is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

My verdict on Greyhound is that it is perfectly adequate if you are constrained by money more than time. It is worse in terms of comfort than driving my own car, but better in terms of not having to pay attention. It is worse than an airplane in terms of time, better in terms of cost for moderate distances, and better in terms of the logistics of boarding and luggage management. It is, imo, identical in terms of seat comfort except that so far it seems way more likely to have a near-empty bus for portions of the trip than a near-empty airplane. Greyhound does lose some points by not being as cool as flying and getting to see the tops of clouds + all the tiny ground people.

Bet it’s more miserable than a plane during the summer, though.

It continues to weird me out that nobody ever talks about the constant ear discomfort at altitude and horrible ear pain on descent when discussing the pros and cons of airplanes. Am I unusually sensitive to pressure changes? Is this only a problem on budget airlines?

A vehicle at ground level would have to try pretty hard to be more miserable than a plane. I *cried* last time I was on a descending plane, and I do not cry easily.

(I’m not sure how much pain my brother experiences *during* flight, but he *always* gets an ear infection after plane trips. Maybe there’s some genetic thing going on.)

—

I’ve been on two-hour Greyhounds a couple times as part of Girl Guide trips, and they seemed okay. Probably would be even better now that I have a smartphone: last time I was on a Greyhound I brought no Internet-capable computers because I didn’t have any light enough to be worth lugging around the whole trip, so I didn’t get to use the Wi-Fi.

Since I am trying to make it so that my Tumblr conversations are fully readable without needing the notes available [link], here is a list of distinct branches that responded to me:

http://theaudientvoid.tumblr.com/post/181528215565/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@gasmaskaesthetic, @dagny-hashtaggart (unpingable), @theaudientvoid)

http://judiciousimprecation.tumblr.com/post/181529320774/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@judiciousimprecation)

https://cadmiumwanderer.tumblr.com/post/181529991193/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@another-normal-anomaly, @cadmiumwanderer (unpingable))

http://jadagul.tumblr.com/post/181530605313/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@jadagul)

https://humanfist.tumblr.com/post/181538993961/my-verdict-on-greyhound-is-that-it-is-perfectly (@humanfist)

And here, since they have no links of their own, are the replies:

@moral-autism: “Anecdote:I chew gum and drink water on planes and I’ve never had more than momentary minor discomfort due to pressure”

@akaltyn (unpingable): “I have literally never had any ear issues flying and I used to fly near weekly for work”

—

Some context:

I don’t have all that much flying experience: I flew a few times around ages 5 – 7, then one round trip in 2015 (age 21). The initial 2015 flight had smaller peaks of pain but more discomfort at altitude: I think maybe my ears adjusted more on the return flight, but then had further to go to adjust *back*. I had a cold on the return flight†, but I don’t think I’d reached the sinus-problems stage yet.

—

I haven’t tried gum and hadn’t heard of the special earplugs: I’ll have to bear those in mind if/when I ever go on a plane again.

@jadagul: My nose clogs easily, but with regular maintenance I can breathe through it fairly well. I would not be surprised if my nasal passages are unusually small: my ear canals definitely are.

@another-normal-anomaly: I had problems with earwax clogs as a kid, but around age 13 I grew out my fingernails so that I could use the pinkies as scoops, and since then have had no wax clogs even though I haven’t been as good at keeping my nails long enough over the past couple years.

@judiciousimprecation: If the thing you do that you can’t describe is what this other post calls “working the rumble muscle”, I *can* do that but it hurts a bit. Might be the lesser of two evils in a pinch.

I suppose this whole thing would explain why some airlines have entertainment systems with an audio component: previously I’d just assumed the airlines fancy enough to do that also had better pressurisation, so your ears were actually functional enough for movie watching. (I wasn’t *completely* deaf, and I could have short conversations and IIRC hear the announcement system, but I was in no condition to watch a movie.)

—

†I had to get back home *somehow*, the tickets were already paid for, and I wore a surgical mask. (I also wore a surgical mask on the initial flight, which I suspect was the deciding factor in why I was only in the *early* stages of a cold by the time of the return flight: I bought myself an extra few days by contracting the neighbouring passenger’s cold indirectly through my foolishly mask-less family.) Still felt bad about it, though.

Tags:

#illness tw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the more you know

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gasmaskaesthetic:

My verdict on Greyhound is that it is perfectly adequate if you are constrained by money more than time. It is worse in terms of comfort than driving my own car, but better in terms of not having to pay attention. It is worse than an airplane in terms of time, better in terms of cost for moderate distances, and better in terms of the logistics of boarding and luggage management. It is, imo, identical in terms of seat comfort except that so far it seems way more likely to have a near-empty bus for portions of the trip than a near-empty airplane. Greyhound does lose some points by not being as cool as flying and getting to see the tops of clouds + all the tiny ground people.

Bet it’s more miserable than a plane during the summer, though.

It continues to weird me out that nobody ever talks about the constant ear discomfort at altitude and horrible ear pain on descent when discussing the pros and cons of airplanes. Am I unusually sensitive to pressure changes? Is this only a problem on budget airlines?

A vehicle at ground level would have to try pretty hard to be more miserable than a plane. I *cried* last time I was on a descending plane, and I do not cry easily.

(I’m not sure how much pain my brother experiences *during* flight, but he *always* gets an ear infection after plane trips. Maybe there’s some genetic thing going on.)

—

I’ve been on two-hour Greyhounds a couple times as part of Girl Guide trips, and they seemed okay. Probably would be even better now that I have a smartphone: last time I was on a Greyhound I brought no Internet-capable computers because I didn’t have any light enough to be worth lugging around the whole trip, so I didn’t get to use the Wi-Fi.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now

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Accounting terms as a metaphor for life

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

swimmer963:

I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy. 

Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self. 

(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now). 

Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic. 

I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then. 

I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently. 

I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].

The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.

Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.

And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

michaelblume:

feotakahari:

People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.

I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.

Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.

(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)

Tags:

#there is a time and a place for reading hot political takes and it is *not* while looking for porn #look I get that you want to demonstrate your SJ-ness in order to reassure people that #just because you write *fiction* about women getting brainwashed doesn’t mean you support The Patriarchy in actuality #but you could just *link* to your politics blog from your porn blog #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

A weirdly large share of productivity advice is about increasing how many hours in your day you spend doing work. 

My current job is not a good example here because it doesn’t come in discrete little units, but my last job did. My last job was to write profiles of software engineers. They took about 15minutes to write when I was in the swing of things, but it was often hard to get myself into the mode where I could work on them. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day slowly slogging through them. Sometimes I’d procrastinate all day and then do all of them with two hours left in the day. 

The maximally productive day, for that job, would have been to finish all of my work by 10am and then spend the rest of the day relaxing. 

Nearly all productivity tools and apps would consider the ‘most productive’ day to be the one where I spent ten hours working on profiles. 

I get why they do this. You have more volitional control over how much time you spend working than over how much work you get done when you do, and it can be discouraging to strive for something that’s not really in your control. For many people and many tasks, how much time you work and how much you get done are pretty strongly correlated. And it’s easier to track time spent than progress accomplished.

But nonetheless, it seems pretty damaging for this to be the focus of nearly all productivity advice. The rare things which are instead results-oriented seem to do well. Duolingo rewards lessons completed, not time spent doing them. 4thewords rewards words written. The people I know seem to like them and stick with them a lot more than with time-trackers or strategies to squeeze more workday out of their lives. 

I think most people trying to be more productive should try both a ‘track how much time you spend working! spend more!’ approach and a ‘here’s how much you have to achieve today! try for the earliest possible completion time!’ approach, so you can give yourself a chance at hitting on whatever works best.

I find that what works best for me is neither “spend as much time as possible” nor “do a set amount” (mind you, I don’t think I’ve tried the particular variant “do a set amount *as quickly as possible*”; that might work a little better), but rather “you have this much time available, do as much as possible within that period”.

Both more-time and result-based methods tend to make me work more slowly because it feels like there’s little reason not to, whereas if I only have a certain amount of time I want to make it count. My job pays by the hour, and I actually do really well under that system: it motivates me to make myself useful, because I want my employer to get his money’s worth.

Meanwhile, with university, it’s unfortunate that my schedule is not as conducive to “spend Exactly Four Hours working on school assignments” as it used to be, and I *am* pretty sure that I go through schoolwork more slowly now that I’m not doing that. I’ve been considering ways I might tweak my approach to allow for rigid school times while still being able to fulfil my duties as my workplace’s emergency fill-in person (that is to say, while having a somewhat unpredictable work schedule).

Tags:

#yes I do best with strict scheduling but signed up for a job with an explicit condition of ”must be able to show up on short notice” #look local minimum wage is super high compared to my cost of living #so by my standards even this fast-food job pays *very* well #most weeks I work 16 hours and make very nearly enough to support myself #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

raptorbarn:

does anyone else have a Misophonic Anger Switch and a Misophonic Shame Switch that are triggered by totally different categories of sound? I just want to go up to evolution and ask it w hat

Tags:

#yes this #(I was gonna say I don’t know whether I qualify as misophonic) #(but then I looked it up and apparently nobody *else* knows who qualifies either‚ so) #((although with the anger one I’m not sure if it’s really *those* sounds)) #((or if I’m just very general-sound-sensitive right after eating dinner)) #church bells chiming out hymns manage to sound like unfulfilled obligations #sometimes I wonder if they do it deliberately to try to convince lapsed churchgoers to return #but the effect seems to get weaker the more familiar you are with the song #and lapsed churchgoers would presumably be pretty familiar with *all* the songs #so maybe not #(one time I was staying in a place within earshot of a church that chimed two hymns three times a day) #(and a person came door-to-door asking for signatures for a petition) #(about noise pollution) #(from the *trains*) #((however I was not the one who answered the door)) #((so I had no chance to tell him his noise-pollution priorities were sorely misplaced)) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #misophonia

Berkeley: being other people

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

worldlypositions:

Sometimes I enjoy understanding better what it is like to be other people. You can do this somewhat subtly by talking to people for ages about other topics, and making inferences. Lately I’ve been asking more directly, something like, ‘what about your experience do you think other people would be surprised by?’  But that’s hard to answer, because one doesn’t necessarily have things cached in that way, and many of one’s own idiosyncrasies are probably like water to a fish, and it involves imagining other people imagining you.

Another way to learn about such things is to ask a bunch of people about the details of a common experience. For instance, I have enjoyed:

Going to evensong in Oxford with a bunch of people from the office, then later discussing what we thought about when we got bored: 

  • The very old but humorously hateful notes in the song book
  • The possible friction between the church’s commitment to the poor and their lavish church decor
  • The fact that each of the people in the choir is conscious right now and looking back at us, and later will go and collect their children from school and make dinner in their kitchen and go on living their lives forever
  • The skull decorations

Learning about the YouTube genres that different people are into: 

  • How things work, e.g. how cherry plantations are dried
  • People accidentally dying in extreme sports
  • Marriage proposals
  • Movie trailers
  • Giant pimples being popped
  • Video game reviews
  • Planes crashing
  • Obscure dances

Hearing different people’s views of the monkey waiter sculpture in my house’s foyer 

  • Somehow problematic
  • Creepy in a fun way
  • Never noticed it, but it has a nice face
  • Is a novelty object and therefore disturbs the neutrality of the foyer

One thing I take away from this kind of thing is that different people are paying attention to different things about their environment, and thinking about it in different terms, and getting different kicks out of it.

Many of my friends say they think they are pretty legible, so there would not be much surprising to others about their internal life. My guess is that they are thinking their experience is mostly a sort of standard one, with this window of visual experience, and some accurately represented sounds, and some reasonable thoughts about the things going on in their lives, and so on. But I guess that actually the same visual scene looks in some sense very different to different people, because of things like where their attention goes, what abstractions they use to think about it, and what associations and emotional flavor things have for them.

If you want to play this game with me, what do you think about when you are waiting in the grocery line? What YouTube genres do you come back to? What about your experience do you think other people wouldn’t guess?

>>what do you think about when you are waiting in the grocery line?<<

Some common categories (with example details that may or may not match any particular trip, but are definitely plausible and in-character):

Optimal payment methods. *My* loyalty card has *these* offers on it, and *Mom’s* loyalty card has *those* offers on it, and my credit card only gets 0.5% cashback on everything but hers gets 2% on groceries, and she almost has enough loyalty points to turn in for $10 off but I’m nowhere close…okay, I’m going to get in this line with just the items that have offers on my card, and you get in a different line with everything else. Wait, shit, I still have an unused bread card [link], give me, um…$19.05 of stuff-with-no-loyalty-offers for my batch. Yeah, stuff with price-matching on it is fine, though try not to spread it out among multiple flyers more than necessary.

The things on the tabloid covers.

  • Pitying the people with the divorces and terminal illnesses (their sadness now compounded by having to deal with paparazzi).
  • I…guess it’s nice that Random Celebrity I’ve Barely Heard Of is having a baby? Assuming she wants it?
  • Wondering what it would be like to actually be into any of the things in Cosmo. Wondering if even vanilla-ish heterosexuals are actually into the things in Cosmo. Presumably *some* of them must at least *aspire* to be into that, or it wouldn’t sell. What a strange world they live in. I suppose they’d say the same of me.
  • I can at least understand why people might buy the food magazines. I don’t want to Lose 15 Pounds This Fall (lower fat reserves would just leave me more vulnerable to starvation damage the next time I contract a “”48-hour”“ stomach bug and can barely eat for 11 days), but the pumpkin thingy does look tasty.

The song currently on the radio is ending. God, I hope they don’t play anything triggery next; honestly, who thought it was a good idea to force people to listen to music in order to be in a store, and those earmuffs I tried didn’t help a damn thing with this…oh, okay, it’s just “Call Me Maybe”. I can deal with that, even if part of me is weirded out that it’s not “Thus Spoke Carly Rae” [link].

Why don’t they sell single-serving packets of plain M&Ms at the checkout anymore? They make great emergency-backup chocolate for keeping in my bag (the candy coating keeps them contained, so repeatedly melting and resolidifying doesn’t make them stick to the wrapper), and these days it’s so hard to find a replacement packet after I eat the current one. Makes me overly reluctant to resort to eating it. At least the convenience store has started carrying them now, though their batch is nearly expired and still has a bunch left, so I suspect they’re going to stop carrying them soon.

—

>>What YouTube genres do you come back to?<<

I mostly don’t watch videos, though I’ve been watching some Honest Trailers lately.

I guess questionably-legal music would also count. I tend to treat Youtube as a kind of musical library, borrowing songs in order to decide whether I like them enough to buy, or songs I only need once or twice. I haven’t been trying out music much lately, though, and I was never *all* that big on doing so.

—

>>What about your experience do you think other people wouldn’t guess?<<

I seem to have a more limited emotional range, with fewer buckets. There are things that others report as being entire emotions in themselves, like “frustrated” or “horny”, that for me are sub-types of other things (“angry” and “tired”, respectively). And we *react* differently because of this, too: they tend not to snap at people for coming to their attention too soon after stubbing their toe (the target-less anger latching on to whomever’s available), or oversleep when they’re ovulating (which doesn’t actually help; some well-meaning bit of my brain just gets confused, I think).

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #disordered eating #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #death mention #nsfw text? #food

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

me: [mad at myself for some inadequacy]

the giant: you know that 99% of people don’t meet the standard you’re flagellating yourself for failing

me:

me, biting and then swallowing the bullet: then I hate them too, just as much

the giant: asldkjflskdjf, no,

Tags:

#this is not a feel that I am experiencing at this particular moment but it is definitely a feel that I know #it weirds me out that so many people recommend ways of dealing with self-loathing that #casually assume you loathe *specifically* yourself #and that if you merely judged yourself the same way you judge others you’d be fine #I suppose I understand why people would want to focus their ways-of-dealing-with-self-loathing discussions on #forms of loathing that don’t extend to the interlocutor #but it does make the advice pretty useless to me #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #scrupulosity cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

@sinesalvatorem, about the r/k thing that I’m not going to reblog under my no-guilt-trips policy:

Keep reading

I am confused to say the least. My post doesn’t have anything to do with violence? Or exploiting other people? Or taking advantage of other people’s unwillingness to push back against assholes?

(Unless you consider applying to lots of jobs even if they aren’t your ideal to be assholish behaviour? But that would be odd and surprising? Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.)

My post is about why people should be willing to take actions that are low cost even if they’re unlikely to succeed in full. But, like, I’m kind of a utilitarian – if I’m counting how costly something is, I’m definitely counting how costly it is to /everyone/.

Putting one’s sketches online isn’t hurting you /or/ bystanders, so it counts as taking a low-cost opportunity. Shoplifting may not hurt you (depending on the consequences of being caught), but it’s still taking money out of someone else’s pocket, so it’s still A Bad.

If cowardice is the only lever you have to avoid acting on impulses to hurt others, then OK, in your specific case I endorse cowardice. But almost no one I know works like this? Generally, a lot of factors go into decisions about whether to engage in violence, and they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.

If you have only one inhibitory mechanism, it makes sense to keep it at the level that helps you interface with society, but most people are using several different kinds of inhibitory signals. I just want them to put less stock in the “People will ignore/reject/laugh at me and then I will DIE” one.

Basically, for the vast majority of people my post is directed at, the negative outcome you describe just isn’t related to the thing my post is about. The fear of embarrassment stops people from dancing in public, but I don’t think it’s a major factor in stopping people from punching each other. In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.

But I still think people shouldn’t do that because 1) hurting others is bad, and 2) whether something is embarrassing is a crappy way to judge if it’s a good idea.

I think I draw the boundary lines in different places than you do.

—

>>In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.<<

Bullying people and embarrassing yourself in front of them are both members of the category “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future”. They increase it by different *amounts*–and I’ll accept that for many cases of embarrassment the increase is negligible–but I don’t know that I’d say they’re different in *kind*.

(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)

—

>>they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.<<

This, on the other hand, I *would* say is different in kind. Is it at all common for people to get annoyed with someone for trying a new food?

—

I’m not sure how to tell how many inhibitory mechanisms I have except by removing one and seeing if things still work, and I think it’s pretty clear that that’s *not* an area where failure is cheap. And while I’ve occasionally caught glimpses of a conscience around here somewhere, I’ve never caught one while angry (even when I wasn’t as good at cowardice as I am now), so I doubt that’s one of the mechanisms for this.

There is a distinct possibility that I don’t have insight into what’s actually going on here, but from the inside it feels like the thing that caused a shift to being consistently non-violent was spending a couple years on the Internet practising my flight response on bits of Discourse, until eventually I could run away from infuriating things offline too. Here, I learned how to grovel, how to phrase things carefully so as to minimise the chances of sparking a fight with anyone, how to keep my mouth shut entirely and quietly slip out. (not doing too well at that last bit tonight, but nobody’s perfect)

In an environment of *relative* safety and much more time to think than IRL, I could have the lesson hammered home that I’m almost always better off reacting to an argument or provocation by surrendering or (if available) pretending not to have noticed, rather than prolonging the pain by trying to fight.

—

>>Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.<<

Eh, I’ve definitely encountered people with hiring responsibilities complaining about completely unsuitable people wasting their time. I guess bigger companies can probably arrange better filters that put less stress on the employees involved?

I think the largest disagreement here is that I don’t think “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future” is a meaningful category in the first place.

I think there are lots of inputs into the specific way people will treat you, but that none of these look like increasing a “bad treatment” variable, or anything that could be a proxy for such. I think things might influence how deferent or hostile or helpful or avoidant people are in interacting with you, but that any presentation style you choose will pull on a bunch of these, and whether the end result looks like being treated well or poorly just depends on what you as a person want out of interactions.

For example, being more agreeable will tend to make people less hostile, avoidant, and/or argumentative toward you – but will increase their willingness to push your boundaries and ignore your opinions. Which direction looks more like bad treatment? This entirely depends on your priorities! I recently intentionally lowered my agreeableness because, to me, getting more confrontations was worth getting less casual boundary-crossing. Meanwhile, past!me would have put more emphasis on not having to confront people.

And neither of these poles at all looks like people deciding they want to treat you worse. Instead, it’s them shifting their interaction pattern into the path of least resistance. For conflict-averse people, conflict is high-resistance, so they avoid disagreeable people. Meanwhile, if you’re unwilling to cuss out the asshole who touches you inappropriately, they’ll go ahead and do it again, because it’s low-resistance. Is being avoided bad treatment? Is being touched inappropriately bad treatment? Quite possibly both are, but the tradeoffs are built into the interaction style.

(Of course, there are ways to avoid having either of these outcomes by seeming approachable but also like you don’t take shit. Currently, my reduction in agreeableness doesn’t seem to be scaring people off, because I still try to be approachable. But, like, there are other tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs.)

A behavioral pattern – and all the different personality traits that influence it – sets you up as a person that it’s most convenient to interact with in some ways vs others. And everyone is going about trying to pursue their own social goals while moving through a landscape where some things are easy and some are hard. The key to getting good treatment is making sure other people believe that the best way to get what they want is to treat you the way you most want to be treated. (Where the way you most want to be treated will vary a lot by person.)

And this is why I wouldn’t put embarrassment and bullying in the same category. Even if they both lead to things you don’t want, they do so through completely different avenues. At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost. Being high cost and being low value are really different social tags, and treating them as interchangeable will make it v v difficult to reason about the social landscape.

Again, if you happen to only have one lever to work with, by all means set it to the position that best helps you navigate the world. But you’ll still be operating at a massive handicap, because your single variable will miss almost everything that determines how interactions can go. If there were anything I could point at as the ultimate “get treated badly” variable, I would say it’s not having options.

>>At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost.<<

Thing is, I contested this in my previous post:

“(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)“

Embarrassing yourself in front of people causes them pain (in the form of negative affective empathy), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return. Punching people causes them pain (in the form of physical damage), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return.

And yes, this is in large part projection. Other people almost never act in ways that would make sense if they considered “inducing negative affective empathy” to be a hostile act, and mostly don’t even act in ways that would make sense if they were inclined to see it that way but consciously overriding that. But you can’t have projection without proof of concept: it’s empirically untrue that the worst thing someone will do to you if you embarrass yourself in front of them is work less hard to gain your favour.

(Although I tend to react a lot worse to people telling me explicitly-labelled embarrassing *stories* about themselves than to them actually *doing* embarrassing things, I think because with the stories it’s very clear that they could have easily chosen to not do this to me. Accidents I can forgive relatively easily, even tradeoffs; signposting “I’m going to do something embarrassing now, specifically for the purpose of having you witness how embarrassing it is”, though, not so much.)

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P.S. Went to check my use of “affective empathy” and found this suspiciously relevant-looking Wikipedia article.

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P.P.S. Apparently I got ninja’d by @kit-peddler. I’m glad to see someone else picking up on my quoted paragraph.

Looking at the notifications continuing to come in as I write this, it looks like now would probably also be a good time to emphasise the very first sentence (not counting “so, about that post”) of my first post:

“I suspect we’re both projecting our own selves onto the rest of society and ending up skewed.“

Tags:

#reply via reblog #discourse cw #violence cw #scrupulosity cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post