Gaslighting discussion (split from: Justin’s Miscellaneous Posts)

Your post actually made implications about what I had said about gaslighting before you said “Here is some brainstorming” though. Here is a quote from your post (bold added):

So in that quote, you were trying to understand what I said about gaslighting. You said you were having trouble understanding it because you understand gaslighting to be a bad acts/behavior. This implies that your understanding of gaslighting (it being bad acts/behavior) somehow contradicted what I had said about gaslighting. You were implying that I had said that gaslighting was not bad acts/behavior, and you were just trying to understand my claim.

And you said that before you said “Here is some brainstorming”.

Edit: Later in the post I replied to here, you said:

So, I think that maybe you were meaning to point out the thing I just pointed out in this post.

But the tone/way you are writing does not come across as you strongly admitting you were wrong and just doing a postmortem about what you did wrong. It is hard to differentiate between things you thought/said that you now think were wrong and things where you are maybe implying that I just didn’t do a good enough job of interpreting you.

It is OK with me as long as you include the full context with all the posts about DisplayLink.

Yeah. I was not solid on accepting that I did make implicit claims about what you said. Part of the point of this new post that I wrote was to convince myself more.

Ok, so it sounds like you still don’t agree with me.

The way you are writing actually makes it harder for me to argue my case. Instead of stating your objections clearly, you keep writing posts that make it sound like you maybe agree with me, but in sort of a vague way where it also sounds like maybe I am just wrong or picky or not interpreting things correctly.

If you would think through your objections and clearly write those down, then I could address them. Instead you are trying to make my case for me, only you are doing a worse job of it than I would (which makes sense, because you don’t agree with me so you don’t actually have very good arguments for my side). But the fact that you kept trying to write out arguments in favor of my side – without clearly labelling what you are doing – makes it harder for me to give my own arguments. Because if I keep arguing with you, despite your apparent agreement, it looks like I am being aggressive.

Conceding early is a standard way to block further discussion. It makes it harder for the other person to give their reasoning and arguments if you say that you already agree with them.

I just reread the context. I think what you’re saying is right and the rest of this post is just adding more details. Specifically, I think I was complaining about the analogy to TCS Coercion not lining up perfectly with gaslighting [EDIT: or implying something that seemed problematic], cuz with TCS Coercion you can coerce someone totally by accident while doing something innocuous, whereas with gaslighting I thought there had to be some kind of bad act. So I had the idea that your analogy to TCS Coercion implied that gaslighting could be done without a bad act (totally innocently, in other words) and I was complaining about that. So yeah I think what you say above is correct.

IDEAS FOR IMPROVEMENT BASED ON QUOTED POST

Labeling

I can try labeling stuff better, since you mentioned that me not clearly labeling stuff was part of the problem.

Thinking Through Objections and Clearly Writing Those Down

I have no objections to doing that.

SUBSTANTIVE DISAGREEMENTS WITH QUOTED POST

Disagreement Point 1

In my mind, I’m trying (perhaps not very effectively!) to be unbiased and look at different angles and stuff, not sabotage your case by arguing it incompetently. I’m actively trying to avoid thinking about stuff in terms of “your case” and “my case” and am attempting to be more objective and less biased. I don’t think you’re suggesting that I be biased, but I’m not quite sure what to do with the bit quoted above (other than labeling stuff better, which I already covered).

Disagreement Point 2

FWIW I don’t think you’re being aggressive - I think you’re trying to be precise and correct and that you’re not willing to agree with what you consider an inadequate or mistaken case for the purpose of avoiding conflict, and that all seems fine to me. I’ll try labeling stuff and being clearer in what I’m arguing though, and hopefully that will help. E.g. I think if I label something DISAGREEMENT POINT that makes it easier to disagree with, so I am trying that out

I’m not an admin anymore. I am wondering why.

Because you gaslighted me. Also your followups have been awful, you haven’t apologized, you haven’t tried to understand or discuss what you did, and you’ve tried to paint yourself as the victim.

Both of your disagreements in this post are major mis-framings of what I said.

I started writing in this thread because I thought you were mistreating Elliot quite badly. I think your replies so far have been mistreating me in a similar way.

You are making multiple mistakes in every reply. It is hard for me to reply pointing them out because you will just reply with even more mistakes. The mistakes grow exponentially, and I can’t reply to all of them. I am having trouble figuring out how to keep this conversation on track. I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can point out the things I was talking about in my initial message.

I am finding this difficult to deal with and emotionally draining. I am having to go back and re-read my own messages over and over again because you keep implying I said things that I didn’t say. I honestly don’t know how Elliot manages to deal with having these kinds of conversations with people. I am going to take a break from this for right now.

One factor is that, while I do reread stuff, I have especially good memory and ability to keep track of who said what and the discussion structure. This skill is a little like remembering moves in chess games, in order, and being able to play blindfold chess (you just say the moves to each other without having a board or pieces). And chess players often remember alternative moves that could have been played, so they can remember moves as a tree instead of just a list. When analyzing a chess position, you have to consider multiple moves you could play, then multiple replies the opponent could play for each of your moves, then multiple options for your side next, then multiple options for their side… So it’s a tree structure. (Discussions are the same way if you think out multiple arguments you could make, potential counter-arguments, etc. You can also actually go through multiple tree branches in a discussion, and people often do that, whereas in chess games you only get to play one move per position. But after a chess game people will play through alternative lines, so the other branches of the tree become more concrete instead of just imagined.) I have a lot of that skill automated for both discussions and chess, so it doesn’t take much conscious effort, which makes these conversations less burdensome to deal with. (Though this has sometimes led to miscommunications when I expected the person I’m talking with to know what was said, but they didn’t. I often experience that people don’t know/remember what they said that I’m trying to argue with, so then they don’t understand my argument. I’ve tried suggesting people put in more effort with notes, outlines, tree diagrams, rereading, etc., to make up for their lack of skill/memory. But people often won’t do that.)

A good example is when I wrote out the discussion tree with Firebench from memory, without rereading. It was a long discussion, had over multiple days, that I represented with like 40 nodes. That shows how well I’d been mentally tracking it (before writing it out, and without having made any extra special effort in that discussion).

Discussion: Curiosity – Firebench Debate

Tree as a large image: https://curi.us/basecamp/fi-learning-20858411/all-files-images-pdfs-spreadsheets-etc/294198239-curi-firebench-debate-commented.png

OK well I keep running into problems in this discussion:

  1. My judgment of how the discussion is going wildly diverges from other people’s judgments. i am [EDIT: regularly] surprised by this. [EDIT: as in, I keep being surprised by the difference in judgments]

  2. I think my replies are good but other people think they are bad, and they point out problems with them, and I agree with at least some of the criticisms.

So I seem to be in sort of a bubble like the dog in the comic where the house is on fire and I think everything is going fine, and then every so often I realize it’s not fine but am basically totally surprised.

So I must have some majorly wrong ideas of how to approach the conversation (or maybe some idea that is interfering with pursuing the discussion effectively - I’m not really sure tbh). So I don’t think trying more of the same stuff is going to help (I have been posting in this topic and its predecessor for a while and it hasn’t seemed to help at all). I am not sure what to do about this situation.

Thanks, that’s clear.

You’re (repeatedly in many posts) posturing like you’re being reasonable or rational. You’re trying to make it sound like you’re open-minded, willing to change your mind, considering other sides/angles/perspectives, and recognize not everything is black and white (rather you’re partly right and partly wrong and can tell which is which). Posturing about your reasonableness is what a bunch of your posts are for. (Also, the reasonableness and rationality signaling you’re doing is focused on the conventional concepts of those rather than the CR, Oist, TOC or CF concepts of rationality. There’s some overlap but noticeable differences. Like you said stuff that implied you think in terms of degrees of belief, credences, strong and weak arguments, etc.) You’re also distracting, at length, from the actual topic/issues and muddying the waters more and more.

What’s actually going on here is you mistreated someone and have made the whole conversation about how you think you’re the victim (you got super upset about being accused of mistreatment, though you haven’t been very clear about why you got upset) and also the local/detail errors you keep making (you have an unlimited supply of new errors so you can derail infinitely). You talked about how you’re upset, which is an aggressive, inappropriate move given the context. You’re extremely self-centered and unreasonable, are dropping the context and big picture, and are not actually discussing rationally. You’ve done nothing to try to understand what you did wrong (or whether you did something wrong). You’re misframing things in many ways (posturing and misframing are actually related to gaslighting), e.g. you’re acting like there is no urgency or importance to discuss what you allegedly did wrong, which implies that even if you did it it wouldn’t be very urgent/important and it’d be OK to just set it aside and talk about other stuff like your hurt feelings.

Imagine you yelled at someone quite harshly and strongly. (The example also works with other things, e.g. rape or murdering their parents. Stronger examples have both advantages and disadvantages.) Then they say you yelled at them. Then you ignore them for a few days, then start talking about how upset you are that anyone would call you a yeller, and saying that you disagree you were yelling, and you don’t think of yourself as a yeller, and you’re really quite upset about this and you’ve been having a hard time for days. And you act like your own upsetness is the priority while expressing no sympathy to the person who felt yelled at by you. They felt yelled at, and you felt accused of yelling, and you’re prioritizing your problem, which is problematic regardless of who’s right (and you can’t reasonably think you’re actually right, given you’re talking to a person who has put a lot of work into knowledge creation so they actually know what they’re talking about, unlike you, and every time in the past you challenged them it turned out you were wrong – that’s another context you’re dropping).

I’m going to reply in detail to some of anon’s post. I’ll try to keep my replies pretty short and focused. The next post of mine will be an attempt to focus on the issue of figuring out what I allegedly did wrong.

AGREEMENT: Yeah okay. I definitely felt attacked so it makes sense that would come out in how I approached the discussion.

CLARIFICATION: I felt like my statements were being unfairly interpreted in a way that implied that I was a extremely evil person. I was upset by that implication.

AGREEMENT: Right. I have an issue with derailing stuff.

I’ll address this after going through the example below.

AGREEMENT: Initially I disagreed with “done nothing”. I thought I was indirectly with trying to figure out what gaslighting meant, but that got kind of derailed. So I’ve done nothing effective, and thus upon consideration, I agree.

AGREEMENT: I agree that I have not treated the alleged wrongdoing with sufficient urgency. Resolving that issue is my top priority after completing this post.

AGREEMENT: I agree that, on the facts described, the behavior of the accused yeller would be problematic regardless of whether he had actually yelled or not. I also see the relevance to the current situation - as in, I see how it’s analogous. So even though I still need to figure out the issue of the actual alleged gaslighting, I can see how I did something wrong here.

APOLOGY: I apologize to @Elliot for disregarding/not taking seriously that he felt gaslit and bringing up my own emotional state instead.

Looking for Social Meanness & Gaslighting - Part 1

Introduction

I’m going to look for social meanness in my replies in order to try to build up an understanding of what I may have done wrong in the discussion. The goal is to figure out if I engaged in gaslighting and reach mutual understanding on that point. I suspect Part I may be longer cuz it’s setting up some discussion context but hopefully the rest won’t be as long on the Context part. If you’ve got a good command of what’s said in the discussion, you can try skimming the context and skip to the analysis. There is also a very short conclusion at the end.

Context

So anonymous33 gave a big hint about where the problem is or where it started, including saying what was going on. I read this as saying that ignoring the point of what Elliot said was part of the social meanness.

So I think looking for the social meanness and seeing if I can see it for myself will be fruitful.

So Elliot, in post 7, said:

So Elliot criticized my post attempting to discuss DisplayLink as being unclear and lacking relevant information or useful links.

I replied with a big post that I’ll call J’s Info Dump, and this was where a dispute over the timing of the edits led to the whole gaslighting discussion. And so Elliot replied to J’s Info Dump in post 9:

Finally, I defended my info dump in post 10:

Analysis

Meanness

In J’s Info Dump, I thought I was resolving the issue of not having addressed “what DisplayLink is or why it matters”, which I apparently thought was central. In post 9, Elliot said I didn’t directly engage with what he said, and linked the Question-Ignoring Discussion Pattern article. We didn’t resolve that branch of the discussion because the gaslighting issue took over the topic.

So what’s going on here? Well, I think I focused heavily on the point “You have not explained what DisplayLink is or why it matters.” that Elliot raised in post 7. But in that post, he also complained about not comparing it to alternatives, about not emphasizing the background info I linked, and about the link being a crappy summary. So those are a few different complaints, and I responded with a wall of text that was initially unlabeled. And looking back at it now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is an info dump. So Elliot’s criticisms in his reply to the info dump - about length, not engaging with what he said, and (at least initially) not highlighting key points - were reasonable. However, I did not respond reasonably. In post 10, I used selective quoting (!) in a biased way in order to defend the appropriateness of my reply (despite quoting the rest of the relevant quotation at the top of the same post, which is bizarre). I think that’s worth special attention, because that’s the sort of thing I would normally call out and be opposed to as biased bad scholarship. Elliot wrote more than one sentence and more than one complaint, but I acted as if my citation of one sentence was sufficient justification for my entire reply. I also then proceeded to bring up my emotional state, which seems notable because I’d forgotten about this instance of doing so and the same issue came up later.

So, bringing this analysis home - I think my initial response, the info dump, was not a competent reply that was engaging effectively with the post that preceded it, and that Elliot’s complaints about it were reasonable. But even at that point I think things were okay-ish. I think the real problems started in my reply to that reply, where I was trying to defend my first reply as adequate. And bringing up my emotional state was kind of weird and is another bad indicator. So post 10 may be the first socially mean reply of mine to Elliot in the thread - where I’m contradicting him with an inadequate response and possibly blaming him for me feeling upset.

So what happened on my end? Well, I thought my info dump reply was great and put some effort into it. So I was really surprised when Elliot criticized it, which is why I think I felt the need to defend it. That seems pretty dumb, because it’s not like I spent a huge amount of time writing it, so I’m not sure why I would have been so attached to something that was quickly summarizing a bunch of info I found online, but I think that was part of what was going on.

Gaslighting

Was there gaslighting in my reply defending my info dump (post 10)? I don’t know if I understand the topic of gaslighting well enough to answer. I don’t know that merely being like “nah my reply was totes adequate as this selective quote proves” quite rises to the level of gaslighting. I’m honestly not sure though, but my suspicion is that the gaslighting part comes later (assuming it occurs, which I still haven’t seen for myself).

Conclusion

Post 8 in this thread was an incompetent reply. Post 10 was a bad and socially mean reply. Apologies to @Elliot for post 10.

Looking for Social Meanness & Gaslighting - Part 2

Context

This should be the core of the alleged gaslighting. Starting with post 13:

And then post 14:

Post 15:

Post 16:

Post 17:

Analysis

Post 13

Meanness

In post 13, when I wrote “I decided to add some labels on my own.” in reply to Elliot’s request that I stop editing my post in response to his post, the meaning was basically, “You are wrong. I did not do what you are claiming. I decided to add some labels on my own initiative, not in response to your post.” I only wrote a part of that down though. And looking at it again… I guess with the omissions, it comes across as more of a clarification or correction, despite actually meaning the stuff I just said. So that makes it hard to push back on, because it comes off one way but means something else. Is that socially mean? I don’t know. It’s socially problematic - it’s socially something. When I think of meanness I think of more overt aggressive behavior. But this is at least not good. There is a problem here.

Gaslighting

Elliot thought, based on what he saw, that I was editing my post in response to his post. I argued with that in a difficult-to-push-back-on way. In my mind, I was just correcting a misunderstanding about a pretty trivial matter (the matter being when and why I made the edits to add labels).

I can see some kind of issue here. I still don’t understand how the term is being used in this thread, but I would not call it gaslighting. But like, Elliot had come to a conclusion based on looking at the timing of edits, and I was kinda like “nah that’s wrong.” I did offer a (very short) description of my perspective, but then Elliot pushed back in the next post, and my reaction in the post after was worse.

Post 15

Meanness

Elliot said that I had made the edits minutes after he’d replied to my post in a way that affected his post.

I did not reply to that at all. Just ignored the point, basically. Just ignoring someone’s major point in a discussion seems mean.

Elliot also asked that I not edit stuff that’s been replied to in ways that matter to the replies, and to especially not do so as a stealth edit without labels.

I sort of replied to the labels part but didn’t engage with the part about not editing stuff that’s been replied to. I think I didn’t engage with that cuz I didn’t think I had done that and I didn’t want to be confrontational or something. Whatever my motives, just ignoring someone and about something kinda related is mean. Anyways, I instead posed a question intended as a suggestion to resolve potential future disputes (CONTEXT: my currently sketchy internet constantly causes Discourse-related problems, so I thought having a clearer record of when edits were made might help settle things in future disputes). I don’t think ignoring the actual stuff Elliot was saying and bringing up semi-related things as an alternative was kind.

Gaslighting

This is the post immediately preceding the accusation of gaslighting by Elliot. I still don’t agree with that claim and would not call it that, but in light of the preceding discussion about how I was ignoring a bunch of stuff Elliot was saying (ignoring a bunch of stuff within a short reply, too), and in light of the preceding discussion in this thread that talked about a different perspective on gaslighting that was different than the one I had (and that I don’t really understand yet tbh), the claim of gaslighting doesn’t seem quite so out of the blue and extreme as it did to me at first.

Post 17

Meanness

My reply is pretty mean. Someone told me they think I’m gaslighting them and I’m like nah and btw I’m a great guy for trying to be helpful and make useful suggestions but you seem to have misunderstood my beautiful intentions! Most of my reply is on my suggestion instead of dealing with the gaslighting claim.

Gaslighting

If I had been gaslighting, then I think that the stuff here would be like, a gaslighting cover-up/denial, which would be bad. There’s an aggressive topic change away from gaslighting to how I was trying to be super helpful, which could be a reframing kinda thing. I still need to understand the gaslighting stuff more to say more on this point though, so I’ll cut it off here.

Conclusion

Post 17 was mean, 15 was mean, post 13 was bad and maybe mean - not sure about that one. Apologies to @Elliot for the mean posts.

I still don’t “get” the conception of gaslighting that Elliot has but the claim that I was gaslighting seems less extreme/obviously false to me now than it did before, for whatever that’s worth.

I don’t know why you think you know this. You never asked for details. I said there were multiple problematic parts to multiple messages. In my original message in this thread, I said:

You still aren’t addressing the issues. You seem to have one theory about what Elliot was talking about when he said you were gaslighting, and you are just addressing that, but in a way that makes it look like you are doing a thorough re-reading.

Also, you still don’t have a clear idea of what gaslighting is or means. So I am not sure why you decided the best place to start was to try to find gaslighting when you don’t know what it is or what you should be looking for.

I actually think that the analogy to TCS coercion lines up pretty well.

I am not sure what you have in mind here. I have a guess: I think you might be talking about some ideas that were talked about before on this forum, but that weren’t actually a part of TCS theory or philosophy. I think you might specifically be talking about the ideas from this post.

Guessing based on where discussion seemed to go bad and where claim of gaslighting came up. Should have framed clearly as guess. Not doing so was error.

True. Not sure why not. Details would be welcome.

I wanted to treat it like urgent issue. Figured I could look at what I wrote before and just see what problems I could find, even if I am very fuzzy on gaslighting. I found problems (re: meanness, at least), so method seemed okay to me, though I did not compare it to other methods - was just trying to figure out something to do that was actually helpful instead of harmful. Also figured I would have to do another pass when I got clearer on gaslighting, which seemed like nbd.

ya that