn't hate it as much as I realized I'd hate sitting for entire conversations with strangers at meals once I discovered that people were going to keep on doing this on a regular basis.
I guess I should clarify that ignoring a stated preference is not the same as ignoring revealed preference. People say all kinds of things, but what they do (or don't do) is ultimately the only reliable guidepost.
If someone says they don't want to drink, you offer them a drink and they don't touch it (or barely touch it) then they have demonstrated that they in fact don't want to drink. Likewise, in your example if someone isn't holding up their end of a conversation in smalltalk then they probably don't want to talk and you can politely dip out of the conversation unless you're under some obligation to continue.
That is, the goal is ultimately to respect someone's preference but the best way to do it is to see what they actually prefer rather than relying on a weak and game-able proxy for that.
True, there are occasions when people will dissemble for social reasons, but usually that consists of pretending to like things they don't. What social lubrication could you support by pretending to dislike what the person you're talking to likes? And the kind of social interaction where I've had these responses are co-equal conversations like the one we're having here in this comment section. Nobody's trying to impress their date, or suck up at the office.
Leaving aside the oft-discussed phenomenon of people not realizing they don't particularly like something because they haven't calibrated their sense of "like", I am unfamiliar with the idea of being wrong about your own preferences. Though people are different, so maybe there are people who do that. But I don't. I never, ever, ever, throughout a long and culinarily difficult childhood, was mistaken about tastes I disliked.
It is very common to say you dislike something or do not want something when you in fact do so as not to put any pressure or impose on the other party to provide that thing. When the other party disregards this stated preference you get to be certain they are not doing something simply because they felt it they were obligated. This is not "irrational" as in many situations, even without power imbalances, constant "imposition" of your preferences can be tiresome.
Is it so strange to think you may not know your own preferences? Almost any nerd that has ever gotten into body building or long distance running will tell you a story as to how that changed their preferences. And how bizzare never to eat something, dislike it, but later to grow to enjoy it.
Changing preferences. Not the same thing as not knowing your preferences.
Exactly. It seems highly likely that older people, having been exposed to multiple cases of stated vs revealed preferences mismatch, are more able to detect such cases intuitively (which is likely the case with the grandmother, the girlfriend and the gift). It may also be hard for them to explain their intuition (hence the nonsensical "everybody likes gifts" explanation). They may or may not be right, of course.
Aside from that, Taarof is a thing, and there are similar traditions in many cultures, so it's not just a weird fluke. I.e. it can be considered polite to state the opposite of your preference, multiple times, before finally revealing the real one, and that may actually be rational behavior due to complicated incentives.
After reading the first paragraph, I immediately thought of [What Developmental Milestones are You Missing?](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones-are-you-missing/). Particularly number 2:
> Ability to model other people as having really different mind-designs from theirs
While I wouldn't say a person who doesn't like gifts or is bothered by friendly strangers as "really different". But there does seem to be an inability "to relate to people who are not just like me" that seems to be missing.
But I have also noticed this is from the same generation. This is also written into Kitty Foreman's character (That 70's Show) who I think would be from that same generation as well.
Some thoughts, beyond the ones in the article:
* They have more life experience to draw on for making a good excuse to not update their beliefs (She only says she doesn't like presents because she is used to getting bad ones. Get her something good, and she'll like it).
* They are used to people just giving up on this battle, and are mistaking that for the previous point.
* They've spent a long time with a self selected bubble so their priors are unusual. (People who get B&Bs disproportionately want the interaction. The B&B hosts end up with strongly reinforced beliefs about what people are like.)
* (Wild speculation) Maybe as people age, their ability to update beliefs gets worse.
* This is mostly just relevant to gift giving: but there may be several social attitudes and signals informing the person's opinion that "everyone likes presents" that may be hard to update all at once.
* There may be a different social attitude towards the preference: being introverted may not be seen as a valid preference. Instead it is something the introvert is expected to cope with.
All of these are at least fairly speculative.
On a final note regarding the second last paragraph: I've noticed the opposite! The emotional response is that she likes me or he is a true friend. It is my rational brain that can rationalize their behavior as "just being polite" or "playing a game". Weird.
I once saw the question, "What thing do you know that nobody else does?" and my answer was, "People are different."
I won't say that -literally- nobody else knows this, but a very large number of people seem not to. And it's not just innocent social preferences, where they assume that everybody likes the same things. It also affects hot topics like politics and religion. People on one side of a divide will assume that people on the other side are perverted, or lying, or have some kind of ulterior motive, and they will puzzle themselves endlessly trying to figure out what that ulterior motive might be, when the people in question have stated their reasons plainly.
However, the most intense example of this phenomenon is back on the innocent social side. It's music. If you say you dislike some music that other people love - and it happens to me a lot; I can't abide about 90% of what passes for popular music - they will accuse you of -lying-. About your own musical tastes! Why would you do such a thing?
Speaking of tastes, it also happens with food. And here it's often genetic, or at least epigenetic, and thus scientifically documentable, yet people who love cilantro still won't believe that other people find it repulsive. (Me, I find it nearly tasteless, yet I'm willing to accept that other people are not like me.)
This. Genuinely understanding that someone may have different preferences deep inside is incredibly difficult even with a lot of practice.
I think people just don't take statements of preference that seriously because most people who are not rationalists genuinely don't examine their preferences very often so people are constantly right when they insist that someone's preferences are wrong. At the same time you respect preferences so immediately because you, and the people you usually surround yourself with, do take the kind of authoritative "I like X" or "I can't stand Y" statements seriously and carefully avoid making them without being very sure. These people are optimizing more for the kind of person who declares that they are in love with the most recent city they've visited and HATES a third of all food types all of which they'll order in their next meal.
Don't know about the specifics in your case, but "I don't want a present" is the oldest trap in the relationship book. So your grandmother did have a very good point.
Anybody who'd play games like that, I wouldn't want a relationship with. So not giving them a present and then getting dumped for it is the optimal move in that case.
Yes! as an autistic person, I'm not wired to do well in a "guess culture," and I've mostly uninstalled whatever guess culture modules i picked up in life experience. A relationship with a "guess culture" person would be huge amounts of work, and I'd be unlikely to succeed. I'd spend lots of time being judged as a social failure, as uncaring, etc. etc. Better to break up ASAP. And because of the "guess culture" element, there's no way I can explain the problem and be heard or believed. Better to "fail" massively and intentionally (easier on my own feelings) ASAP, and be dumped by the guess culture person, however attractive they are otherwise.
Now if only I really believed that guess culture behaviour was a binary thing;-) Sadly, even extreme autistics pick up bits of it from those around them, particularly when it's ritualized.
Doesn't that read like: "Normies should make an effort, but I shouldn't have to (because my explicit way is better and theirs is bad)"?
I think it does read that way a bit because of the "I" framing, but practically speaking, it could just as easily be reversed.
"For a person with an ingrained 'guess culture,' a relationship with someone like me would be a lot of work and would be really unpleasant, because they'd have to parse a bunch of atypical preferences without being able to rely on simply asking me things or trusting what I tell them. They'd spend lots of time being judged as inconsiderate, obnoxious, dishonest, etc. for behaving according to their own understanding of the implicit expectations of a relationship."
Not to me. I'm so unable to empathize with guess culture that I think that even normies "should" also abandon it in droves, but I'm aware that in practice they'll stick with what they know, strongly prefer it, and mostly notice people from other cultures only as defective and rude. (With exceptions; some are ultra-good at soft skills, and learn to code switch.) So will those autistics raised in a strongly guess culture who manage to learn to function in it, and don't happen to switch their primary self-identification to the autistic/geek subculture.
Not to me. I'm so unable to empathize with guess culture that I think that even normies "should" also abandon it in droves, but I'm aware that in practice they'll stick with what they know, strongly prefer it, and mostly notice people from other cultures only as defective and rude. (With exceptions; some are ultra-good at soft skills, and learn to code switch.) So will those autistics raised in a strongly guess culture who manage to learn to function in it, and don't happen to switch their primary self-identification to the autistic/geek subculture.
Here's the problem as I see it though:
It's a normie world. We're guests there (statistically speaking).
Like with disability ammenities, it's civilized and moral to have them (e.g. handicapped, parking spots, ramps for those in wheelchairs, special traffic light signals for the blind, etc), but there's no way the majority of the population will turn to live like they have disabilities so that everybody is on the same level.
Besides imposing a minority issue on the majority (that doesn't need to handle it themselves), it will also in a way handicap their preferred mode of communication (the implicit, non-austistic, way).
For normies, the issue of implicitness and unstated preferences still being respected, is at the core of relationship.
For normies, respecting an unstated preference, even in spite of a token polite stating of the opposite (e.g. giving them presents even if they said they don't want any), is the core of actually connecting.
They don't want the others following their explicit orders (explicit preferences), because e.g. that wouldn't be a real gift. Telling you "bring me a present", and you bringing me one, is more like a mechanical action.
Whereas the subtlelty of bringing a present anyway (even if I didn't ask for it, or made a token gesture of not wanting any), means you took initiative, not blindly followed what I said, and went above and beyond it for me.
In other words, people in general don't want friends/lovers that explicitly follow their orders, but people that "click" with them, and "read their minds".
I think the ask vs guess culture observation suggests that this simply isn't true; normies who come form "ask" cultures, or from "guess" cultures with a different set of rules than some other normie, would be just as baffled and unhappy by being blamed for not doing what they were explicitly told wasn't wanted, and similar, as any autistic person.
OTOH, my most successful roommate relationship, was with a person whose grandparents came from the same part of Yorkshire as my great grandparents. We lived several 1000 miles from the UK, so neither of us commonly encountered people from that area - or people anywhere near as compatible in the tiny details of living together.
This. If someone reacts negatively to me respecting their stated preference, that's generally a good reason to downgrade my overall opinion of them. Especially in relationships - "I expect you to care about me too much to listen to what I say I want" is a messed-up dynamic that leads nowhere good.
Well, such "games" are part and parcel with social life in all kinds of contexts. And it's not some cunning plan on the part of the perpetrator, it's how humans (or at least "normies") are wired, and part of the evolutionary development of interpersonal communication. So whether within a relationship or outside of one, one must deal with them to get by.
But we also probably shouldn't throw the baby (e.g. relationship) with the bathwater, because we don't like this or that aspect of it.
In terms of finding someone you are compatible with for a long-term relationship, if you want things stated explicitly and the other person continues to ignore that, it's a sign to end things, so each person can find someone they are more compatible with.
It's extraordinary how little skill people have at what might be called "enforcing your preferences." Scott told the B&B folks about his friend's preferences but did not secure any explicit agreement or even check for understanding.
What they may have taken from him was this: A) Not much at all -- they just didn't pay attention; B) "This man doesn't understand his friend, or how much people like us" C) His friend should learn to be more friendly, so we'll help her; D) We don't want folks like that at our B&B, so we'll work her over in the usual manner in the hope that she doesn't return.
If you want to enforce your preference, you need to make sure that you have been understood, that the other person agrees, and that the other person sees more advantage in respecting your preferences than in serving his own. I don't see any of those elements present in what he describes.
Harsh but fair.
I think it's worth noting that receiving/wanting a present from a partner and receiving wanting a present from a friend are really quite different things, and it wouldn't surprise me if she really did have a different preference for each of those situations.
One of the changes in society that has occurred in the last ten years is that many people are desperately lonely. They may be nice people – but when they have the opportunity to visit, they will talk and talk and talk. Another change that has occurred is many people have become very bad at conversation. Once you have discussed the weather they are out of things to talk about.
Not just in the last ten years. The most talkative guy I ever met was the proprietor of a used book store housed in a broken-down school bus in an otherwise (as far as I could see) abandoned ghost town in Nevada. He talked as if I were the first person he'd seen in a week, and I possibly was.
I admit to making a similar mistake, more than once. The problem was the lack of social skills and inability to pick up on social cues. What makes this extra difficult is that people *do* say stuff they don't mean all the time. So if you grew up around people who often play coy, you learn to expect that another person will reject whatever nice thing you're trying to do in a humble or self deprecating way ("oh, no, thanks, I wouldn't want to bother you"), but if you do the nice thing anyway ("oh, but I insist"), they will appreciate it and be happy about it.
So, for example, I would insist on helping my friend to carry her heavy backpack, and fail to realize that she said "no" in a "I don't want you to do this and am feeling increasingly annoyed" sense, not in a "oh, no, don't bother, oh, but okay, thank you."
I don't think that I'm particularly irrational person or that I don't care about people's preferences, or was doing whatever a modern woke person would accuse me of doing. It's just that taking other people's preferences at face value is a social skill you have to learn, and unless you've been taught it or are able to figure it out eventually on your own, it's not that weird that you'd miss it. I guess a smarter person would've picked up on this kind of thing faster... Or maybe some people are just naturally better at socializing than others.
Which is why I think it would be much better if our society didn't have a huge stigma around teaching social skills and dating advice to young guys. If you're shy, awkward, kinda weird, and feeling overwhelmed by social interactions, you'll end up making mistakes like this all the time, because your model of how human relationships are supposed to work is based on romcoms, platitudes, and whatever your parents taught you when growing up, who didn't really know any better themselves.
Cultures and sub-cultures come with a set of very deep unspoken assumptions and understanding that those may be really different is HARD. I live in a different country then the one I grown up in, so I actually have quite a few examples of where I literally can't comprehend people having other preferences, even though I rationally understand they do. To take an apolitical example, I'm having trouble imagining people might want to live in a group setting if they can afford a place of their own. Not for the lack of examples of the contrary, Scott being one of them! Also, whenever I see or hear any office worker approving of going back to full in-person work after the covid, I can't get rid off the little voice in the back of my head saying they are an evil lying bastard who just wants to look good in front of the boss.
Would I disrespect any of those preferences given a chance? Not sure, but I'm in the bay area where they are squarely withing the norm. If someone would've been expressing something equally alien in the context where my assumptions were the norm and their a wild deviation, I can easily see myself ignoring this as a lie or confusion or whatever.
As for the most probable explanation though, I'm on board with everyone who said that deep down they probably just didn't care what she wants.
Some of these seeming disconnects about "preferences" are just complicated social dynamics playing out. For example, an act that appears like altruistically trying to please someone else (giving a present), is actually more about social positioning ("I am generous and considerate"), and the recipient has good social reasons to get annoyed ("now I look inconsiderate for not getting them a present" and "now I owe them").
A more fundamental version of the "problem" would be: "Why it is hard to accept that other people experience a different reality?" Formulated that way, the answer is almost obvious. Each of us wants to believe that we are living in one objective reality and that we accurately perceive it.
But if you meet someone who prefers the taste of lemon peel to chocolate ice cream, you have to ask yourself "do those things taste the same to each of us?" "Or does that other person enjoy bad tastes?" "Why would they do that?" "Are they a weirdo?" "Am I the weirdo?" "Are there multiple realities, in which we are both right?" Of all these choices, it's easiest to assume you are right about reality and "they are just a weirdo" or "just pretending to like bad stuff."
That's how I feel about sushi. I can't believe people really prefer the taste of raw fish to something that is actually worth eating. So my theory is that all the people who go to sushi bars are just pretending they like it because they think it makes them cool or interesting. (As objective evidence for this theory, notice that sushi eaters go out of their way to load up each bite with a bunch of rice to obscure the raw fish taste). Anyway, that's my reality, and I'm sticking to it.
Most places that offer sushi with rice also offer sashimi without rice.
One of the most surprising things I've seen online was someone who said he liked Stockhausen more than Mozart.
Sushi eaters don't normally select how much rice comes with their sushi.
Also, how does this extrapolate out to hot dog buns?
I don't think all these cases are really best explained by a single theory. For instance, there are specific reasons why people might be reluctant to update on explicitly given information in many of the cases you cite.
1) Recognizing that a girl who says they aren't into them really isn't.
Here I think you have evolution on the other side favoring male optimism about women sleeping with them since, for unattached women in the evo environment, the costs to continuing to pursue them were probably pretty low compared to benefits and given a limited selection people probably did change their minds not infrequently.
2) Accepting that someone didn't want a present.
Here I think you need to not only take into account the fact that it's considered appropriate to pretend not to want presents in our society but also the fact that some people really feel they *shouldn't* want presents and should indicate they don't like them.
Also I think many people have genuine experiences of finding out that people who insisted they didn't want presents actually found that unpleasant. People just aren't as good at predicting their future emotional reaction as they believe.
3) B&B experience.
In this case the owners are almost certainly extroverts who don't understand (intuitively) that other people genuinely dislike those interactions. Not only did they probably just forget your warning if they remembered it they probably assumed it meant nothing more than your friend might get tired and make excuses early.
The problem in these cases is that convincing someone that there really are people who hate that friendly extrovert stuff would require them accepting they've been making lots of people secretly feel bad when they thought they were being friendly. That's just too big an adjustment to make based on brief remarks from a stranger.
Re: #1, a friend of mine once told me that in his experience, there are primarily two kinds of guys: assholes who assume all girls are into them and if someone says she isn't, she must just be playing hard to get, or at worst she must be a frigid bitch, and regular men who have a sensible estimate of their own likely worth (i.e., average or less). The first group hit on every girl they like, get shot down a stunning amount, never take it personally because clearly the chick is just crazy or something, and crucially, never miss any opportunity with any girl who does like them because they throw their net maximally widely. The second group essentially never hit on girls because they assume, correctly, that any given girl won't be interested; thus they whiff most of their shots and the consequence is that assholes get laid more. Same principle: there are basically zero costs to hitting on everyone you want because the people who get mad about it wouldn't have slept with you anyway.
There are costs if you care about women for any purpose other than getting laid, which is why feminism tends to try quite hard to get men not to make moves on women without some reciprocation - or at least to make moves in such a way that they won't get mad about it if they aren't interested.
For fairly obvious reasons, if someone made a move on you and you got mad about it, then it's likely to make a professional relationship between the two of you more difficult.
The problem is that feminism seems to focus its message and effort on the people who aren't the source of the issue.
You've heard this relevant joke?
"A man comes across a drunk, at night, squinting anxiously at the ground under a streetlight. 'What's wrong?' 'I lost my car keys!' 'Oh here I can help.'
"After some time spent in fruitless mutual search, the sober man asks the drunk: 'Are you sure you lost your keys here?' 'Oh no,' the drunk replies, 'I lost them crossing the street over there. But the light is much better here.'"
I don't know if I would describe that as *the* problem, I don't think feminists going away would just resolve the entire tension between competing preferences, but it certainly is *a* problem related to this whole situation.
"There are costs if you care about women for any purpose other than getting laid"
Right, which encourages assholes not to care about women for any other reason.
I think the B&B thing comes down to the misunderstanding - Scott requested "please don't bother my friend" and the hosts agreed, but to them "say hello and make small talk" wasn't "bothering" her, it was "greeting the guest in a friendly manner". For them, "bothering" meant something different. For the friend, what she wanted was "come in, say who I am, get shown the room, no other interaction" but for the hosts, that would have been rude and mercenary - "we're treating you like all we care about is the money for the room".
> When other people's behavior baffles me, I try to think of an example where I make the same mistake; this usually shows up pretty fast, and I get appropriately humbled.
This one is weird, because it's staring you right in the face here. In your first two examples there's a counterparty with legitimate preferences that you have completely failed to acknowledge, yourself!
Your friend has a preference for no small talk. Your host has a preference for small talk. That's a reasonable preference conflict that needs to be resolved somehow, but you seem to be just assuming that it should be resolved on the side of your friend's preferences rather than your host's preferences. Why so?
Similarly your girlfriend has a preference for "no presents" while your grandmother has a preference for "presents". Why should we assume that this perfectly reasonable preference conflict should be resolved on your girlfriend's side rather than your grandmother's?
What's more, you seem to be making the same mistake that you're assuming the counterparty is making, of assuming that the other person's preferences are simply invalid. Nobody could _really_ have a strong preference for making small talk, could they? Nobody could _really_ have a strong preference for giving presents, could they? In fact I think some people do have a strong preference for making a bit of small talk with strangers that they're letting into their house; it's scary having a stranger under your roof and it's nice to be reassured that they're vaguely normal through a few minutes of conversation. Similarly, gift-giving rituals have an important role to play in strengthening familial bonds.
In both these cases, it's not a story of "one person has a legit preference which the other person pigheadedly refuses to acknowledge", it's a story of "two people have legit preferences which the other person pigheadedly refuses to acknowledge". I find it amusing to consider the possibility that your grandmother and your hosts have their own substacks on which they're writing exactly the same post from the opposite perspective.
I didn't think of things that way, so thanks for the insight.
I think potentially this comes from a similar place in all of us, which is: we're acutely aware of how much work *we* have to do to accommodate the weirdness of other people, and since our own weirdnesses are ipso facto not really weird because their ours, it is extremely difficult to credit the fact that *other* people might have to do a lot of work to accommodate *our* weirdnesses.
So the cost seems asymmetrical to us: it's hard for me to accommodate your pecadilloes, whereas it's easy for you to work around my small harmless idiosyncrasies, so why are you so selfish?
Id est, I think a really important part of understanding these conflicts is assessing with some degree of accuracy the *cost* (mental and otherwise) of accommodation, and the relative willingness of the parties to bear the cost. Sometimes it's trivial, sometimes it's not, sometime the cost is apparent to all, sometimes it's not -- and that seems like a really big part of the story, much more so than any ethical/moral ground rules.
There are many good responses to Scott's post, but yours stands out to me. It's one of those situations where I'd like to claim I'd have written the same thing if I'd got round to it. I didn't tho' and you put it particularly well. Kudos.
I think for most people in most parts of the world, the idea that they would host people in their homes and not interact with them is completely beyond the pale of social norms. Scott seems to be underestimating the “weird points” being spent in a request as extreme as ‘don’t talk to my friend who is staying in your house' and because of this level of weirdness, the hosts are politely pretending it wasn’t said, or else the request didn’t compute because it was so beyond acceptable precedent.
I imagine they felt a bit like flight attendants would if a passenger suddenly said, “Sorry, I don’t like flying, Please don’t put this plane in the air.” What would a sweet elderly flight attendant do in this situation? Almost surely smile and say “Sure, dear whatever you say,” and then proceed to let the plane take off. Such a preference can’t be taken seriously because one person demanding the plane not take off means no one else gets to fly, which is to say that extreme introverts tend to seriously underestimate the damage they can do to social gatherings of any kind. Just one or two people who are in an anti-social headspace can completely suck the air out of a room, just like how one or two people talking in a movie theatre can completely ruin it for everyone else.
The hosts had a strong preference for this not to happen on their social turf and expressed this by ignoring the request. I currently live in Japan, and I imagine the response here would be much worse even than that: hosts would hear the request loud and clear, and hate me for it because expressing such a strong and anti-social preference would be viewed as both generally arrogant and directly insulting to the hosts. I see there as being real historical baggage here in both America and Japan: walking around not being bothered or chatted at by the people doing the cooking and cleaning has long been a privileged reserved for the high-upper-class.
Basically, those two hosts didn’t want their home to become a place where people don’t talk to one another, and they held that preference very, very strongly, probably much more strongly than Scott’s friend held hers. And although not a request for some material luxury, what Scott’s friend was asking was on the level of requesting golden bed linens and a bowl of only-blue M&M’s in terms of weirdness, and in the eyes of most people aged 50+ , arrogance.
Since nobody else has, I feel obliged to point out the status effects at play here as well.
To oversimplify massively: when you stay at a hotel, you are automatically of higher status than the hotel employees you interact with since they're just hired help, but when you stay at a B&B you have at best equal status to your hosts because it is, after all, their home.
One of the ways in which B&B proprietors like to assert their status as not-inferior to their guests is to engage in lengthy and somewhat personal conversation that would be totally inappropriate from a random Marriott employee. By disturbing this routine you threaten their status, which nobody likes.
Of course it's all a lot more subtle and less conscious than I've laid it out, but I think something along those lines applies.
A very good point.
>I imagine they felt a bit like flight attendants would if a passenger suddenly said, “Sorry, I don’t like flying, Please don’t put this plane in the air.” What would a sweet elderly flight attendant do in this situation? Almost surely smile and say “Sure, dear whatever you say,” and then proceed to let the plane take off.
That actually strikes me as really bad service and something I definitely wouldn't expect a flight attendant to do, because once the plane takes off, the rest of the customers are stuck with them, and they might make a huge scene, so if the customer is, say, someone with a massive phobia of flying who hasn't properly thought through the fact that staying on the plane commits them to do so, that should absolutely be resolved in advance of the plane taking off, for the sake of the other passengers if nothing else.
Help, help! People are trying to be nice to me, and they are really bad at it!
Possibly "nice," in the sense of "In compliance with local social norms".
"Kind" seems right out, though. And that's often what people mean when they say "nice".
+1. If I've told people I'm an alcoholic, and not to give me alcohol because it will make me relapse, they are not being kind by giving me alcohol.
i don't know how much this generalizes, but my model of the b&b couple & elderly people that don't want to accept weird preferences is that, while they do somewhat care about how the other person feels, their actions are mainly determined by a social script that they feel really bad if they don't follow. if the b&b couple hadn't been really friendly, even if you said that was preferable, they would have felt bad about it all day. most peoples' conscious minds and emotional minds aren't connected very well, so i can totally see it being very difficult for the conscious mind, who knows that they should violate their well-worn social script *this one time*, not being able to override the powerful, uncomfortable feeling of social violation generated by the emotional mind. i find myself doing things like this in the moment sometimes, too; even if i planned on not doing something, the social pressure *from myself* is too much to handle and i end up doing what i always do (i can't think of a specific example though).
I think this is it; this matches my own experiences. In fact, I'd say the B&B couple are most likely bad at accommodating weird preferences *for the same reason* that they're so nice: that they're *scared* of not being nice is what produces the effusive flow of Niceness™ in the first place, not just the cause of their inability to turn it off.
I agree with this, on the basis of my experience with buddhist mindfulness and psychoanalysis. The reason it is harder to accept different preferences from our own (as opposed to different beliefs) is because preferences are typically reinforced with tightly conditioned emotional reactions, which are associated with fantasies and irrational fears. It's basically the same phenomenon as addiction.
I would imagine that the nice old couple are addicted to niceness. Perhaps the idea of their own mortality, declining relevance, and an image of the isolation and abandonment in old age scares them. Connecting with people has generated positive feelings that displaced the negative ones, and shored up their positive self-image. So they ward off their fears by nursing and feeding a fantasy of a cozy world of social connection. Anybody who doesn't buy into their system of happy social connection would seem to be making an implicit claim that cozy connection cannot redeem or ward off the aspects of the world that scare them. Since they can't tolerate that threat, they suppress the possibility.
Whenever I have an experience that something is *special*, like my coffee in the morning, or a movie that really made a perfect night (which I probably combined with a nice drink), I think, this special thing has made an otherwise intolerable world tolerable. I was experiencing discomfort, which it replaced with comfort or reassurance. I become attached to that experience, and I want other people to affirm it as well, to reassure me that I have found a talisman that works. If they don't like it, my fantasy is threatened.
It could be that intense, but my guess is that they were rewarded for being sociable when they were young and possibly punished for not being sociable, and the training has stuck.
Heavy duty stuff like fear of death might be in play, but if my model is correct, it's heavily backgrounded and based on not getting along with their families as children which can translate to not getting life right.
I try to keep in mind a sentence from one of Iris Murdoch’s novels when someone has a preference outside the norms as I understand them:
“We’re all so very different.”
Such a simple but important fact that I didn’t always know.
If you've ever had a woman ask you out on a date, straightforwardly, instead of making various spastic jerking movements and inane statements meant to get *you* to ask *her* out, that alone makes you a massive experiential outlier in the West, to say nothing of the planet.
I'm a bit surprised Scott is so puzzled over this. It's been well covered in x-rationalist circles.
Other minds fallacy. We use our own minds to model others. We have to. We assume that everyone is basically like us. Often, they're really, really not (see the "people literally see different colors" or "some people cant visualize" posts.
There's more to it as well. Older people tend to be more habitual. It's possible they heard what you said but completely forgot it (especially as these people see tons of guests all the time and might not have connected what you said to this guest).
I had a friend who used to be an egregious example of this. Part of it stemmed from his insane overconfidence (he believed he was the smartest man in the world- basically he discovered tautological reasoning, said he figured out the goal of life was to be happy, and thinking anything else might interfere with his happiness.)
At one time he believed people didn't like things he didn't like, they were just trying to be cool contrarians. Examples- reading books, being homosexual.
I have to admit even I struggle with this. There are definitely times I have a hard time believing people have preferences they claim to have. (I still can't grok people who prefer winter over summer. I understand for people with allergies and overweight people, but otherwise it's tough.)
Of course, people also do signal, and are often bad at knowing what actually makes them happy. I relate to you on the NYC thing. I feel it's possible people's preference there is often feeling like "they've made it" if they're living in the city. Of course that's not all of it. There are people who have lived in the city there whole lives who can't stand to leave.
There's also cases like your patient. There are often situations where "prefence" is multi-variable. People rarely get to choose their ideal preference, their are many factors involved like social pressure.
There's a lot of research that social media makes people less happy, but a cumulative effect may not be obvious to the person when their motvations are short term, when the social structures around them motivate them in a certain way, when short term interests conflict with larger happiness (Moloch), when it doesn't occur to people there is a different way to do things. There is also inertia- making changes to routines is hard, and allowing oneself to exercise different preferences might take quite a bit of work. There are many people who want to get in shape and get healthier- that's a preference. But exercising that preference comes at the cost of other short term preferences and can require a reserve of "will[power."
I had a friend who lived in the city and I did wonder if it didnt actually make her happy but was one of those "I have to" things. Of course she claimed that i couldn't possibly enjoy drives through places in jersey I havent seen and that I like beat roadside motels (she assumed I was signalling.)
There's also different depths of preference. The smartest man friend loves to play video games. I enjoy that as well, but more so in certain situations- a lot of experience is sort of "spiritual junk food"- it may be somewhat enjoyable but it doesnt create memories or have much depth of emotion to it. Video games that are designed to reward your dopamine drives are often like this I feel.
In the case of the patient in the abusive relationship, people's preferences always have downsides, but we tend to create a schilling fence where the harm of the preference says we shouldnt respect that preference as a society. We call these preferences self destructive (i'm not saying this is a bad thing, just pointing it out.)
Of course there are disagreements about what should count as a self-destructive preference. There are those we feel are an issue as a society, like serious addiction and abusive relationships, and those we may feel are a personal issue (not living up to one's potential). Of course people have huge variations of preference for this sort of thing and the degree they generally respect people's autonomy.
We tend to grant more autonomy the better the person understands. But not everyone does. (Take for example, the disagreements over whether someone can consent to sex while intoxicated, including those who have a sometimes explicit preference to do so themselves.)
This brings me back to what Scott was saying- in more conformist societies (which can include smaller social groups) person preference is less important.
So social interaction in certain contexts could be an expectation to fulfill what are seen as social norms, not a matter of preference.
I have noticed that in urban black neighborhoods, when passing someone on the street, it is considered polite to acknowledge them- this certainly is not the case universally across America.
The notion of what's "polite" could be a major factor. The hotel staff may have felt having a conversation was the polite thing to do regardless of what you said, and expected the other person to reciprocate.
This may even have been true had they known the other person was an introvert, as many people, especially older ones, probably feel there are social customs that must dictate behavior.
Going back to Scott's post about tribal knowledge, this has an evolutionary advantage (in the broadest sense). Customs that have worked mean safety and security, and not following those customs means potential risk.
On the girlfriend present thing- what your grandmother was saying usually makes sense.
Keep in mind, a lot of social interaction isnt honest exchange of information but performance.
The whole "don't get me anything" but you're supposed to is established schtick.
Since that is the norm, Person A has to follow it, of course they don't care, they're not greedy, they love you anyway, etc. But since this is the norm, she really is expecting a present, and expects that you get unspoken social rules to get how this works.
Your grandmother probably assumed your girlfriend was a normal girlfriend and not YOUR girlfirend.
This kind of thing has evolved to a level of silliness in Japan for example where people are supposed to insist on giving gifts and the receiver has to insist on not receiving- to the point where even if you do and you didn't argue enough, you're seen as cheap/greedy.
Performance=social signalling. Again, this isn't "rational" it's customs that have evolved over time.
This sort of thing can be very toxic though.
This is literally what the "no means no" campaign was about in the 80s. Because while no always "officially" meant no, the "good girl" was supposed to offer token resistance and the man was supposed to keep trying till he just overwhelmed her resistance. yeah. And people weren't even supposed to be having pre-marital sex anyways.
This is part of the reason why I think you see so many older people so skeptical of rape claims. but it was a legit toxic situation for everyone involved.
Nobody is "supposed" to be doing this anyway- but it was up to a horny inexperienced guy to judge how real the "no" was.
I had a coworker from Nigeria and in his culture this sketchy shit still goes on.
If you are sincerely interested in a girl, you are supposed to "stalk her." Which literally means following her around, going to her house, etc, declaring your intentions for her. She's supposed to refuse you untill you prove yourself "honest". Failure to play either role sincerely enough means the two are judged negatively (the opposite of the way westerners think). If she gives in too easily, she's not "pure" enough. If he isn't... super stalkery, he's not sincere and just wants sex.
Yeah.
"Nobody is "supposed" to be doing this anyway- but it was up to a horny inexperienced guy to judge how real the "no" was." You know that it's still like this, right? The penalties to the guy for guessing wrong were just vastly increased, and now we have headlines about "young people are having sex less than ever".
Ritually lying about preferences is an essential part of many cultures. In China, for example, it takes a bit to convincing to refuse gifts or hospitality. This is especially true if you're family. The Persians have a moral formal system called taarof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taarof
"In the rules of hospitality, taarof requires a host to offer anything a guest might want, and a guest is equally obliged to refuse it. This ritual may repeat itself several times (usually three times) before the host and guest finally determine whether the host's offer and the guest's refusal are genuine, or simply a show of politeness. If one is invited to any house for food, then one will be expected to eat seconds and thirds. However, taarof demands that one can't go ahead and help themselves to more food after finishing their first helping. Good manners dictate that one must first pretend to be full, and tell the host how excellent the food was, and that it would be impossible to eat any more. The host is then expected to say one should not do taarof ("taa'rof nakon" - similar to "don't be polite!"), for which the appropriate response would be to say "no" two or three times, then pretend to cave in to the host's insistence and pile on the food. Done any other way, one can come across as either starving, or simply a bit uncouth.[7]"
Ritualized lying about preferences isn't such a prominent part of American culture, but it's still there. How many times have you actually wanted to know how someone is doing when asking "how are you?" Asking "how are you?" without wanting to know is considered deeply weird in most of the world, even Western cultures like Germany. When you last went to a party, did you show up exactly at the specified time, or 30 minutes late, as required by custom? When was the last time someone said "let's get lunch some day" and subsequently invited you to lunch for real?
For whatever reason, it's often against custom to say directly what we want. It sounds rude, demanding, or unappreciative. If a friend asks whether I want a gift and I say yes, I've just created a burden that wouldn't exist had I said no, so I would say no to demonstrate that I value the friend's time and don't want to impose upon him (which is true). But that doesn't mean I actually don't want a gift, or that I wouldn't be happy had he given me a gift without asking.
Here is a funny video about Taarof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAvzW1WZsN4
For most people, our preference to be liked by others, in particular our significant others, usually trumpfs any other preferences we may have. (That is also why you can get large swings in public opinions whenever people sense "what is the prevailing correct opinion on this question" has shifted.)
If a girlfriend tells you she does not like gifts that is likely to be because she knows you are a rather prominent "rationalist", and rationalists might be likely to appreciate someone who does not like presents, since there is something irrational about gift-giving as such. "Why give anybody anything else than money? If you give money, the receiver can buy what he/she actually wants most...if you give something else, there is bound to be an utility loss." Which is a famous argument against giving anything other than money at Christmas. Quoting from memory, an economist colleague calculated the societal utility loss of Christmas presents to something like 0.7 perent of GDP each year.
...back to the topic: the empirical fact that you overheard your girlfriend say she loved a present she received from someone else, strengthens the above suspicion that she said what she said to you because what she really cares about is what she thinks you think about giving presents.
I short: Your grandmother was right.
>When other people's behavior baffles me, I try to think of an example where I make the same mistake; this usually shows up pretty fast, and I get appropriately humbled. But I'm having trouble. There are things that are close - part of me will always refuse to believe that people enjoy living in New York City, and whenever I talk to friends in New York I have to resist the urge to ask them if they're okay, or whether I can help them move. But it stays at the level of intellectual curiosity; I would never refuse to drive an NYC friend to the airport because I don't believe them when they say they want to go back home.
You probably do the same thing, just in reverse, by overvaluing peoples' stated preferences and undervaluing their unstated/unspoken/implicit desires.
Related: In college I wasn’t great at spending money. I would go to parties thrown by my friend who would buy most of the alcohol, and the first couple times I feebly tried to pay her back she refused and said she wouldn’t let anyone give her money. Naive me gave up and took her at her word. Fast forward a few months and she texts me to meet up out of the blue. She’s pretty upset, both at me and a few other friends, for giving up on paying her back, leading her to pretty much run out of money. Embarrassed as all heck I gave her whatever was in my wallet and our friendship continued on, a little worse than before.
Since then I’ve learned that in polite (American?) society you should take repaying debts as a non-compromising value. There’s too much pressure for people to misrepresent their preferences, and too high of a potential price for messing it up, to ever leave a debt hanging. (Bonus: people will like and trust you more too!)
In effect she wanted the social virtue/benefit of being someone who was generous and wealthy without the associated (literal) cost.
This strikes me as a common theme in many of these situations. People want to present (internally or externally) as virtuous but do not actually want to bear the consequences of that. As I tell my kids, it's not a sacrifice if you don't give something up.
I think the failure to take preferences into account makes more sense if you look at it through a signaling framework. Giving presents and throwing a welcome party (from the perspective of the giver/host) is less about optimizing the recipient's welfare, and more about signaling. So when you give chocolates on Valentine's day you famously don't ask yourself how hungry the recipient is, but rather how many chocolates you need to give them in order to signal how much you care. Likewise when the hosts welcome you and your friend to their B&B, their primary concern is to signal how impressive they are as hosts - your welfare as guests is of secondary concern.
You are assuming throughout this that people are _supposed_ to respond to your stated preferences. That's probably pretty ingrained from the culture you're used to but is really not how most people operate, I think. I'd bet that most Americans aren't used to people who have stated preferences _at all_, and would both (a) find it uncomfortable and off-putting and (b) do a bad job of respecting it.
I've been unlucky enough to see this play out for most of my life regarding food. Somehow basically everyone I ever talked to remained absolutely certain I must secretly like the foods I told them I found intolerable, and no amount of me trying it in front of them and saying "I find this intolerable and wont eat it this time, or any time in future" made them stop giving it to me. I still find it happens all the time with spice in particular, where I ask if something is spicy because I have no tolerance for it and they say no, and when I try it and it's intolerably spicy they say "well its not THAT spicy". It's a stranger case though I feel, since surely they have their own foods that they don't like but other people do, so it should be easy enough to model someone else.
With spice in particular, this might actually be not just a case of modeling failure, not noticeability thresholds.
I suspect my own spice tolerance has degraded over the last few years since I no longer cook many meals exclusively for myself, but it used to be that with at least some brands of salsa, I actually could not tell by taste the difference between their "mild" and "hot" salsas, because the levels of spice in both were below my noticeability threshold.
If you asked me if something was spicy, and I thought there was a fair chance it was supposed to be spicy, I would have had to tell you "I don't know," but if I didn't think it was supposed to be spicy, I would probably say "no."
I have the same issue with my mom. I like spicy food. She can't tolerate it, and is seemingly sensitive to individual molecules of capsaicin. I can often tell her for certain that she can't safely eat a dish, but I can't reliably tell her that she can.
My wife and I have a similar issue with thrill rides, where my tolerance is much below hers. (But somewhat idiosyncratic: I can deal with fairly intense simulators and centrifuges, but the drops on a children's roller coaster are outside my comfort zone.) After she goes on a ride alone she may be able to tell me to stay away for sure, but she's rarely comfortable saying I'd be fine. An intolerable drop for me may not even register as a drop to someone with a higher threshold.
Many (maybe most) people are deontologists about interpersonal interaction. There's a certain range of culturally-approved-of ways to be nice, and these people feel they ought to be nice, even if compromising that would make people happier. They care about doing what they're supposed to do, and satisfying people's stated preference is a weak node in that network, so tweaking its value doesn't change their behavior much.
It makes sense that those who take ideas seriously tend to be better at respecting preferences, because they care less about social norms and propriety.
While certainly "do the things that are socially acceptable" is a form of deontology, there's a lot more forms of deontology than that. Kantian morality rejects some social norms directly as perfect duty (e.g. white lies), and imperfect duty can potentially hit almost all the others.
>>my girlfriend had told me unprompted that she found getting holiday presents weird and awkward and would prefer I not give her anything. I'd challenged her on this - what if I try really hard to pick something you like? - what if I leave it on your doorstep and you're under no obligation to demonstrate any emotion to me? - satisfied myself that this wasn't some complicated attempt at emotional manipulation, and agreed not to get her a holiday present.
>>I mock, but one of my girlfriend's friends gave her a present and she loved it.
What might be going on (I guess only because it's like that with me) is that your girlfriend hated receiving gifts-out-of-obligation and likes gifts given for any other reason. Telling people you hate gifts is about the only way to remove that obligation and ensure you get gifts only when people really do want to give you gifts. That's really confusing, though - I am telling people I hate gifts on Christmas and birthday and like them any other day, that works a bit better.
On the main subject - my first thought was that maybe old people just come from different cultures where words mean different things? Where saying "my friend hates talking" meant "we don't want to bother you, but would love to chat actually". My older relatives' stories have a lot of that - mothers saying they hate sweets because children loved them and there were only so many to go around, that sort of thing.
But then I remembered I have been told numerous times explicitly that my preferences are wrong and I am dumb and evil and inhuman for having them. Not even weird preferences - normal tastes like not liking honey or swamps. That might be the same language barrier where "I don't like honey" translates into "All your effort to get me this jar of honey is worthless, I hate you and hope you die in pain!!1!!11" because it was unthinkable to refuse food some time ago? So I must be unthinkably evil to do so now?
I wish I knew a better explanation.
I was discussing something similar and my interpretation is that most people are bad at *expressing* preferences, so for most people a policy of "assume people like the same things other people like and ignore any instructions otherwise until they've violently rejected something at least three times" works BETTER than trying to ask what people like or listen to what they request.
An example you might fight more familiar is if you're living with someone, and they say, "they're fine with X" or "they like you to do X" but whenever you do X they get upset or angry and whenever you talk about X they get upset and angry -- I think if X isn't a big deal, it's natural for many people to just avoid it most of the time, even if that wasn't what their cohabitee says they want. Because X is something where the other person doesn't completely know what they want.
I speculate that a LOT of people don't clearly know or be able to explain what they want because people are complicated and because no-one can understand themselves COMPLETELY, and for people living in that system learning how to deal with people by trial and error works better than listening. And people with atypical preferences or people who are good at expressing preferences get caught in the cracks of those societies, but the society rumbles on.
I sometimes think of it as, multiple people represent a complicated interacting system, that might be modelled like "every person mostly understands themselves and communicates through a narrow bandwidth channel" or "no-one understands anything, everyone just does what seems to work, and behaviours evolve in the shared system"
Principle of charity (at some level of granularity) says that if people ignore what people ask for, that strategy probably WORKS for them compared to anything else they've tried (but maybe not compared to "spending decades learning to understand people better")
Part of the problem is that people often misrepresent their preferences. Two examples off the top of my head: the girlfriend who insisted she didn't want a Valentine's Day present only to be hurt when I didn't get her one; the woman who told me she wasn't interested in dating me, but who became exasperated when I didn't ask her again, later telling me that I should have "tried harder".
Because people's revealed preferences often contradict their expressed preferences, the calculation is much harder than: "go along with whatever they say".
I haven't been reading your blog very long, maybe 3 months or so and this is my first comment. I'd rather it be about the material but you seem like someone who might take this notation fine. Something that has been distracting me is that the periods are on the outside of quotations! I might be misinformed or otherwise mistaken but I'm used to them going on the inside and believe that is the correct punctuation in those cases. I believe it's a little more up for debate on question marks and exclamation marks (although I prefer them inside) but I think it is standard for periods. I know this is relatively small and I do want to note that the posts are otherwise very well written and edited.
I recognize other forms of writing that are not American English use different rules, but I presume you're following the rules of American English given your double quote usage. Additionally, a quote ending in an exclamation would be the terminal point instead of also adding a period. Sorry this is grammatical but you clearly have well-edited posts which means it won't change without someone noting it. Thanks for all the great content to think and read about.
Speaking only for myself-- I used to put periods outside quotation marks because periods indicate the end of the sentence, so having quotation marks dragging the sentence out past the period was irritating.
I have occasionally typed a period before the quotation marks to indicate the end of the sentence being quoted and another period after the quotation marks to indicate the end of the whole sentence, but that looked too weird.
Anyway I've gotten used to having the period inside the quotation marks, so I'm doing conventional punctuation these days, but as for the future, who knows?
This has been discussed in comments before, though I can't find it since Google doesn't seem to index the comments on Substack. My hypothesis is that Scott, having a philosophy degree, is following a convention common among philosophers, where punctuation marks go inside the quotes if they are actually part of what is being quoted. So, typically, if you are quoting an entire sentence, the ending period will go inside the quotes, but if you are just quoting a word, and that word just happens to fall at the end of your sentence, the ending period will go outside the quotes.
I think that this one is ultimately pretty simple.
Most people are nearly fundamentally incapable of behaving differently than they would by default.
I think this statement has a lot of explanatory power for so many of the seemingly baffling things that 'normies' do. It's a big question why this is the case, but I've come to take it as a pretty fundamental truth.
As someone coming from the Guess culture (60's communist Czechoslovakia) and trying to be Ask myself (my kids already are, no problem - I still sometimes struggle), I tend to understand both the actions of Guessers and the frustration of Askers.
I think your frame — "Why Is It Hard To Acknowledge Preferences?" — blinds you to the frame of the B&B owners. From their point of view, you are asking them "When my friend arrives would you please be rude to her?" It's hardly surprising that they would demur.
I can identify with both of your examples.
I am an introvert. My wife's family is large and Mediterranean (think: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) Whenever I visit them, the attention is overwhelming. Fortunately, they have one of those Mediterranean flat roofs that I can sneak off to when it gets too much for me. As soon as my mother-in-law discovers my absence, she'll send someone to come and sit with me because I shouldn't be on my own. She would be delinquent in her hosting obligations to do otherwise. She would be rude.
After 30 years, she finally understands (sort of). When my in-laws visit us across thousands of miles and, often after several years, they will walk in the house, say Hello Hello, then immediately go to another room because "K does not like to be bothered."
Mother-in-law is trying her best to learn from experience but B&B owners don't have sustained opportunities for learning like this. The rule is "Don't be rude to guests". Even if a guest asks them to be rude.
On the gift-giving thing, I explain to every guest who is visiting us that they should not bring a gift because it will upset my wife. At the end of every visit (I mean EVERY visit), the guest will say 'I know you said not to bring a gift but this is "just a small gift"/"a very nice gift"/"is something that I know you will appreciate". EVERY time it ends in tears and shouting and our guests leaving with bad feelings all around.
I don't like gifts either and have learned how to say "Thank you. It's just what I always wanted." but my wife does not have that skill. Her phobia of gifts is too deep.
Our closest friends have learned to make a joke of it now ("Hello! I didn't bring you anything!") but others still bring gifts.
B&B owners don't have this opportunity for learning because they only interact with you once.
These are great stories! It strikes me that at the point we feel harmed by something that is a normal occurrence in the world (gift giving in this context), then it's almost like a phobia isn't it? Like someone with a bridge phobia who needs to cross a bridge to get to work. It's very hard to go through the world never being offered a gift.
I had a client once who coped with her anxiety by giving her friends a list of topics they could not raise with her because those topics caused her anxiety. She handed them the responsibility of remembering and avoiding. She felt this was a perfectly reasonable accommodation to ask of them for her anxiety. The trick is that lots of people won't agree that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask and so the anxious person is still left not being able to create a world in which they can perfectly avoid a thing that causes them pain. Which of course is why the standard treatment for a lot of anxiety and trauma is exposure therapy -- to learn in a safe environment how to turn towards and tolerate the thing that distresses us until we learn that we can tolerate the feelings it raises and then the distress decreases.
I don't mean any critique of your wife's behavior. We all do versions of this in bigger or smaller ways (anyone want to talk about dentists?). I'm more in this moment taken with how "preference" overlaps in a lot of places with trauma and how the tactic of trying to avoid the thing that causes the difficult feelings is likely to leave us feeling more vulnerable and brittle rather than less.
Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.
Just to add to my anecdote. My wife had a group of friends who liked to meet up for each other’s birthday. My wife said, every year, I’ll come if you promise not to buy me any presents. Every year they bought her presents until, eventually, my wife cut off all contact with them because it was too stressful.
We moved house recently and had to decide what to do with 10 years worth of still-wrapped birthday presents in the garage.
I'm not good at taking ideas seriously but I'm good at updating to others' preferences (well, at least I think so). I feel like different mechanisms are responsible for it. Taking ideas seriously is a cognitive exercise and acknowledging preferences is... respect? I'm afraid I'll harm a person by insisting or ignoring.
I wonder if this is related to what Holden Karnofsky talked about in his post about sequence vs cluster thinking
https://blog.givewell.org/2014/06/10/sequence-thinking-vs-cluster-thinking/
Quoting Holden:
- "Sequence thinking involves making a decision based on a single model of the world: breaking down the decision into a set of key questions, taking one’s best guess on each question, and accepting the conclusion that is implied by the set of best guesses (an excellent example of this sort of thinking is Robin Hanson’s discussion of cryonics). It has the form: “A, and B, and C … and N; therefore X.” Sequence thinking has the advantage of making one’s assumptions and beliefs highly transparent, and as such it is often associated with finding ways to make counterintuitive comparisons.
- Cluster thinking – generally the more common kind of thinking – involves approaching a decision from multiple perspectives (which might also be called “mental models”), observing which decision would be implied by each perspective, and weighing the perspectives in order to arrive at a final decision. Cluster thinking has the form: “Perspective 1 implies X; perspective 2 implies not-X; perspective 3 implies X; … therefore, weighing these different perspectives and taking into account how much uncertainty I have about each, X.” Each perspective might represent a relatively crude or limited pattern-match (e.g., “This plan seems similar to other plans that have had bad results”), or a highly complex model; the different perspectives are combined by weighing their conclusions against each other, rather than by constructing a single unified model that tries to account for all available information.
A key difference with “sequence thinking” is the handling of certainty/robustness (by which I mean the opposite of Knightian uncertainty) associated with each perspective. Perspectives associated with high uncertainty are in some sense “sandboxed” in cluster thinking: they are stopped from carrying strong weight in the final decision, even when such perspectives involve extreme claims (e.g., a low-certainty argument that “animal welfare is 100,000x as promising a cause as global poverty” receives no more weight than if it were an argument that “animal welfare is 10x as promising a cause as global poverty”).
Finally, cluster thinking is often (though not necessarily) associated with what I call “regression to normality”: the stranger and more unusual the action-relevant implications of a perspective, the higher the bar for taking it seriously (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”)."
People who are "good at taking ideas seriously" _quickly_ would be predominantly sequence thinkers, most people would be cluster thinkers. Holden is a self-described cluster thinker who wrote the post pretty much to explain his style of reasoning (when prioritizing EA causes) to sequence thinkers.
I think this is the best case scenario, and the degenerate case would probably be Venkatesh Rao's "cactus and weasel": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/
(Although I might be overreaching a bit by implying that Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog and fox map onto Holden's sequence and cluster thinking?)
This is a weird question coming from the guy who wrote the "Different Worlds" essay (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/).
Isn't it just as simple as the B&B owners coming from a "different world" where guests of their B&B want to be chatted at?
And Scott and the hyper-introvert friend apparently don't understand the cultural norms associated with a B&B. The friend would probably be happier with a conventional hotel or the sort of Airbnb where you can check in with zero human contact.
Lots of commenters are mentioning that mildly lying about your preferences, but then having your requests violated to everyone’s eventual delight is a pretty common social dance.
For an extreme example, check out taarof:
https://youtu.be/XAvzW1WZsN4
Hilarious!!
Back in the 80s while in Beijing, I offered my bus seat to an elderly woman. As I stood up she put me in an arm lock and drove me back down into the seat. Also hilarious.
That is so funny, the comment about "he has no rearing!" (which is how that would translate in an Irish context) is exactly the kind of thing people here would say about that kind of violation of the unwritten social rules. Thanks for sharing the link!
Some people just have a hard time altering their default behavior. Case in point: My father-in-law is quite hard of hearing (and won't wear hearing aids). When I'm with him in social settings, I discretely ask friends & relatives to speak louder when they engage with him. I've found that most people can't seem to do this. At best, they'll start by increasing their volume -- but then they'll quickly go back to normal volume. Even health-care professionals do this during doctor's appointments. It's very frustrating.
This reminds me of an incident where a distant relative was trying to insist on my brother eating. My brother at the time didn't like his eating habits to be the subject of other people's wishes and generally doesn't like taking food from other people. So he refused, she persisted two or three times before giving up. I felt this was a little obnoxious, even if it came from a place of caring, but my wife (who was born in India, I was born in the US) felt like this was part of being a good host.
I think there is an inherent tension between making sure people are taken care of (or feel taken care of) and making sure people have their preferences respected (or feel that their preferences are respected). I think most people around the world would consider both of those things to be important and good things, but I think there is a big variation, largely but not entirely driven by culture, of where people would say, it's okay not to respect this person's preferences in this aspect, they need to be taken care of vs we can't take care of this person, we need to respect their wishes. There is also variation depending on situation, for instance in the traditional Indian culture of my parents, pushing food on people is an especially expected behavior.
When you think about treating someone "nicely" or being "considerate" of someone, it encompasses both taking care of them and respecting their preferences, but because of culture people will approach this differently, erring one way or another.
That's my thinking on the topic.
There's a normative issue here: I think the world/society is less of a nice place if friendly old B&B owners aren't chatty with you, even if it's your directly expressed preference. You *should* learn to appreciate this interaction, your preference is wrong. The thing about respecting a preference for not talking to each other or not giving each other gifts is that if the preference becomes more acceptable than we eventually are by default not talking to each other and not giving each other gifts. This may sound fine to you, but I assure you it's not fine for those of us who want to talk to each other and give each other gifts.
I am sympathetic to this view that friendliness is worth valuing and tolerating as best we can wherever it shows up (there will be exceptions). I think my amendment to it is something like "and it's also good to let people be who they are as much as possible." Let the B&B people be their chatty selves and let introverts or people with social anxiety be curt in their responses. Let's all be less judgmental of each other and remember that we all have different preferences and needs guiding us. When people with very different preferences or capacities bump into each other, let's consider that as fine and normal, not something broken or wrong that needs to be fixed with criticism.
I think there may be a perceived prevailing wisdom, true or not, carried through the generations that recognizes that:
1) Explicitly stating one's preferences that run counter to predominant culture can come at a greater cost to that individual than that individual just rolling with the punches.
And/Or
2) Catering to folks' preferences that run counter to norms too often isn't particularly good for the group or the individual.
Summarized: From an individual perspective, it can be good for one's mental state and fortitude to accept that folks may rub you the wrong way sometimes, and that's ok, and may come at less cost than making a stink about it. Pick your battles.
Or another way to look at it. Persistently stating to people a desire for them to cease acts that run counter to your preferences seems like a road toward a less resilient self. Of course there are thresholds an nuance to consider.
Something important is being missed here. I've lived in CA, the midwest, the south, and the southwest for extended periods of time, and this is just a cultural miscommunication.
I'd wager your hosts were culturally midwestern or southern. There's a strong cultural norm of pretend-declining gifts and favors with the expectation that the giver will ignore the polite declining and provide a gift/favor anyways. People who were raised in that tradition just ignore the words of people who claim they don't want pleasant things, like favors or presents or conversation.
The culturally-appropriate way of preventing conversation on your friend's behalf would have been for you to hang out and talk with the hosts during her arrival, and quickly point out how tired she was and subtly show them that the hospitable thing to do is to excuse her from conversation and let her go rest.
Essentially you should have showed them that their normal hospitable norm, making pleasant conversation, was inappropriate because of how tired your friend was and needed to be replaced by a more hospitable solution.
Experience has taught that some people lie about their preferences and the penalty for believing the lie and acting on it is usually much worse than violating someone's sincerely stated true preference.
How much are people *actually* listening instead of waiting to talk during "small talk?" Small talk is not about exchanging information; it's about building emotional rapport. Lots of semi-rehearsed lines and jokes in the waiting in those conversations too.
The couple chatted with your friend because the couple enjoyed it, and having the opportunity to chat with strangers is part of why they run a B&B. Chatting with them is part of the cost of staying there. Similarly, many people enjoy giving presents, and accepting presents from them is the cost of being their friend. Your grandmother was trying to console you over the fact that your girlfriend was being mean/rude to you.
"A Northerner was apprehended by police in London today after walking around and saying 'Hello' to strangers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4
So, cultural differences.
Also, B&B hosts sometimes give you the Q&A treatment to figure out if you might be a problem. People who answer their innocuous questions casually and consistently are less likely to be up to no good.
For whatever it's worth, my father used to be like this. (He's still alive but has gotten a little better with age, actually. Or maybe it's distance. Or he just doesn't feel as responsible for me as an adult.)
I found that going overboard on the context for the altered preference sometimes helped in persuading him to acknowledge the unusual preference. "Here is why I do this. Here are the consequences of me not doing this. Here is what you've done. Here is what I'd like you to do. Here's how acting differently will help me. etc." Bonus points if it's possible to bring up some formally acknowledged difference from a respected authority like "I have been diagnosed with ADHD so my experience is different than yours." Of course, that only works to the extent that someone recognizes psychological expertise, which is not universally a given. For those who are skeptical of psychological expertise, an artificial impediment to, say, someone's visual ability (like glasses that distort an image) coupled with asking them to read and telling them they're not trying when they can't has been anecdotally helpful in getting others to understand dyslexia without relying on an appeal to psychological authority.
An attempt at quick communications without context, in contrast, would just get dismissed.
Why do you assume that the host couple should believe you when you are asking them to do something extraordinary for a person they have not met yet? If I was running any kind of public accommodation I would train the staff to respond to requests that guests make for themselves, or perhaps for a child or another person who is present and clearly associated with the person making the request, but to be very wary of requests by one guest that are to be applied to another guest without checking with that person first. What if you had assured the old couple that your friend enjoyed being greeted by having a glass of ice water thrown in her face? You seriously expect them to take your word for it? You put them in an impossible situation, and now you are judging them because they acted with reasonable caution. And why was your friend unable to make this request herself? And if both of you had, and been ignored, you had the option of upping your warning. A bright pink piece of paper with the words "Please don't talk to me - socially anxious" pinned to her shirt should do the trick.
Phase 1: Everyone communicates their preferences honestly. Sometimes people are 'nice' and have preferences that are good for others in various ways—either because they caa, so they prefer to do favors for others or to decline favors others would do them. People like associating with these nice people, which makes it advantageous to be one.
Phase 2: Non-nice people notice that it's advantageous to be perceived as nice, and that they too can be perceived as nice if they express some false preferences. So lots of them start doing this—not too much, since they don't actually want to be performing/foregoing favors all the time, but a bit.
Phase 3: Most people are falsifying their preferences a bit. One consequence is that when somebody exaggerates their desire to perform a favor, the other person will usually exaggerate their desire to decline it. Another consequence is that expressing a-bit-nicer-than-honest-average preferences is average behavior and means you're only perceived as average niceness. So if you want to be perceived as nicer-than-average, you need to falsify your preferences a bit more, which you can now safely do without having to actually perform too many favors.
Phase N:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Vm_ksWreM
(The ability to easily express honest unusual preferences that happen to make things easier on others is just collateral damage of this process)
I know several people have commented things to this effect, but I still want to emphasize them because I think they’re important and I see them as blind spots in this post.
First: in some cultures people may have reason to believe you’re deliberately downplaying your own preferences in order to avoid looking greedy or like you’re taking advantage of them.
My family comes partially from Portugal, and in Portuguese culture, when you go to someone’s house, even unannounced, they WILL offer you food and drink. And you are EXPECTED to refuse, whether you want it or not. If you accept right away, you look like a greedy bastard. So you refuse, they insist, you refuse again, they insist again, and finally you “give in” and say, “Okay, since you’re SO insistent, I guess I can have a bite.”
If you actually don’t want food, expect them to continue insisting for a good while, until they finally realize that you’re not just partaking in the social ritual and that you actually, truly, don’t want anything.
In my experience, this kind of culture is more common among older people around the world than it is among younger folks, maybe having something to do with how older people tended to live in more tight-knit communities, where gaining a reputation for being greedy would matter a lot more.
For that matter, gaining a reputation for being generous, whether that generosity is wanted or unwanted, also mattered a lot, which maybe explains why old people are so resistant to change this behaviour.
Second: even outside of cultures like these, there are people out there that deliberately understate their preferences. You might have seen some of them in your practice: people with self-esteem issues, people who have a history of dealing with manipulative or abusive people, people who feel like they’re a burden to others, and so on.
These people may very well say things like “No, it’s fine, I don’t need anything,” but that comes with an unstated appendix of something like “…because I don’t really deserve the effort, it’s not worth these people’s time to do something nice for someone like me,” or “…because every time someone did this for me it was half-hearted, insincere, or an attempt to manipulate me,” or something along those lines.
These kinds of people could actually be thrilled if someone actually went through the trouble to sincerely do something nice for them, but they’ve been so frequently primed to expect disappointment in their lives that they say, both to themselves and to others, “No, I don’t want or need that.”
I suspect that the guy in the abusive relationship may be in this situation: he may not expect that he can do better in another relationship, and he sees this as better than eternal loneliness. Or, maybe, he intellectually understands that he can do better, but emotionally he doesn’t really FEEL what that actually means (in a Mental Mountains type way).
The key point between these two examples is that, especially in older cultures, deciding whether or not to honour someone’s preferences often isn’t as straightforward as listening to them and accepting the surface-level understanding. You have to understand them, their culture, and whether or not they may be lying to you or to themselves. And then you make a judgement as best you can with the information you have, and sometimes that judgement is wrong.
And sometimes, even when you know that judgement is wrong, you might still do it anyway, because you’ve decided (consciously or subconsciously) that this is the reputation you want to build. After all, you did just describe the B&B owners as “very, very nice” instead of “annoying assholes who wouldn’t leave us alone.”
"And you are EXPECTED to refuse, whether you want it or not. If you accept right away, you look like a greedy bastard."
Exactly, that's the whole point of the little dance! The host offers hospitality, and to refuse hospitality is a grave insult, because you're insinuating that they are too poor to be able to spare the items or that you think you're better than them. But accepting straight away is RUDE GREEDY BAD MANNERS - "you'd nearly snap the hand off them!" so you refuse and wait to be politely pressed to accept.
That way, everyone saves face and gains social credit: the host shows off their hospitality and generosity (which was a big virtue in Irish society, partly because of poverty post-Famine) by offering and then insisting (otherwise by accepting the first refusal, that is meanness and greed on the host's part) and the guest shows their good breeding by polite refusal and then politely allowing themselves to be pressed to accept.
The British have their own jokes about this, about the Scottish meanness which says to a guest who arrives at meal time "You'll have had your tea" (so they won't have to offer hospitality) and the Irish version of that is the jokes about Cavan people (so mean they eat their dinner out of a drawer - the idea being that if an unexpected visitor calls, they can close the drawer and pretend not to have a meal ready so they don't have to share or offer to the visitor).
I think another factor here is that we don't communicate our preferences honestly and emphatically enough.
I have a similar issue with elderly relatives (I'm extroverted, but don't like to hear the same story for the 10th time, or sometimes the story is just not interesting). But I never tell them "I'm sorry but this story doesn't interest me. I wish we could connect on a deeper level, or talk about something else. I feel like I'm not even here when you tell me these things."
Instead, we opt for very subtle cues (e.g. not reacting or encouraging less) that either are not picked up by the elderly (due to changing norms, blunter senses) or are not a strong enough signal to overcome the desire to continue the current behavior.
I agree there are other factors here, but have we tried to really give the speakers credit for wanting what is also good for us, and made sure they understand?
There's a thing I've done which has worked in the short run. I haven't tried it with elderly people.
Person starts to retell a story. I smile, jump in, and tell some more of the story. I aim for an emotional tone of "I was paying so much attention that I remember the thing you were going to say."
I'm not sure whether this annoys people or not.
I do this too and also don't know how well it lands with people, but it does seem to work in situations where the re-told story is intended to get to another story they haven't told.
One of the issues I hear running in the background of this discussion (not your comment, I'm just expanding here) is: "I want something more than is being offered in this interaction, I'm frustrated I can't get it." The something more might be less interaction, not hearing a story repeated, connecting on a deeper level, whatever. A feeling/voice comes up in us that says "I don't like how this is going, I want it to be different, how can I make this go more to my liking?"
I think that voice can in some situations, like with very close friends and loved ones, help a relationship grow. But I think in other situations, what's mainly called for is patience and acceptance.
Many old folks as they age genuinely cannot remember if they told that story before. Being reminded they have told it before will make them self-conscious and confused about what to offer when the thing they had to offer seems not to be adequate for the listener. There is a limit on how much behavior change a person is capable of on the spot in social situations once they've gotten the message the listener doesn't seem thrilled with how it's going.
It is good that we get better at articulating our needs clearly when they are *needs* -- I'm not sure it's good that we all get better at articulating our preferences more. This is where I insert one of my favorite quotes attributed to someone called the Third Zen Patriarch of China: "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences."
Having lots of preferences -- including things like not having to hear stories retold by elders -- is at the core of the suffering that Buddhists talk about. To have a lot of preferences is to move through the world with a lot of friction.
Personal review: I notice that I have some sort of implicit preference ranking system that I use to decide which preferences to disregard.
For example, a barbeque party in the distant pre-crisis era: I am manning the grill, taking steak order.
Someone is vegan, so I produce a kinda eggplant harrisa steak like object. No problem.
One comes in well, and I produce a well steak. No problem.
The next comes in well, and I make an argument that the dude was, infact, Wrong; and that he actually wants a medium steak. I convince him to try the medium steak. He prefers it, and now is a medium steak guy.
Why him? Why not the other well steak guy? Getting told you are wrong about your preferences isn't good and I know this, so why did I think it was worth it with well steak guy #2?
I notice this with other things as well; that for some people who don't want presents, I don't buy them presents. For others, I still buy them presents.
There is some sort of complicated evolved heuristic here, because feel like I have a better than 50% rate of hits on this sort of thing, and I bet most other present-buyers do as well.
But, maybe only if I'm in a group of people who share an identity with me? Like, only within that identity?
It may have nothing at all to do with you. It's possible the second well guy was better at signaling that he was open to persuasion and learning. For all we know, the first guy would also have preferred medium, but he sent the wrong signals about the force of his convictions and/or willingness to learn more.
Or it could entirely be you. I'm just observing that nonverbal subconscious communication has an active "speaker" as well as active "listener."
Yeah, I think this hits at an important point- sometimes people express a preference that when talked out of, they are happy they have been talked out of. I needed to be convinced that roller coasters weren't too scary, and then I loved roller coasters. My guess is that people get a dopamine reward for correctly guessing that the preference expressed "should be" changed, and then overgeneralize to preferences that "shouldn't be" changed
I am forty-seven years old now. Which means I am old enough to start to have preferences harden, and young enough to realize that my preferences are hardening.
As people get older their preferences get more locked-in. If you want to view it in Bayesian terms, then we've gotten a lot more data about what other people prefer and updated our views appropriately. Or you can see it in terms of habituation: Older people have more time to get into habits regarding their actions and beliefs.
You'll see this behavior more often as you get older. Which is why it's polite to gently acknowledge other peoples' ignorance of your preferences, even when you say something about it. You'll be there too, someday, and you'll probably appreciate someone who treats you respectfully and doesn't make a mountain out of a molehill.
How much are people *actually* listening instead of waiting to talk in those situations? Small talk is not about exchanging information; it's about building emotional rapport. Lots of semi-rehearsed lines and jokes in the waiting in those conversations too.
'Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.'
George Bernard Shaw
This is a good post but I think it’s important to keep in mind that some people really do say they want one thing when in fact they want another. For example if you ever get to know midwesterners, especially upper Midwesterners, You’ll find that they always refuse everything and never ask for hardly anything even though they often want both things. They need to have it either offered multiple times or people need to volunteer the thing they obviously need multiple times.
Folks often aren’t honest about their preferences. Or they state preferences that they believe will be received best whether or not it is true.
It’s also true that we often want and don’t want something at the same time
Company of others is a case in point
Sometimes we want to be alone until someone is there or vice versa
There’s a constant dance of what people say and mean
You touched on the social dimension, but I think one thing that’s updated since the ‘60s is the idea that the culture should accommodate the individual. I’m an introvert who started a business. I didn’t want to get on sales calls. I lamented that the customers wouldn’t buy without a call, but eventually I needed the business so I just got on the phone and became decent at sales. I’m lazy, and I grew up rail thin, but I want to be strong into my ‘90s if I’m lucky enough to live that long. So I took up weight lifting. Instead of complaining the weights wouldn’t accommodate me, etc etc. There’s validity to the “society should accommodate my preferences” argument, and contexts where that’s true (for instance if I have a life threatening allergy or genuine phobia that requires therapy), and there’s validity to the idea that the individual should endeavor to be adaptable, and contexts it’s easy to imagine that (stoic anyone ?). But that’s the frame difference I see playing out.
What cultures do a good job of accommodating different levels of sociability?
One of my friends was surprised when she invited a lot of sf fans to a party, and some of them would spend some time reading. She wasn't offended and she threw more parties for sf fans, but reading at parties isn't mainstream behavior.
Thank you for writing this! I have this problem all the time, to the point that I've more or less stopped interacting with "normal" people.
(My favorite ACX/SSC post are the ones that explain something I know or think, but are not sure how to communicate. It's super validating when someone who better than me at putting words together, explains my experience. This makes me feel less gaslighted by the wold.)
My own theory why some people can do this update while other can't, is that weirdos respect other weirdos. If you have had this happen to you enough times, you understand on an emotional level that there is a lot of human variation, and you are less likely to believe others whey they say they are different, regardless of how they are different.
I also think that mental diagnoses and personality types are meant to fix this problem. "No really, I am different, a doctor said so". Or maybe you've seen all the Facebook posts and memes, that circulated a while back, that where just about saying "introverts exists" over and over, in the hope that some people will get the message.
Preferences are often formed from bad experiences. Maybe she didn't like gifts because people who have given her gifts in the past didn't actually know what she liked, and so it was always a disappointing experience; feeling disappointment can be worse than being the odd duck out. It think it probably is true that "everyone likes gifts that aren't disappointing", which then explains why your friend liked a gift that wasn't disappointing.
An additional possible complication, people don't know themselves as well as they think they do. Stated preferences can be a statement of ignorance as often as it is a statement of knowledge. There are many examples of that in this thread as well.
I seem to have two different registers for preferences, one individual and one cultural, and I wonder if others here are the same way.
With respect to individuals, I have the same difficult updating my prior as Scott describes; I gave my son birthday presents for several years after he made it very clear he didn't like receiving gifts. (He's my son! It's his birthday!)
Yet I have often visited other countries/cultures where I am told things analogous to "people here don't like presents", and I have no difficulty at all internalizing that, instantly and thoroughly. To the extent that if a person from that culture says they "like presents", I tend to disbelieve them.
For example, I lived for a while on a Pacific island where I was told on arrival that people there did not share meals (some complicated caste arrangement where individuals could only eat food that was harvested by someone of the correct caste, etc). This seemed largely true. So when an island native then invited me to share I meal, I assumed that I should decline - surely this person was trying to be polite in what they thought was the Western way but didn't really want to share a meal. My entire set of assumed preferences had been inverted, for entirely rational and evidence based reasons.
I think in the situations Scott describes, these two preference 'registers' are in conflict, and resolving the conflict isn't a matter of reason but of judgement - whether this is a situation in which assumed cultural preferences trump individual preferences, or vice versa.
This is probably posted too late for Scott to notice, but if you're in the same situation again I would suggest just telling them your friend has a migraine. 'Don't make smalltalk with people who have a migraine' is much more natural for people to act on than 'Don't make smalltalk with people who you're told are introverted', and for interactions which are relatively limited (you're not going to become friends with the B&B owners) it's a harmless lie.
I'm always interested in the differing views on the ethics of these kind of white lies. I'm with you on this because my sense is we don't owe strangers the truth. We owe them civility and respect as fellow humans, but not any degree of self-disclosure that doesn't meet our needs in that moment.
If the goal in a situation like this is to achieve a particular outcome, rather than say to advocate for the legitimacy of someone's unusual preferences (there might be moments to do that too), then I support uttering whatever respectful words are most likely to achieve the desired outcome.
I work with a lot of folks who have chronic illness and this is a common dilemma among that group -- how do I say "no thank you " to X invitation or expectation without offending, confusing, inviting judgment, or requiring more effort when I'm already exhausted?" It's really helpful for people in those not-center-of-the-bellcurve situations to have some short sentences handy: "Whew, long day, please excuse me if I had straight to the room" or "Please excuse my lack of chattiness, I'm wiped and am going to go rest."
Most people's model of introverts is that they can manage short social interactions just fine, they just don't seek it out in large groups for hours every day. There's a certain civility that's still expected of us and if we can't pull it off, the signal your average person is going to need is more like "feeling unwell." A person who has severe social anxiety will still need coping scripts for the multitude of random social interactions people encounter when traveling, including a willingness to "seem rude" by delivering monosyllabic answers to questions and then internal tools to not feel guilty about that.
Asking other people to change their behavior doesn't strike me as an effective coping tool, but lying in some situations does. I'm sure that says something about me, perhaps not all good.
Sometimes my friends and coworkers, here in Minnesota, in the upper Midwestern United States ask me why I, a diehard Democrat, support Mike Bloomberg. "Isn't he some kind of malevont, out-of-touch conservative billionaire"? No, actually, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are so many reasons my wife, my kids and I support Mike. We are New Yorkers, born and raised, and know what Mike did for New York -- and will do for America if we give him the opportunity. He used to be our mayor, but, to be frank, we do not think of Mike as our former mayor, we think of him as a good friend. He cares about common Americans, their needs, ideas and dreams.
"Isn't Mike one of those greedy, humorless, petty billionaires we've seen on movies and TV series, a Trump-like figure?", my friends ask. Not at all, Mike is kind, generous and likeable. Trump was the most divisive president in modern American history. Mike, on the other hand, is a uniter, not a divider. Mike believes in consensus-building and genuine democracy. Mike is a successful businessman, not someone who only played one on TV. Mike is smart and hard-working. He will invest and policing and crime prevention to protect our kids from drugs, pornography and violence. Mike will invest in America's decaying infrastructure. Mike believes in a strong military as a deterrence against foreign aggression and supports our troops. Mike will bring back from Asia well-paying jobs to reverse the opioid crisis tide and revitalize our communities. Mike will invest heavily in our public schools and make sure every child learns to read, write and count by age 8 or earlier.
I like Mike and so will you. Mike gets things done.
This is either a very late comment for the previous election or a very early comment for the next one in 2024; will Bloomberg run again and if so, for which party? If your crystal ball lets you know the result, Thiago, tell us too so we can all place our bets with the bookies then clean up!
As for the NYC mayoral race, I note with interest this news story: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/06/yang-falls-behind-adams-for-first-time-in-new-york-mayors-race-poll-485541
I have no idea if this is a temporary blip or if, like many's the horse race, Yang's early lead was always destined to be overtaken. I do claim that I have previously commented that I felt it much more likely someone who had been in local government before would be the more 'natural' choice than Yang, and Adams was one of those I felt who seemed more likely.
Let us be blunt. America is not ready for an Asian-American NYC mayor.
America doesn't get to decide. What's your opinion about NYC voters?
My opinion is, they are probably Americans. America is not ready for an Asian-American NYC mayor (The same way, it was not ready for an Asian-American president -- as Yang helped to prove).
It may be hard to tell in advance. America wasn't obviously ready for a black president, but Obama got two terms.
It is different. America was not ready to have another Republican president right after Bush II (McCain's numbers melted with the stock market ones) and was less ready to have a female president named Clinton than it was to have a Black president named Hussein.
This is definitely "That's not how it's done"ism, a complex my mother-in-law has to such an extreme that my wife has come up with a whole vocabulary to describe it.
This doesn't require being dumb or malicious (MIL is definitely not) but it does require a lack of confidence in your judgments. It's the need for a script for interactions combined with a strong need for external validation.
I know this won't make any sense to people in this community - it made little sense to me. Why would a need for external validation cause you to ignore the preferences of others? But it's almost a performance - the idea that The Judge is watching and that if your interactions deviate from the script, The Judge will know and banish you from something called Polite Society. The Judge isn't really one person, it's a crowd of folks that generally does not exist. You hear this on TV sometimes as "what would the neighbors think?"
For instance, my wife is tomboyish almost to the point of parody. Yet when planning our wedding, MIL constantly suggested traditional wedding trappings - lacy table cloths, monogrammed napkins, etc. She didn't suggest these things out of malice/desire to control the wedding/narcissism. In fact, she was consistently hurt that she couldn't seem to understand what my wife wanted. In greater fact, these weren't really things my MIL was interested in.
But in her mind a wedding was a show put on for the benefit of your friends and family - and there was a way these things are supposed to look. Even if everyone involved wanted it to be a different way, some undefined Other would turn its gaze upon us and not see A Wedding unless the napkins were monogrammed.
This is easy for me to mock just because I am completely the opposite. But it's a vital component to the human experience. Some research indicates that a lot of the rise in anxiety comes from the massive stress of choice - we do not have defined roles anymore and that can be good. More often it is alienating and paralyzing. The idea that there is One Correct Way To Be A Person is deeply harmful to folks who exist outside the mainstream. But having a coherent identity in a coherent society isn't entirely a bad gig. In fact for the majority of folks it's much better to perform a role than it is to float through life wondering what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Even if that means sometimes making small talk with somebody who clearly doesn't want to make small talk because That's How It's Done.
I know this comment is 85 years long, but one last note: when my wife decided she wanted to stay home after we have kids she mentioned it offhand to someone in our younger peer group. This person was scandalized. Even though I'm relatively sure that two working parents is the norm, this person was convinced she was bowing to either pressure from me (I assure you she isn't) or from Society. The response was essentially, "...but you can't do that. That's How It's Done."
Freeing someone from the tyranny of "how it's done" is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. The convenient part is, they're already vulnerable to peer pressure, otherwise they wouldn't care in the first place.
The thing is, some people who have a dream of further career are pressured out of that career by someone, and express the same sentiment. It seems like it's a miscalibration of a good instinct. Something that starts out "check to make sure that is actually their preference if there's a history of other people expressing this only because they are uncomfortable/feel pressure/something else" turns into "refuse to believe anyone expressing this preference"
One possibility: when we hear someone state their preferences, and we want to understand the underlying mechanism that caused this statement to be made, we use our own internal mechanisms (which we can interrogate) as a stand-in for the other person's (which we can't).
So we ask "what would lead *me* to make a statement like 'I don't want presents.'" One of the hypotheses might be "because I no longer want presents." But others might include "I don't want the other person to feel burdened with present-giving" and so forth... and those might seem to be more likely explanations, given that they *would* be more likely explanations to explain *your* behavior.
The problem is that the experimental model available for you to test your hypotheses on is not universally representative.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy
also: insert drunk-looking-for-keys-under-lightpost anecdote here
I've found that people will usually respect my preferences, except for cheese. In my country, if I tell anyone I don't like cheese; this results in frantic attempts to make me "try" cheese. My current theory is that there is a mind-controlling parasite in cheese, to which I am immune, and those around me are compelled to infect me; sort of like "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers".
I've found that people will usually respect my preferences, except for cheese. In my country, if I tell anyone I don't like cheese; this results in frantic attempts to make me "try" cheese. My current theory is that there is a mind-controlling parasite in cheese, to which I am immune, and those around me are compelled to infect me; sort of like "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers".
The prevalence of social contradictions around things like gift-giving also has to factor in - saying that you don't want a gift when you actually do is common enough that it certainly gives the "everyone loves gifts" crowd ammunition. This is even formalized in some cultures to the point where it's a cultural expectation to express a contradictory sentiment toward gifts.
People with unusual preferences are acutely aware that not everyone across the population has the same preferences. People with socially accepted preferences are not required to come to terms with that fact personally, and so are less likely to become aware of it.
Just as the AirBnB hosts find it difficult to understand, either experientially or conceptually, how someone like Scott's friend could exist, so Scott finds it difficult to experientially relate to how the AirBnB hosts could have such a conceptual blind spot. But at least Scott has the conceptual framework to understand rationally why his hosts are the way they are.
Enjoyed the article very much. (Prompted a lot of new thought, which probably is most one could ask for in a Sunday morning read.) On the other hand... Preferences are sometime (often?) not set in stone, can be fleeting, whimsical, just expressed in the moment. Could also be because no chance offered itself to even know otherwise. Of course it's rude (and suboptimal) to "force-feed" someone other options, just to expand their horizons or whatever missionary motivation one might have. But it's worth acknowledging, including from my own experience, that sometimes being led to chose something initially not preferred did lead to a change of preference or at least to a valued change of perspective later. Another facet is, that we are not as constant of an entity as we or others sometimes believe. We are essentially different people in different circumstances, in different company, or just over time. I remember being annoyed by being "pigeonholed" into a preference that I once might have expressed casually.
"Maybe this woman is rejecting me and telling me to go away and saying she isn't attracted to me because she actually isn't attracted to me...nah, must just be one of those games women play."
reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CJdFppsHeo
Luckily that's (i) dramatic fiction; (ii) literally set in a mirror opposite universe; (iii) written fifty years ago; so we can be glad nothing like that is going on in the real world today.
Thinking there is a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy angle to this, which is: ppl can tend towards validating responses or invalidating responses. If you tend to invalidate, it can take work to get yourself to make validating responses. This tracks with your idea “taking ideas seriously.” If my gf says no presents please and I believe she means it, to not get her a present is to validate (show understanding and acceptance of) her preference, even if you or your grandma doesnt agree with it. To get her a present is to invalidate her preference. Of course, real life never feels this simple.
The story sounds like a simple case of miscommunication to me.
"My friend is introverted and probably would prefer to be taken straight to their room" just isn't (nearly) a strong-enough-phrased request/report to prompt them to overwrite their priors and habits of a lifetime.
If you phrased it in a way where you were unambiguously making an appeal to their sympathy and compassion for others, do you think they wouldn't have complied?
I mean, if it's an intimate 1-to-1 personal relationship, I can understand insisting on people taking you literally, but there are so many people out there who are acting based on reflex and habit and acclimation, it seems kind of weird to me that you would expect them to understand the seriousness of the request just because you literally and unadornedly recited to them the essential facts of the case.
Like, there is a way to refuse a cup of tea, if you really want to avoid a second offer, and it's not saying "I don't want a cup of tea". you put on a serious frown and say "Oh no, I can't stand tea. It makes me feel weak. I tried to give the stuff a a chance, I really tried, but I can't stand the stuff. If you and I are friends, then don't ask me about tea." You put it in an emotionally unambiguously way. You ensure that the request is transferred on the emotional level as well as on the literal one.
I think this adds something important. There are cases of people ignoring every single signal, but more often people miss a light-touch signal. Especially when you combine this with the fact that some light-touch signals are intentionally false to be polite.
For example:
Oh that's so kind, I don't want a cookie.
No really, take one! Please! I have too many!
Well, if you insist...
I may have 2 alternative, possibly slightly less charitable interpretations:
1. People develop social algorithms which become fixed so much, that they are impossible to update or override, even in situations, when it's clear that they shouldn't be applied.
2. We know (on some level) that the other person would prefer if we didn't use this social algorithm, but we use it nevertheless to signal (to others or to ourselves) our pro-social/altruistic attitude.
to me this is just about broader social consequences. If people hear that you got her a present and she didn't like it, she looks bad. If you try to explain to someone at a party that your girlfriend doesn't like presents, you're guaranteed to look worse than if you just got the present. They don't update on your preferences because they care more about looking good to a broad audience than you specifically
There are absolutely times when people express a preference they don't have. If my wife tells me she doesn't want anything special for her birthday, it's possible that's true, or it's also possible that she would kind of like to feel special but doesn't feel like asking to feel special. I should update my prior based on my past experience with her- has she been mad about me not making a big deal about her birthday in the past? Has she tried to downplay something as a test to see if I will take the bait?
Any time there's a potential for a false signal, that makes it possible for type 1 AND type 2 errors, which means people can overoptimize for avoiding one error at the expense of the other
I've experienced this. A few years ago, I embraced minimalism. I got rid of about 70% of all my possessions, and enjoyed having a vastly tidier and more spacious home.
When people asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would tell them I actively want nothing. I was trying to eliminate clutter. And if I wanted something, I would already have bought it myself.
But they would continue to buy me gifts I didn't want. It took several years of me bluntly saying "If you buy me anything, I'll probably just give it away." Before they finally gave up.
Or maybe older people tend to know younger people better than they know themselves.
Possibly the constant stress of "The golden Rule" treating others the way you would like to be treated from early childhood until adolescents has conditioned people (In the US at least) to reference their own wishes as a marker for acceptable social interaction. This may be highly successful in monoculture society, but in a homogenized society where peoples preferences differ, the selfishness of this methodology becomes apparent.
When I am sick, I want foremost to be left alone with minimal interaction. Don't make me soup, down come stroke my forehead, don't ask me if you "can do anything for me". My wife on the other hand wants to be doted on, sympathy should be constantly verbalized and lots and lots of chicken noodle soup. Needless to say, this caused issues until we came to the understanding that the golden rule was shit.
Now bought in our household is the real golden rule.
The Golden Rule: Treat people as they want to be treated. if you don't know, ask.
They feel comfortable talking, or at least talking helps them avoid feeling uncomfortable. That's it.
Converse: what if your introverted friend ran a B&B and you asked them to be really chatty with someone else due to arrive
Everything is Bayesian though. If you received compelling enough evidence that gravity is fake/works in a different way, you could update that prior too. It’s a question of degree of certainty, and therefore these facts exist on more of a quantitative (though perhaps exponential) continuum than in a bunch of qualitative categories