Unions and Bias

Unbounded
21

Ok, I’m not sure where you are getting that from.

That would be a pretty absurd point of view for someone to hold. Like, it is saying that workers should just show up and work shifts that their employers have never agreed to have them work, and actively don’t want them to work. And that if they don’t blatantly defy their employers in this way, than they are at fault for the work not happening?

I don’t think the original tweet said anything that communicates that this is his actual point of view. Is there something specific you read that way?

22

Yes. The graphic in the tweet says [retyped by me due to it being a graphic]:

An overnight shift of five hours is available, but it is up to 50% more expensive and rarely used, say liner and terminal operators who foot the bill. Cargo pickups on Saturday are also rare, being charged as premium shifts, and there is no work on Sundays.

I read the above to mean the extra shifts are rare because they cost more and the people who pay (the employers) don’t want to pay extra, so they (the employers) usually don’t authorize them. That causality is not literally stated, but it’s implied and it’s also a routine, common feature of non-salaried working arrangements.

So when the tweet text says:

unions holding ports for ransom while dozens of ships pile up, working just 2 shifts with a 2 hour break in between, the country at their mercy.

He’s criticizing the unions for not working shifts that employers commonly / routinely don’t authorize for cost reasons, and he gives no indication that the employers have actually authorized those shifts in this specific case.

23

tangent and i don’t know what platform you’re on but on Mac I use this

24

Yeah, I was able to get that from what he wrote.

What I don’t understand is the jump to saying that his opinion is that the union workers should do something like break into their place of employment at night, and just preform the work without the approval of their employers or managers.

25

If he has a specific action in mind I agree he’s probably not thinking the workers would actually break in and perform work, just that they ought to make whatever unilateral concessions are necessary for the work to get done. He might think something like: the workers / their union should offer to work the extra shifts at the normal shift rate, and if they did that then of course the employers would approve the work.

It’s also possible he hasn’t thought his position through to a specific conclusion about what the workers/their union should do. His thinking could be as simple as: there’s work to be done to clear the ports, country needs it badly, workers aren’t doing it cuz union contract but they should figure out a way to do it anyway for the good of the country.

26

That’s totally different from what you originally said though.

I specifically tried to clarify if what you said is what you meant, because it seemed like a particularly weird point of view.

27

Instead of

maybe something like “obligates the union members to make concessions to the people who pay them in order to secure their approval to work extra” would make more sense?

28

@ingracke, I think @Lebowski doesn’t see the point of persistently focusing on his error(s). He feels backed into a corner, defensive, etc., so now he’s evading and just trying to move on and change his position and forget about the error. Attacking his error, and trying to keep the attention on it, feels mean and pointless. He feels like you put work into confirming his positions in advance in order to trap and hurt him. He doesn’t know how to get constructive value out of this or what sort of nice goal you might have.

Whereas you think you’re trying to help and that he apparently doesn’t want to learn anything and is wasting your time by sabotaging. He’s trying to remove the spotlight from the very thing you’re trying to talk about, so that seems like he’s awful to talk with.

There’s a clash of goals here. @Lebowski doesn’t seriously expect to get things right so doesn’t value post mortems. You’re assuming he was trying to think, made an error, and would want to fix his thinking error so he doesn’t repeat it. You see discussion as practice to get good at thinking to improve your lives. But he’s just screwing around and writing careless errors that wouldn’t surprise him to be wrong about, and then using social manipulations to change the subject without even admitting what happened. He isn’t trying to do a learning process and doesn’t have things set up to benefit from criticism. He has plenty of uncorrected, known errors so he doesn’t actually benefit from most criticism – unless it’s super super important (so it’s worth dropping almost everything else to fix it), criticism just makes the error queue longer which is something people often feel bad about.

Finding out about errors is not his bottleneck, and correcting errors is not his goal. You’re talking to each other at cross purposes.

In this case, I think the main thing going on is he dislikes unions which prevents him from reading normally. It’s not something he can think objectively about. And he isn’t here to find that out and fix it. He has bigger problems which he’s avoiding by being here… Alan’s answers were also poor, I think for the same reason of bias about unions. Similarly the tweet author is being egregiously unreasonable (including in multiple followup tweets nested under that one), and I think he’s being more unreasonable than he usually is due to him hating unions.

29

I think people sometimes assume you wouldn’t be saying a criticism unless you thought it was drop-everything top priority, because they assume everyone’s life has a big queue of known errors (they don’t conceptualize it in those terms). So they misinterpret criticism as claiming to be a bigger deal than you intended it as or said it was.

30

I do generally dislike unions.

31

High level, I thought the tweet was biased against unions.

Perhaps because I know I am also biased against unions, I overstated the bias that was actually there in an attempt to be fair.

Like, if it looks like 5 points of anti-union bias to me and I know I also personally have 5 points of anti-union bias, I assume it must actually be something like 10 points of anti-union bias and attempt to read it in a way that confirms that assumption.

32

I think I have automated policies like that.

33

It goes the other way, too. Joining a discussion implies that you looked at your activities queue, priorities, etc., and it was reasonable to join. That implies you do not have a queue of errors that makes you unable to deal with regular criticism in the discussion. Otherwise you shouldn’t have joined the discussion and should instead have started a different topic to address your higher priority issues.

Responding critically to people who engage in discussion is a way of taking them seriously, and treating them as competent and able to manage their own affairs, and treating them as independent entities responsible for their own decisions, rather than being paternalistic and condescending.

34

Yes. I have a guess about one reason why. I think I’ve internalized the cultural idea of constructive criticism.

I think the cultural idea of constructive criticism requires stuff like the following:

  • The criticism is relevant to some goal the person receiving the criticism has (even if such goals are unstated and unknown or different than the criticizer’s goals)
  • The criticism includes not just the problem but also a suggested, plausible solution
  • The criticism is delivered in a way that’s designed to allow the person receiving the criticism to avoid looking bad socially

According to the constructive criticism idea, criticism that doesn’t include the above (and perhaps other requirements I haven’t thought of) is not constructive and is therefore mean.

35

Sometimes people act like you’re tutoring or mentoring them when you’re not. In other words, they expect you to take into account their goals, context and priorities, and then pick the most important thing for them to do next. If they aren’t paying you and there’s no agreement to help them in that way, then that is not your job and should not be expected.

It’s a public forum and multi-person discussion, and you often don’t even know much about the people (including not knowing stuff you would find out in a tutoring relationship). And often they won’t listen to you – like they partly want you to tutor them but partly they sometimes go and listen to advice from anyone else who posts, instead, and ignore your advice. They don’t consistently treat you like their tutor and won’t take on the sort of commitments, responsibilities or obligations that make tutoring work. If they follow bits and pieces of plans from many different advisors, there is no way for any particular advisor to take responsibility for the outcome since his plan is not being followed overall. The only person who can take responsibility for the outcome there is the learner who is making the decisions about which advice to listen to or not, which suggestions to take, etc. And anyway it’s basically inappropriate to expect unpaid people to take responsibility for other people’s issues.

My comments often don’t try to worry about people’s lives. That’s intrusive and people often complain when I do take that stuff into account, and they often hide lots of info about their lives anyway. So often I just reply to some words they said and have an impersonal discussion. Then they hide what advice they are actually acting on IRL, in what mix, from who. But then they sometimes blame me when they misused a few things i said and it doesn’t work.

36

One issue is that on a forum, I’m not just writing it for the person I’m replying to: I’m writing for other readers too, including possible future readers. So sometimes I’m trying to be helpful to the person I’m replying to, but other times what I say is more for the benefit of other people.

But even when I am saying something that I think might be helpful to the person I am talking to, my advice, suggestions, corrections, etc aren’t very personalized. I don’t know the person I am talking to well. I don’t know the context of their lives, what other problems they have, what the best thing for them to be focussing on right now is. So I can say general things that I think are true, or true for most people, or something like that. But I can’t give them advice based on their actual context & situation because I don’t know their situation.

And, also, if I take into account what I do know about the person, from previous interactions with them, reading previous threads (including older stuff on the FI list), etc, my experience is that a lot of the long-term posters here have previously claimed to not have any major, ongoing problems or disasters in their lives. Elliot has previously tried to get people to write more about their actual real life problems, and people have refused to do that, many of them claiming that they just don’t have any to write about.

So, if I take that seriously, then pointing out things like logical errors in their writing actually does seem like a helpful & relevant thing to do. In order to improve your ideas or your life, you need to actually find mistakes, errors, etc to change. Since people either don’t have any major ongoing problems or they are unable to see their major ongoing problems, then providing them with evidence of some kind of problem would be helpful – it would be giving them a place where they could start making improvement.

And, also, even if they do have major, ongoing problems, sometimes those things are much harder to work on. They are painful & emotional, or hard to figure out how to change without making major, difficult life changes. It can be hard to figure out how to fix a life that you feel stuck in. And it can be hard to question and change beliefs that are really important to you.

So, in those cases, working on improving your thinking on anything at all might be a helpful way to start improving your life. If you get some practice correcting things like impersonal logical mistakes you are making about ideas that aren’t central to your everyday life, that can help to improve your overall thinking. And it can give you some practice with finding and correcting errors. And if you do that enough, you can start to use those skills to find other kinds or errors too – the kinds that are actually causing you ongoing problems in your everyday life.

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37

Yeah you can use forum discussions to practice stuff (like error correction, taking criticism, learning anything, successful small projects) in simpler and easier cases, even if you have an outstanding queue of major problems.

38

It’s really awkward in general to deal with people who are systematically ambiguous or inconsistent about whether they want a peer (often debate) or mentoring interaction. Sometimes they demand a debate … then the debate consists of me trying to teach them stuff because they are not competent to debate the topic and need everything explained to them. But it’s much harder to teach people stuff in a peer debate context than a mentoring context. In debate, instead of trying to listen and learn, they argue with and object to stuff they don’t understand.

If people asked for free mentoring overtly and clearly, it’d be readily apparent to everyone including them that they should offer something in return. At the very least, a commitment to put in some time/work and stick with it over time. Otherwise, if they’re just going to flake or not try, they are a poor person to give free help to.

So they claim to be better than that, more competent and responsible than that … debate-ready peers … and then act worse than that, less competent and responsible…

39

People want me to make a mix of charitable assumptions about how much of a smart peer they are, and condescending assumptions about how incompetent and help-needing they are. They want this done without discussion, without saying what’s going on, and while pretending the whole time that they’re the smart peer. They want my participation in a fraud – in putting on a show where they pretend to be something they’re not. One of the main things they find mean about me is when I don’t participate in that show or even say things contradicting it.

They want me to know, without communication, which condescending assumptions they will secretly appreciate and which they’ll hate, and guess the right ones. But despite all their conformity, they are idiosyncratic not predictable. Conventional people aren’t all the same. There’s a significant range of conventional ways to be with variations.

40

I don’t know if you think I’m included, but I have said things approximately like that in the past.