[extropy-chat] Inadvertant insult

[Keith Henson]

At 03:34 PM 2/21/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>One problem with mailing lists, and email in general, is that people
>miscommunicate their mood and intentions, leading to insult where none is
>intended (or its counterpart, failure to appreciate a well-aimed barb).
>A recent study investigated this effect:
>
><http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/89/6/925> requires a
>subscription, but Wired Online had an article about it last week,
><http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.html>.
>
> > The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave
> > each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the
> > weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of
> > each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners
> > then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in
> > their answers.
> >
> > Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the
> > time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the
> > recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
> > ...
> > At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them
> > based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this,
> > the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages
> > nine out of 10 times.
>
>So writers predicted that their tone would be understood 80% of the time,
>readers thought they had received the tone accurately 90% of the time, but
>actually the tone was only communicated correctly about 50% of the time.

I am not surprised at the result, it is great that someone actually set up 
a study.

>Now, this is a particularly hard case since I gather that only one
>sentence was sent.  In practice with email, probably the whole message
>adopts a particular tone.  Nevertheless the significant datum is the
>discrepency between people's impression of their own communication
>effectiveness, 80-90%, and their actual ability level, ~50%, only slightly
>better than flipping a coin.  This is in accord with a wide range of
>studies showing that people systematically overestimate their abilities

No kidding!

>We've seen this kind of communication problem often here on this list,
>including a message I just read a few minutes ago.  Studies like this
>one suggest that this is a bigger problem than most people realize.

And you need to add to the problem that some people have very different 
(and often much worse) personalities on line than they do in real life.  I 
can think of several examples.

>I've long had a dream for this mailing list, and ExI's communication media
>more generally, as a place where we could experiment with non-standard
>techniques with the goal of improving our ability to communicate.
>I've been so frustrated over the years to see us falling again and
>again into the same kinds of pointless debates that could be found on
>virtually any other mailing list in the world, particularly the political
>arguments which have followed the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war.  I don't
>necessarily have any brilliant suggestions for how to fix things, but I do
>believe in the homespun saying, if you always do what you've always done,
>you'll always get what you've always got.  You have to make changes if
>you want something different to happen.  This is why I continue to hope
>that ExI will press on with their plans to find new ways for people who
>share a vision to communicate and coordinate their efforts.

Your goal splits into two areas.  How to keep the list from being invaded 
by people who come across as scammers like JD and how to get more 
intelligent conversation.

On the latter, I think people should make a real effort to raise the 
discussion to a meta level.  I.e., it is ok to talk about wars and politics 
but the current situations should only be used as examples in discussions 
of the meta level.  (Why wars?  Why are humans captured by both socialist 
and libertarian politics/memes)?

I think in order to do this list contributors are going to have to come to 
some understanding of what humans are.  I know of nothing besides 
evolution/evolutionary psychology that gives a logical and consistent 
description of human nature, but I am always willing to consider other 
foundations if they can be found.

>In the mean time, we can certainly benefit by increasing awareness of the
>limitations of this text medium.  I wrote earlier about evidence-based
>medicine; Max wrote about evidence-based business methods.  We should
>dedicate ourselves to evidence-based communication!  In fact, we could
>do worse than to set as our goal, moving towards an evidence-based
>lifestyle.  (The Left has co-opted "reality-based" to refer to their
>own ideological biases, but AFAIK "evidence-based" still has objective,
>academic connotations.)
>
>In terms of this recent study, the obvious conclusion is that where mood
>is important, we need to be much more explicit in stating our intentions.
>A simple proposal along those lines is to use smileys :).  I am not a
>fan of this technique personally - I don't like unbalanced parentheses!
>Too many years writing code.  I used to always try to work my smileys into
>parenthetical expressions (like this :) so that the parentheses balanced.
>A bit of compulsiveness on my part, I'm afraid.  But it can certainly be
>helpful, if you are joking or making what you intend to be a light-hearted
>comment, to add the smiley and lessen any chance of misinterpretation.
>
>On the receiving end, as a general rule it is safe to assume that the
>other guy probably does not mean to be insulting.  If you read something
>that seems vicious or angry, try to read it as if it were said in a
>bantering, light-hearted tone, and see if that helps.

Excellent advice. :-)

One of my posts bounced recently and by the time it came back the issue was 
moot.  Your comments induced me to fish it out.

At 03:53 PM 2/20/2006 -0300, Henrique Moraes Machado wrote:
 >Speaking for myself, I know I'm not as smart as some members of this list an
 >I can be hardly classified like "highly intelligent, enormously creative,
 >and exceptionally knowledgeable about science and technology to fit in", but
 >I love this list and on the other side I can be hardly classified as a
 >source of conflict or any disruptive behaviour to the list. There are other
 >members of this list that can fit my shoes and I think I'm speaking for all
 >of them when I say we don't want to be cast out or prevented from making an
 >eventual comment on some subject.

You and several others have made what I consider to be a very cogent 
argument to change the list administration in a minimal way.

The problem with a list moderator is that it just takes too much time from 
very busy people *and* having to silence bozos is a thankless task.

Another list had the same problem about a year ago, as a matter of fact 
with one of the same people. The list administrator generated a completely 
automated system that kept the clutter out of mailboxes. It lets people 
rate postings on a connected web site. Those who got some magic number of 
low ratings on their postings were snipped out of the mailings (though they 
were webbed).

People who post rarely would never be binned, it takes consistent annoying, 
off topic or scamming behavior to induced people even to click on a link.

********************

The problem (now that I consider it as an engineering problem) is lack of 
feedback.  If list readers could be induced to click a link that a post was 
below minimum or well above average, the first would guide either automatic 
or manual silencing and the second would reward posters you want to 
see.  The only way to do that now is to respond (hard to do if you agree) 
and if you don't have much to say, it clutters the list.

So Hal should take my post as a reenforcing reward and we should deeply 
consider this feedback business.

Keith Henson