Today I Learned...

I am very glad to see people acknowledging and examining social norms, and pushing back when appropriate. Many social norms don't work, or don't work for particular people, or used to work but could be replaced by something better now, and I'm glad we're calling them into question.

But.

The fact that social norms have been used to oppress people for a long time, and that fighting back against those is good, is not carte blanche to pretend they don't exist. Let me give you a few examples.

I had a professor whose "I'm thinking about your interesting question" face was indistinguishable from most people's "I'm in incredible pain" face. He could have tried to conform to the social norm of what an "interested face" looked like, but it probably wouldn't have worked. He could have spent a lot of time lambasting students for not accepting his facial expressions as they were, or just wondering why kids these days were so quiet. What he actually did was announce his pattern in the first day of class, that in fact the more pained he looked the better we should feel about our question. And he lived up to that, and found other ways to demonstrate his appreciation of all questions throughout the class. To me, this is the perfect example of how to be when you don't fit into social norms in ways that are keeping you from getting what you want (in this case, student engagement): acknowledge the norm, explain how you are different and how you hope people will interpret your actions, and go out of your way to affirm people's code-switching efforts.

A PT I saw would be an example of a bad handling of divergence from norms. This PT charges for things other PTs don't. I'm okay with this, and in fact think that the current model of medical business where you charge for face time and only face time is harmful to all parties. I think you can do that without nickle and diming patients or in any way operating in bad faith. But. Given that face-time-only is the predominant model, I think she has an ethical obligation to go very out of her way to warn patients about her policy ahead of time- and that warning them means doing so in ways that are unambiguous in the current climate, where people will assume certain services are included for free unless explicitly told otherwise .

Lastly: I have a friend of a friend who brides herself on keeping good boundaries. Like all people who talk loudly about being good at something, she is terrible at it.* She thinks she is good at boundaries because when someone says a clear, unambiguous no, she doesn't fight it. In some contexts, that would be sufficient. In current American culture, dodging a question five times and displaying avoidant body language is understood to be an unspoken no. Missing/ignoring that is not only rude, it's informative. People are allowed to conclude from her behavior that she is a person who does not hear no, and to make predictions about her future behavior based on data from other people who don't hear no. Such as "she is not safe, and something so rude as a direct rebuke will make her even less safe."

There's a lot of room for debate here on when the aggrieved party is expecting boundary-violator to be psychic and sense the boundary without any clues, and when the boundary violator is refusing to respect "nos" except for those given in very specific formats (which can very easily be used as cover for violating boundaries until the risk of social punishment is sufficiently high). There are people who have sufficiently different zones of comfort that they can't be functional friends, and that doesn't automatically make either of them bad.

ASDers are the obvious example of people who just can't pick up on socially-expected cues, but I don't think you need to fit into an established pattern in order to avoid having your weaknesses viewed as moral flaws. Under my paradigm, the correct thing to do is what my professor did: tell people you miss these cues**, but respecting their boundaries is really important to you, so please tell you as directly as possible. You acknowledge that this is asking them to do some additional work to accommodate you. And then you accept it and thank people when they do so, even when it hurts. You accept a duty to respond well to very direct statements of discomfort beyond what would be expected from others***, because you have removed a set of options from people's toolboxes. You do not insist that they are rude for violating a social contract you have walked away from.

In some ways this is unfair, and I think I might have gone too far. I cherrypicked examples where either the norms were well intentioned, or there was some affirmative moral obligation on the part of the norm-violator to be extra straightforward. Lots of times norms are used to oppress people and it's not fair to say they can only get out of them by doing more work. There's a lot more here to work through.

*She also hates drama.

**As opposed to "these cues are stupid".

***There are limits, of course.

The Hardcore History podcast is another one of those things that makes me mad at my childhood history classes. It is full of context and explanations of why people did things/were driven to do things, not just what they did. With the caveat that I don't know enough history to spot subtle lies, the episodes seem rich and insightful. And the author is just so happy and excited to be talking to me. It's like a really interesting friend wanting to share a really interesting book she just read: you might not have been interested in the topic before, but you are now.

The episode I am listening to now* is most proximately about US-Cuba relations circa the 1890s and the Spanish American war, but in order to talk about that properly has to talk about American identity politics and how they were affected by the closing of the frontier, the state of journalism**, naval warfare, the views of the time on war in general, impact of the business community on foreign policy, the Cuban revolution and Spain's response, some of the factors that drove Spain's response... And I'm only 1/3 of the way through. This is not a short podcast.

Here is what strikes me: as the podcast describes it, President McKinley was being driven by two things: fear that Spain (then a fairly weak power) would transfer Cuba (whose location gave it incredible strategic value in war against the United States) to a power that was an actual threat against us (England and Germany being the biggest concerns), and an abhorrence of war after seeing the devastation of the Civil War first hand. Neither of these are bad motives: the abhorrence of war is obviously more universally moral, but I don't think it's ridiculous for the president of a country to worry about expansionist countries with strong militaries gaining an easy foothold near his country. Earlier in the podcast he talks about the US business/economic interests in Cuba, but does not mention them influencing McKinley directly on this issue (although gold-standard wise he was closely allied with the business community, and business interests were influencing the news coverage that influenced popular opinion).

McKinley desperately did not want to have to choose between going to war or letting
a strong power establish a base in Cuba. So he oriented all his actions around preventing it from coming to that. Most obviously by suggesting a limited independence for Cuba, which he hoped would get the rebels to lay down arms while not leaving Cuba free to ally with other powers, but there was also a general policy of "let's wait and see if this solves itself." The problem is that in the meantime, the Spanish were herding Cuban farmers into camps and leaving them to starve or die of yellow fever (the Reconcentrado policy). To be fair, the rebels had extracted resources at the point of a gun from farmers as well, but nothing on that scale. McKinley's wait-and-see policy left these people to wither and die.

As I see it, the problem was that McKinley applied his moral values to one hypothetical choice, saw it would be a difficult one, and directed his efforts to steering conditions away from ever having to make that choice without applying his values to the choices he made as part of that effort. His abhorrence of war was ultimately born of an abhorrence of suffering, something Spain was causing just fine within McKinley's wait-and-see policy. I think this kind of cognitive dissonance causes a lot of the worst decisions in human history: a decent person, seeing that two of their values may soon come into conflict, compromises those same values in order to avoid that choice. And it's not something you can solve by telling people to buck up and be more moral, because that only makes the aversion stronger.



* Fine, the only episode I've listened to.

** Apparently there is always a new mass media driving people to demand intervention in events they previously would have ignored

Shorter Hugo Schwyzer: to make up for exploiting past relationships for personal gain, I won't acknowledge the public facts about the breakdown of my current relationship.

Okay, the exact quote is "I wrote too many pieces about my exes that, while accurate as to fact, needlessly exploited private exchanges for page views. So in the spirit of contrition, I won’t write about the breakdown of my marriage to Eira."

Not writing about the details of his divorce is probably a very good decision, for many reasons. But the fact that he's phrasing it as a sacrifice to atone for past misdeeds, as opposed to a generally good idea, or specifically the very literally least he can do for the woman he fucked over and the children he's failed, makes me think he hasn't learned fuck all.

This isn't the first time he's done this. He described writing his college's anti-student-fucking policy as atonement for all his student fucking. That is not how atonement works.

Criticizing Hugo Schwyzer is delicate at this point, because he's very clearly mentally ill, and I don't pick on people with mental illness But sometimes what you're seeing is not the mental illness, but the deepseated personal flaws that a more able person would be able to keep hidden. And those are fair game

In computer networking, there's the concept of a "handshake protocol." You don't just start sending data willy nilly, you send a specific initiation packet and wait for one in return, to establish everyone is prepared to receive and send data. I just realized I wear headphones not to discourage conversation entirely, but to force people to use a handshake procedure. They can't just start talking at me, they have to signal me and wait for me to engage, giving me a few precious seconds to switch gears. It also provides an easy signal for "good, this conversation is over."

At least that's the theory. In practice, people seem to start talking to me even though they can clearly see the headphones, and I enter the conversation one step behind, feeling guilty for "ignoring" them, and resentful for being made to feel guilty. I feel rude putting the plugs back in right away, but not doing so can signal I want to keep talking.

I had a couple of bad run ins with store owners this week. I want to go into their stores and look at things. Getting asked about what I want and shown stuff while they watch feels like pressure. Sometimes to buy it, but sometimes just to have an opinion when I don't.

Now I'm going to depart from abstract pattern and bitch about one person for a minute. My college town has a single comic book store, and the owner is an asshole. He had a real sense of entitlement to our money, and was generally oppositional.

I stopped into the store today, he started talking while I had headphones in. I took one out and said "I'm sorry" in my politest "I genuinely plan on listening" tone. He muttered something about not wanting me to have the headphones in at all something something feeling invisible. Not sure if he was referring to feeling invisible himself or calling out my attempt to be invisible, but my reaction to that was "okay, I'll leave." Which I have mixed feelings about, but there may not be a way to have left that situation feeling perfect.

It was bad enough when the lady at the hand crafted local artisan put a bird on it jewelry store kept trying to engage me, but at least she was pleasant, and she was in a store where a lot of the customers do want to talk. This is a bloody comic book store, and you're bad with people. Me physically walking in to buy something without wasting your time is a bloody gift, because I could have done that cheaper and faster on the internet.

I'm genuinely confused as to how this store is surviving in the age of the internet. The owner makes Bernard Black look like.. I dunno, I don't watch much TV with helpful shopkeeps. There's no such thing as the only game in town now that the internet exists, and most of the town is too young to have any nostalgia for ye olde comic book shoppe. OTOH, the constant influx of new customers may be what shields him- the employees are great people I actually enjoy talking to, and he's not there all the time. Maybe he just hates women

http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/8/21/introverts-and-extraverts-and-power-oh-my

Finally, people are talking about introversion and extroversion and how they interact with the rest of the world, rather than keeping them in their own isolated bubble. Privilege exists. Introversion and extroversion exist. Except for extrovert privilege*, your orientation does not affect the amount of your privilege, but it does affect its expression. And it's vastly easier to notice that in opposite-orientation people than in yourself or people like you.


*which is the worst privilege because it's the best one I don't have. Yet.

I am tired of hearing "alone time" and "social time" referred to as distinct, fungible buckets. There are lots of different kinds of alone time and people time and they cost and give different things. A teacher friend has described teaching as rather lonely because even though you're surrounded by people all day, they're children, and the energy flow is almost unidirectional. I don't play MMOs because they invoke the worst parts of dealing with people- having to negotiate with them to get a thing I want- without making me feel connected.

There are kinds of social activity that I need other social activity to recover from. Most noticeably when I'm around my parents for significant lengths of time, I start reaching out electronically. My first choice is chatting with good friends, followed by posting to facebook and livejournal, but when desperate I'll resort just to reading blogs and commenting on them. If you think of all social interactions as energy exchanges: I can't participate in the kind of exchanges that make me feel like me with my parents. It's not even a matter of hiding who I am, it's that they are incapable of seeing it and therefore can't react proportionally. Participating in exchanges with my friends makes me feel more whole.

Incidentally, I'll do the same thing when pushed into the introvert wall and forced to socialize (such as at work). Work is not such a violation of my sense of self as talking with my parents, but I am more actively suppressing certain aspects. As is appropriate for a professional situation and is totally fine as long as I have the cope, but when I'm depleted than g-d damnit, someone is going to hear the funny innuendo about what my boss just said.

Alone time that I've planned or deliberately turned down an invitation for is scored differently than incidental alone time. It feels worse, because everyone is hanging out without me/I'm a loser for wanting to stay in/I'm missing an opportunity I may never get again/I genuinely wanted to do that fun thing. But if I'm able to fight through that, it's also more restorative. There's is more flow when there is an event I have separated from than when I am merely adrift.

So if you assume everyone has some equilibrium they wish to maintain, and no one can balance those perfectly immediate, extroverts whose ballast or rebalancer tends to fall under the broad category of "social time", and introverts are those whose ballast or rebalancer falls under "alone time".

I'm just going to admit this up front: this post was inspired by someone who claimed to never get jealous yelling at me for flirting with someone she didn't even have a right to be territorial over. This annoyed me deeply. I think I'm channeling this into positive philosophical musings, but I'm prepared to hear it's just passive aggressive whining.

G-d willing, none of us are as good as we want to be. That would mean we had stopped striving to become better, and that's pretty much death. This is what is dangerous about making hypocrisy the worst sin: wanting to be better is the first step to becoming better.* I don't want to ban people from talking about being better or wanting better until they've conclusively proven they're better and never going to relapse. That's not the only source of hypocrisy, or even the largest by volume, but I think preserving space to strive is worth putting up with some sanctimony.

So, you're human, you don't want to be bothered by a thing, but you are. What do you do? I think there is real beauty and grace in taking the actions that your best would would, and accepting the discord between that and what your current self wants as growing pains. Unpleasant, but something that will pass and leave good things in is wake. You don't have to hide that pain either, you can acknowledge it, even to the people who are causing it, if you do it right. The script in this particular case is "I feel jealous. I'm not asking you to change your behavior, or feel bad, but please accept that I need to go do self care things now."

But there is also beauty and grace in accepting yourself as you are now, and making the lesser choice, because you're not yet ready to be that big. It doesn't lock in that state forever, it doesn't make you a bad person, and it doesn't make you a hypocrite for not living up to your values. It's loving yourself and accepting that you cannot instantly be everything you want to be. In practice, that could look like "I know I said I don't get jealous but I really don't like watching you flirt with that guy, would you stop on my account?"**

There is ZERO beauty and grace is claiming a virtue, shaming those you don't think sufficiently demonstrate it, faltering when called to demonstrate it, and then taking the shame of that failure out on the witnesses. That is just annoying

*A friend of mine has dedicated this year to the power of cognitive dissonance for that exact reason.
**To be fair, the answer in this specific case would have been "no." Sometimes the mature option is your only option.

I have a new pet peeve, and with it, a new resolution. The pet peeve is a common American phrasing that takes some set up to explain. Suppose something could be A or B, with B being either an opposite of A, or clearly bad when A is good. Instead of saying "This is B", people will say "This is not very A." For example, if you go to Hawaii and it is mysteriously freezing, people will say "I was planning on something warmer" rather than "I'm freezing my balls off". Other variations include:

• "That's not my favorite" = "I find this actively unpleasant"
  
• "This is not necessarily what I planned on" = "I wanted the opposite of this"
  
• "Weren't completely relevant" = "Were irrelevant", "Weren't very relevant"
  
• "Wasn't exactly a model" = "fat"
  

I find this actively annoying. We all know what people mean, but... no, we don't. There's still a lot of ambiguity and suddenly it's on you to guess where. It makes it a lot harder to answer follow up questions. In the particular case of my boss telling me "not necessarily what we wanted when we started this project" (not my project), it makes it harder for me to ask follow up questions about things that were poorly done, versus things that had to be changed because the plan was based on incorrect facts.

I have tried to stop doing this myself, and it is hard. It feels harsh and mean. I try to stick to it because I think verbal imprecision is disrespectful, and that is worse than mean, but it is very hard. I haven't even attempted to fix my use of the word "maybe" to mean "definitely", but I think that is the next step.

Capitalist is a weird word, because it can mean "pro-capitalism" or "an owner of capital". Neither communism nor feudalism have this problem, and I think it muddies up the waters quite a bit. I have no particular affinity for the owners of capital. I don't think it makes them* morally better than non-owners. Policies designed to give people with more money because they have money seem prima facia stupid to me.

What I do have an affinity for is markets. Markets are clearly neither feudalism nor communism, so we'll call them capitalist, but one of the things I like about them is their disregard for who has the capital. Centrally designed systems tend to pick a winner and stick with them, and this helps the rich get richer. Markets, in which ideas compete freely, are much more open to the latest good idea. IBM had a good idea, but it stopped, so it withered away. Markets do end up creating owners-of-capital, but I see that as a side effect of their actual point, which is to give people choices. Note that once people acquire capital, they often favor anti-market practices, like tariffs and overly restrictive licensing.

Side note: This is why privatizing government functions while retaining the monopoly is the stupidest possible plan. There's nothing magic about a private company, what I want is *competition* that lets people choose between multiple options, leading the lesser options to die or improve.

This is tangentially related to my latest book Hungry Ghosts, which is about the famine caused by China's Great Leap Forward. Without knowing much about the subject, I had assumed that the famine was caused by Communism's edict of "to each according to their needs" creating a tragedy of the commons, in which no one had an incentive to work. This is incorrect. The famine was primarily caused by the government taking all off the food. Initially people in the cities ate fine because they were given grain rations, but the government insisted that the peasants were hiding grain and thus took everything they could find. In later years the famine did spread to the city, not because the farmers were freeriding, but because many of them were dead of starvation or torture. The communists' belief that their ideological purity allowed them to improve agriculture in ways those bourgeois scientists and farmers could not did lower the crop yield, but if the crop had been good, they would have just stolen it and sold it overseas. Also, I have trouble taking seriously the idea of "according to their needs" when the government mandated abandoned children be left to starve, because it would only encourage people to abandon their children.

So ideological Communists? I'm officially allowing the argument that the Chinese were not practicing real Communism and thus don't count as a failure disproving Communism. I still think Communism is a terrible plan, but it's not the terrible plan the Chinese were following.


*As a net saver, technically I'm an owner-of-capital, although like many rich people, I don't feel rich.

This is a trick I have used with landlords, co-workers, and other assorted types. Say we are debating something, and I am right. I have explained my position, and they have explained theirs, and no one is budging.* They attempt to break the stalemate by repeating their position, loudly and with increasing implications that you are an idiot for disagreeing. You could respond in kind, but if you are female you risk being written off as hysterical, and even if you're male proof by intimidation is just a horrible way to go through life. But if calming stating your point worked, the problem would already be solved.

The trick I have found is to let them yell for as long as they want, saying absolutely nothing. They may talk for a very long time, but eventually they will tire themselves out (often much faster than if you interrupted them, although it won't feel that way at the time). Continue not talking. If you are there in person or on a webcam, look at them, but say nothing.** Eventually they will crack and attempt to solicit you, with something like, "okay?" or "so you're on board?". And you say "No." Depending on the situation, you may elaborate just a bit, with something like "no, for the reasons I've listed." but don't say anything more than that.

The benefits of this are manyfold. First, sometimes the other person will give in just to stop the silence. Second, even if you end at a stalemate, you deescalated the situation without giving anything up. You can come back- in a few seconds or a few days- with new thoughts*** or a letter from your lawyer and you haven't haven't said anything they can use against you, legally or socially. Third, regardless of where the argument ends, you don't leave it with the icky feeling you got bullied into something.

I am trying to think how I would feel if this technique was used on me. I think anything that slows down the pace of emotional arguments is a good thing. And I would like not yell, but if it's bad enough that I'm yelling am maybe not going to take correction very well; a long pause for me to slowly realize what I just did seems like the gentlest possible way to tell me. So this technique even passes the "do unto others test".



*the landlords may well have known I was right and been trying to intimidate me into backing down, but I assume good faith on the part of co-workers. That is the brilliance of this: it works either way.

** I like to think this is when certain co-workers being to realize how stunningly unprofessional they just were.

***I originally discovered this technique when I decided I was going to take as long as I needed to think of my response, and if that led to an awkward silence, so be it. The mindset of "I am thinking" over "I am waiting" may be important to its success, although "my co-worker's unprofessional behavior has literally shocked me into silence" also works.