Hi, I'm Ouro. I'm a soft, frustrating thing hewn of mostly imperfect, often uncommon algorithms. I apologize for the various inconveniences this may cause on your end, but I sincerely appreciate your trying. I make an effort to do the same in my own conduct with soft, frustrating creatures. This document is perpetually incomplete for obvious reasons and will occasionally be edited.
This guide is not mandatory. If you are vaguely competent within the default conversational framework of any of the cultures I have spent some significant amount of time engaging with (urban western European, academia, forum culture, internal leftist discourse, rat(ionalist)s (this list is not exhaustive, and is mostly meant to showcase examples of what I consider to be pretty distinctive communication styles)), you are unlikely to find conversations with me particularly frictionful. Some exceptions are:
While I am not inherently opposed to small-talk as a cheap and easy path towards social calories, a number of the cultural mainstays have rather outworn their welcome and I do not spend enough time outside to particularly care about the weather on most days. Why don't you tell me about a really interesting dish you had recently, or even better about how to make it? Keeping it shallow does not necessarily come with an obligation to be boring. If you dislike chit-chat however, you are at any point more than welcome to dive right into something heavy, personal or difficult without needing to ask permission or wait for an opportune moment. I am fine with the first words out of your mouth being something along the lines of "So what's you're relationship to your parents like?" (though maybe not exactly that one, as it has been my default example for a few years now and has thus been moderately overused. I do not wish to change my default example only for the new one to be met with the same fate. Come up with your own invasive question.)
NVC (Non violent communication) is a speech framework in which one avoids claims about the assumed motivations and internal qualities of another person and instead speaks about their observable actions and the effects they are having on oneself directly. Its intent is to improve clarity, to minimize defensiveness and to talk about the real world instead of models of models of models etcetera in perpetuity. I quite like NVC and implement a lax version of it most of the time. On request I can either drop it or do the precise, careful version. Making slight adjustments in either direction is harder than doing one of those three practised modes (full-throttle, normal, none), but I can give it a try and see how it goes.
My way of expressing myself, while overwrought, eclectic and occasionally accidentally artful, is not generally an attempt to seem smart. I enjoy exotic lingo, expose myself to a lot of it, learned english largely from fanfiction written by self-consciously magniloquent teens and often have trouble finding the correct, normal word for anything, which results in exaggerated circumlocution as a contingency. I am frequently bidirectionally wrong about which terms are common knowledge and which ones are not and I will never believe anyone stupid for not knowing a word and asking for an explanation. There are still plenty of words I don't know about.
Especially if I was recently focused on something, my answers to smalltalk-y questions like "how are you?" may not reflect reality, because I may not actually query my mind state. If you are of average competence at assessing these things, I suggest to trust your own read of my mood over the words I say. You can also ask me to actually query my mind state (do genuinely say something jarring like "query your mind-state" or "how are you really?" or such, so that I won't instinctively give a smalltalk-answer).
While this should not need saying, I am happy to use whatever name and pronouns you wish me to use for you. They need not be among the common set of choices. Wanting to be addressed in a certain way does not require an explanation. You may change your selection between conversations with me or even in the middle of them and this too does not ever require explanation, though you are of course free to give one if you feel so inclined. You may request a pronoun or a name to be used for you experimentally and I will be entirely normal about this as well. For myself I prefer the use of they/them in English though have never gotten upset about any other choice when used without clear malicious intent.
There is an incredibly pernicious culture of disregarding people who are unable or unwilling to present themselves as aloof and disaffected about a topic as "unobjective" and "overly emotional", causing those with the most visceral, concrete involvement, who are by far the most likely to have a real nuanced understanding, to be taken the least seriously while soft-spoken outsiders whose calm is at least partially the result of ignorance get to take the floor. Personally I think this is terrible. Not only would I always rather speak to a person who actually seems like they care than to be unwitting party so someone's purely intellectual masturbation, I also want to constitute one of the spaces in which folks do not have to perform this sort of emotional labour. I personally try to strike a middle ground most of the time unless the other party has given me the distinct impression that they will disregard what I am saying unless I present a perfectly stoic mask of academic detachment.
Without deep insight into the specific situation, "it will probably go worse than people think" has only rarely let me down as a prediction strategy. This is of course unsurprising given optimism-bias, but I'm not doing it as a conscious strategy for countering that. Things just usually look much worse to me than what most people are saying and it takes some mental effort to convinve myself that they arent all being insane.
I think conversations about a topic should be had between two people who care about said topic. If I am talking about something that doesn't interest you, then I strongly prefer it for you to tell me this fact as early as possible, so that we can do something else instead. It is kind of you to want to indulge my excitement, grief, anger etc about something, but you are incredibly unlikely to be the only person I could talk to about that particular thing. Since I do not have the opportunity to have every single conversation with all conversation partners anyway, I would prefer to have the good ones. If it ever does happen that you are the one person I could talk to about something, or that literally no one else cares about it either, I would still like to know whether you care or not. Similarly, I am thankful if I'm allowed to tell you when I don't care about a topic without you being hurt by this. Me saying such a thing is not an indicator that I do not care about you and does not mean that I want you to stop talking. If that were the case I would say so. I simply want to give you information which might help you save breath and avoid frustration about me not contributing much, when we could be talking about something more fruitful instead. If I do this, it is perfectly acceptable for you to jump one meta-layer up and try to convince me that I should care about the topic that I just disregarded. This is an entirely different subject and if you have a good case for that assertion, I will be happy to hear it and maybe go back down later, should you convince me.
References to concepts developed by other people are not an endorsement of those people. Ever. Not even when it's a person you believe to be virtuous. I may elsewhere make statements about any such individual, but bringing up the concept only highlights it as interesting. Using it merely highlights it as useful to my mind. I do not explicitly endorse or disavow most people whose tools I use. This is deliberate and there are a number of reasons for it. "I want you to evaluate the thing neutrally" is a good one, and one I believe to be sufficient, but it isn't necessarily my true cause. If I can hand a good person a powerful weapon, which was crafted by a demon, without them feeling hesitant about using it, then I have succeeded. If I hand a good person a faulty weapon, crafted by an angel, and if —by way of their uncertainty about the originator— they distrust it enough to notice the flaw which I have overlooked, then this too shall have been a success. In retrospect I believe most of my explicit endorsements and disavowals to have been significant mistakes which I would caution past-me against in the strongest of terms. Alas, they are not known to act optimally.
It is good to have coherent, reliably, re-derivable beliefs and it is difficult to get those by looking at individual, strongly context-flavoured examples relating to a question at hand. It is difficult not to be swayed into believing that a thing is inherently bad for example, when it is primarily mentally tied in your brain to an instance where it has hurt you or a friend, even when the thing in question is primarily beneficial. People often derive different answers to the same question depending on how the question was presented to them, therefore I find it paramount to reason through most relevant questions at the level of extreme abstraction first and only get to preconception-charged concrete reality at the very end, once you already have solid footing upon the pure, stripped-down object and are ready to weather the waves. This, in my experience, is the most reliable way of not crystallizing weirdly or inconsistently due to irrelevant memetic noise (at best. At worst deception.) and you will have to make a very compelling argument to convince me that we should do things the other —more common— way around.
There exists the idea that optimism-bias in critters is a feature, not a bug. The shape desires take in the brain may not be separate from our world-model but a part of our world-model. "Wanting to do well on a task" may look like "predicting that you will do better on it than you are currently on track to be". The brain, in its attempt to minimise surprise (i.e. be as correct as possible), is now incentivized to take those actions which will make your optimistic prediction true and do the work. In other words, agents are systems which keep themselves perpetually off-balance in precisely such a way as to fall towards desirable states. While this is useful, it still means that the predictions are usually wrong. If you only overestimate yourself a little bit, so that you can easily put in the extra work to get there, then you're leaving figurative money on the table. Being somewhat wrong is experientially cheaper than performing somewhat worse. I will occasionally tell people that I don't think they can afford their predictions, especially if they're promising me something important for which I'd be significantly harmed by relying on an optimistic estimate that proves to be wrong. While the mental mechanism is very useful, I quickly get frustrated by people who fail to account for it in the things they say to others. In that same vein I will never be upset about being asked whether some of my own predictions are agentic and whether I think I can afford them. While I do try to track these things, I am still a soft, fallible critter which is tired or distracted occasionally and which often fails to keep an eye on how many spoons it actually has at the moment rather than how many it feels like it ought to have.
I don't think being cordial with a person entitles one to being agreed with, but it does entitle one to being heard. I react very badly, even vicariously, to people within a good-will-network being shut up or drowned out. I understand that continued dialogue on a matter which one person deems concluded can be perceived as argumentative, hostile or otherwise as an attempt to exert pressure on a boundary. I am aware that many people actually are doing that, but I dislike this sort of culture. I believe that not having shared information about the things trusted people deem worth expressing, even if it is "only" about their own emotional state, is harmful to both decision making and the mental well-being of a group. Hearing someone out does not require the ceding of ground. It is, in my preferred coms-culture, perfectly acceptable to hear a perspective and make absolutely no changes to the plan. Not moving from your position does not even require any sort of justification. Listening and then saying "no" anyway is fine. "But what about X, Y, Z [...]?" "No" "Yes, chef" is fine, so long as you allow people to say X Y and Z. Especially if we are working together, I expect you to be competent. If you propose something you will do and I comment in ways which seem contrary: Be perfectly aware that after the exchange is concluded I will be entirely content to say "Yes chef" and let you do your thing with not a shred of ill-will. I have no problem believing that you know better. I am just querying to make sure everything is being considered so that I can feel at ease and confident. You hearing all of it and changing nothing is one way of achieving that confidence.
Overly adversarial lingo around the subject of being shown wrong (think "destroyed with facts and logic") has got to be one of the most sure-fire ways to guarantee that no-one will change their mind. To position being corrected as "losing" is not only deeply strange, insecure, and an ill omen for how they themselves might react to attempts at correction, it is also fundamentally inutile. Truth is powerful. To gain it is a victory. The admission that your conversation partner has held it first only means that you got more out of the talk than they did and the implication that such a thing should constitute a bruising of one's ego is frankly embarrassing. Facts and logic, in the vast majority of cases, will heal and not destroy you. It is not shameful to have been wrong. It is shameful to remain wrong. An argument can only be lost if no-one learned anything.
I am slow at replying to messages unless they relate time-sensitively to a shared project of ours. At most times at which I might receive messages, I will be busy with something and unwilling to drop that cognitive context in order to reply, prompting a need for focus to be painstakingly reassembled from whatever scraps are left in the wake of this event. I will usually go to significant lengths to not even notice. Even longer delays (this will only tend to cause an answer to arrive at some point during my scheduled message-responding time in the evening at worst) may be expected when I am overcome with the terrifying thought that my response may not settle the issue but rather instigate a whole back-and-forth of indeterminate length for which I do not necessarily have time or spoons. An answer may be delayed until I think I have these resources, which may well take a week. Proposing a time at which to talk tends to go a lot better than sending a message which elicits this reaction. Consistently: Unless relating to a time sensitive shared project of ours (or being very concerned about your mental well-being), I do not mind being left on read in the slightest for arbitrary amounts of time. There is never a need to apologize to me for responding late because unless it was such a time sensitive obligation, I never had any expectation or particular desire to hear back quickly. Not only do I understand that people have things to do or just aren't in the mood to reply to me at any given moment, I also do not tend to have a strong preference for hearing from people at that point specifically. It just tends to be the particular time at which I remember that I want/need to send a thing.
To my mind there are two types of apologies: Real (I recognize the specific way in which I have harmed you, regret having done so and will seriously endeavour to not let it happen again)-ones and fake (You seem like you aren't doing so hot and you seem to blame me for it so I'll say sorry)-ones. I refer to the latter case as "aww, poor meow-meow"-apologies and they're the only type most people ever give. There is nothing inherently wrong with "aww, poor meow-meow". I would probably rush over to the single person on the recently-doomed trolley-track and express my condolences, despite the fact that I don't regret my action and would do the same thing each and every time. The fact that they will face negative consequences is still regrettable and I do genuinely feel for them. If what you mean is "aww, poor meow-meow" then say that (or your own cultivar of it). Despite how it sounds, I don't consider this to be a moderately nice and not-at-all condescending action to perform. I just don't think this type of thing should be lumped in with Apologies, whose main function, in my opinion, is to re-establish trust. A real apology consists of correctly explaining what it is that you did, why it caused hurt, and providing an actionable plan for how you will in the future prevent things in this reference-class. If you are not currently able to do this, a truly regretful person would endeavour to figure these things out. Anything less is lip-service.
Rationalists make a habit of attaching concrete numeric probabilities to their beliefs. I do this less than many of them and more than the average person. I am happy to do more or less of this upon request (though I'll probably also mirror your own frequency to a significant extent by default).
"Language descriptivism" and "Language prescriptivism" are camps of linguistics wherein the former seeks to make claims about the way a language is spoken in practice and the latter makes claims about the way a language de-jure ought to be spoken, which is self-evidently fascist. Adherents of descriptivism however seem to occasionally take the fact that a language is currently spoken a certain way as a reason to personally follow suit, despite the fact that they too are part of the vivaciously polyvocal linguistic soup which shall decide what any future descriptivism yields. Language activism is speaking in ways that you personally find sane, fun and beneficial and hoping that they catch on, the same way everything which has shaped the language so far has caught on from a single individual. Doing this is not to say that your way is the right way, only that it's one you have found useful. An important facet of my personal language activism is the belief that every word should mean something and be real in the Wittgensteinian sense ("unicorns" exist in that this is clearly a coherent concept we can conceive of and talk about). Thus, any time one finds oneself tempted to conclude that there is no coherent, discussable idea behind a certain term, one should come up with something in that vague domain which does make sense, so that the syllables don't go to waste. I believe this to be a good reliable way to make sure that the set of say-able things can only grow and never shrink, and also to counteract the trap of unsayable beliefs hidden behind place-holder words that don't mean anything. Aditionally: Assuming that anyone using a word is automatically wrong and incoherent is mean.
We all have libraries of Alexandria in our pockets and I consider it good form to look things up when you don't remember them or aren't entirely certain. I do this very frequently in the middle of conversations and will never believe anyone less knowledgeable for looking up a fact. Truth is worth significantly more than pride after all, and a lack of diligence is not something one should be proud of in the first place.
If you recommend media to me, "it's like X" is generally a bad way of going about it even when I like X. The main thing I care about in art is novelty, so recommendations should take the form of "it does this interesting thing which I have never seen anywhere else before". I additionally draw a distinction between personalized and un-personalized recommendations. Most pitches people make are of the shape "I really like X, you should give it a shot" or "I think most people would really like X, etc.", which is fine, if you either give a description that is by itself compelling, or if I have a strong reason to believe that we have very similar tastes in this domain. I do however know very few people who have particularly similar tastes to me in various domains and recommendations of this un-personalized form will often be mentally filed as "you are telling me about a thing you are excited about and the interesting bits to me will be the ways you engage with this object as opposed to the thing itself". If you actually want me to experience something and have any model whatsoever of my tastes, personalized recommendations of the form "I think you specifically would really like X, for these and these reasons" fare much better. I exclusively make personalized recommendations in one-on-one conversations (though I may of course be wrong), and as such will with some frequency pitch art that I don't particularly care for myself, when I get the impression that your particular palate would find it agreeable.
I don't believe in them. Trying to talk around specific facts about a piece of art tends to be incredibly cumbersome, annoying and time-wasting. I have never once encountered a good piece of art which was spoiled by information about it, including some of the go-to examples of art for which "going in blind is paramount". Out of courtesy, I will not pronounce things that a somewhat-though-not-maximally-trigger-happy definition would consider spoilers, unless explicitly told that you share my stance or something adjacent to it.
I sometimes come across as overly literal or preoccupied with semantic pedantry. This is not quite the correct shape of what's happening. I am more than happy to accept and use metaphors so long as I am convinced that we are capable of a concrete description (The idea that I of all people would balk at being figurative is somewhat ridiculous). When drilling down, it should be possible to move beyond the metaphors. You should be able to say words which you actually mean, because if words cannot construct your actual belief then words cannot be used to alter that belief. Object and tool need to be able to exist on the same layer of representation in order for any meaningful discussion to occur, and oftentimes when people say things repeatedly and exclusively in ways they later write off as metaphorical or hyperbolic or imprecise etc, it is because there are no words which they do mean. I do not mind shorthand. I mind shorthand which cannot be expanded, because at that point it isn't shorthand. It is quite common for people to never be explicit so that they do not have to really believe (or admit to believing) anything whatsoever, while tricking themselves and/or others into thinking that they do. Of that of which one cannot speak one must remain silent, so learn to speak about the things you deem pertinent. Construct the proof and then refer to it by label, rather than gesturing at a label hoping that there is a proof somewhere in your brain. If you find yourself tempted to engage in this manoeuvrer, that's pretty good evidence that there isn't.
It is at any point valid to halt an interaction if something about it seems wrong or inefficient or painful or otherwise unenjoyable to then figure out why that might be together.
Noises can very easily kick me out of a thought which may take some time to reassemble. Loud bangs and screeching will send my heart-rate soaring and make it quite difficult for me to do anything productive. Non-surprising, non-shrill sounds (traffic, fans, peripheral conversations etc) on the other hand can be filtered out with ease unless I am in an unusually diminished state. People raising their voice makes me drop all else and start trying to avoid harm, look for exit strategies, and generally mentally treat the person responsible as an immediate danger almost regardless of whether I believe them to be generally safe or not. I do not believe that I have ever yelled at a person, regardless of whether they were doing so, and I try at great lengths to avoid having to raise my voice even when doing something benign like calling for people. When genuinely angered, my voice tends to get sharp and over-enunciated, but not loud. I cannot stand the sound of joints cracking. It makes me physically nauseous.
I tend to walk on the balls of my feet, tend to sit with my legs crossed and when un-crossed tend to bounce at least one of them rapidly. When standing I will frequently pace in circles. If these correlate with anything, I have not figured it out yet and it is probably a bad idea for you to read anything into these behaviours. I am just doing things with my body. While I have gotten better about this, I occasionally pick at the paronychium around my finger-nails. This too does not generally indicate discomfort. I tend to look people unwaveringly in the eyes while paying attention and sometimes look entirely past them when attempting to recall or formulate something.
I really hate being touched without consent, especially unexpectedly. How well we know each other changes nothing about this aside from how much I expect you to pick up on non-verbal signals for (non-)consent and how likely I am to give it. There is basically no scenario in which it is okay to touch me from behind without alert unless I am in a small, clearly defined interval of space and time where I have been given to understand in advance that I may be touched from behind. If the house is burning and you have no other way of getting my attention, I am genuinely unsure whether it would not be preferable for you to simply let me die. I am aware how deranged that sounds. I was trying to think of exceptions and was truly shocked at myself to find that I wouldn't even consider the fire-case one of them, so yes, I agree that it is deranged. It is not, however, hyperbolic. This is the boundary, which also means that if more people than just myself are endangered and might be saved by my attention, you get to do your worst.
Once consent has been requested and given either verbally or through gesture, I am usually very open to giving and receiving hugs. I may be tense or jittery in various unexpected ways but I encourage you to not read anything into those. In specific contexts which warranted such a thing, I have in the past consented to being slapped, kissed and picked up among other things.
When people bump things into me, drop things on me etc, I will reflexively say "ow" or something of the sort before even processing whether I was hurt or not. Usually I won't have been and sometimes these sounds are even emitted on close misses. The verbal feedback serves mostly to remind the universe of where my hurtbox is, so if I was genuinely harmed in a way which matters I'd probably let you know some other way.
I love criticism. I fiercely want to know about things which I might be able to do better and which I might not be thinking about. The criticism being constructive is nice, but even a plain "this sucks" is something I'm quite grateful for, especially if you say it in a social context where everyone else might have been too polite to say it. Attempts to be mannerly about these things are appreciated, though mostly in a second-order way of finding it commendable that you are putting in the effort and assuaging my fears that you might be too blunt around people who do not share my insensitivity in this regard. I cannot guarantee that I will actually be able to competently implement fixes to my various deficiencies, but knowing about them makes it much more likely that I will find a way to do so eventually.
It is difficult to insult or compliment me. My default reaction to most insults which aren't very blunt name-calling is to parse them as derisively phrased criticisms. Since I don't particularly care about people being derisive (to me), this means that I'll try to work out whether I did something wrong, what I did wrong and how to do better in the future, either by thinking for a bit or by asking you clarifying questions. What I will not usually experience is the intended effect of being hurt and upset. Luckily there is an easy fix here, if you don't want to wade through this tedium. If you want me to be hurt and upset, you can simply tell me that you would like it if I were hurt and upset. Since that is a very distressing thing for someone to want, it will easily do the job. I will be sad, you will not get any more frustrated and no one has to jump through communicational hoops. Yay! (I do not consider doing this to be an instance of "using this document for evil", as it is strictly preferable to the tedious misunderstanding in terms of potential time and energy wasted. It is nobody's job to make sure that I am not upset, and negatively affecting my mood is an affordance you are implicitly given the moment we start interacting.)
Compliments, in some sense, are even harder. I don't like the vast majority of them and even the ones I don't strongly dislike, I can easily go without. If you are unsure: Err on the side of not saying it. Compliments about intrinsic characteristics not of my own making or choosing are categorically terrible. I don't know what you want me to do with that information. There is definitionally nothing I can do about that thing, so I don't know why you are telling me that you like it. It's not like there's any risk of me changing it or any opportunity for me to lean into it more strongly. The only cause I can infer is that you're trying to flatter me for social points, which I will fiercely resist. Compliments about non-intrinsic attributes are not inherently doomed, but still likely to fail. If the thing you are complimenting is something I did not put much thought or effort into, I will decide to do it more from now on, since it seems to please people, but I will only feel good in a "oh, nice to know"-way. If the thing you are complimenting is something I did do deliberately and did put some effort into, my reaction will depend on whether I believe you to be a competent judge of that thing. The likeliest outcome is that I will simply decide that your standards are are too low or, particularly if you were relatively unspecific, that you have no idea what you are talking about and are flattering for social points. If I have reason to believe that you are both qualified to speak on the matter (have standards) and that you would tell me if the thing was unsatisfactory, then I will actually feel good. Thus, if your main intention is simply to make me feel good (which seems to be why most people do compliments), this is a terribly fraught route to go down. A compliment-related thing which works significantly better is the alternative provided by NVC. The general outline is that you name the thing which made you happy and explain why it made you happy. This will allow me to be straightforwardly delighted that you had a positive experience instead of assessing how to act upon some feedback or whether your judgement in some area is more discerning than mine and therefore "means something".
Since I, like everyone, use myself as a baseline for modelling others, my intense dislike for compliments makes me quite reluctant to give them. Even when I know that a person would be happy to receive them, the though very rarely enters my mind, unless explicitly prompted, because It just doesn't feel like a nice thing to do to a person. It feels gross and weird and I have no idea why anyone would ever want it. If I have any amount of information about you, I can probably give you an honest list of admirable qualities I perceive you to have, if you ask me. If you are ever uncertain whether I'm not saying anything nice because I have nothing nice to say: Err strongly on the side of assuming that this isn't the case. The fact that I am interacting with you probably means that I believe you to have positive qualities. I'm trying to get rid of this mental block, since I clearly am not very representative of the broader population in this way and since I don't perceive compliments to be ontologically bad, but my progress on this has been quite limited so far. Apologies.
If we are talking for the third time of our own volition (and not because we have to communicate due to work or such), it is a decent assumption that I find you interesting, which is significantly more than half the battle. If I like you, I will also relatively quickly start to mimic mannerisms or turns of phrase of yours and perform actions in the world which you consider desirable and which I don't consider evil. Analogously, I am delighted when people perform actions in the world which I consider to be good and feel very warm and fuzzy when they pick up my lingo (see: linguistic activism).
No. You aren't. This exact culture of stressful reciprocal obligation spiralling helplessly into infinity is why I usually don't like receiving presents. Most of my best friends do not give me gifts for Christmas or my birthday. You do not have to give me anything ever.
I believe that people have a personal obligation to be the sort of force which not only does good and not bad, but which also disincentivizes destructive- and rewards virtuous behaviour. Not only is it probably bad for you if your cohort has an unaligned incentive structure (for example if you give in any time someone yells at you, they now have a really good reason to yell at you more), but it also makes you less safe to be around because, while you personally may be lovely, your presence does not radiate the type of moral pressure which creates safety. Threat resistance is not sufficient but necessary to exist as a virtuous incentive structure. I will be weary around people who do not seem to apply this to some meaningful extent.
I believe that principles are an immoral thing to have, as, for any given principle which is not exactly identical to "I will always steer towards the worlds which my utility function scores most highly", I can definitionally construct a scenario in which you would steer away from (or less strongly towards) good worlds by heeding that principle. Doing bad things —I regret to inform you— is bad, and if you break with your principle in such cases where it doesn't lie flush with the actual right move (as you should), then you don't really have a principle. The thing that reliably predicts your actions at that pace is cutthroat-consequentialism. Welcome to the club. After all, it's not very sightly to brag about how you would make decisions that cause unnecessary suffering for the sake of some fake rules you wrote above your bed-frame. It's an embarrassing larp in which losers with the privilege of getting to leave value on the table make this fact other people's problem. To have principles is to be exploitable and unreliable for the sake of optics and I suggest that you don't. The fact that I call things "virtuous" a lot does not mean that I am a virtue ethicist. The only core virtue I believe in is cutthroat consequentialism aimed at good things.
By the standard definition of the word, I should add "selfless" to a lot of these. I think the term is chosen badly though, and I have known people who (whether consciously or accidentally) take it literally. Most people act selfishly in a way which values their own happiness, lack of suffering etc much more highly than anyone else's. This is bad. When I say "good things", I certainly don't mean selfishly good things. I mean globally good things, but the self should still be counted. If, in a complete vacuum where the two of you can't interact with each other in any way, you got the choice between you receiving two apples and another person receiving one apple, you should take the two apples for the same reason that you would pick the two-apples-choice if neither of the participants happened to be you: Two is bigger than one. But by the literal meaning of selflessness, you would pick one, since that one goes to "a person who matters". Well, you matter. It would not only be quite bad for everyone else to loose a source of good to starvation, it would also be a shame about you as a person that others might want to give apples to. So, I will take apples when this maximizes global goodness. Not unduly self-ful but also not strictly self-less in the autistically absolute way.
"Do not attribute to malice what is better explained by incompetence" is an obvious truism, though it tends to be used to justify attributing everything to incompetence, despite a lot of these cases being far better explained by malice, which is to say "the agentic pursuit of desires which run counter to mine". This is far more common in the wild than egregious stupidity, though both are of course in wild over-supply. Particularly "do not attribute to malice" tends to be used by its preachers to justify a failure to outright stop a person who is doing harm, as this, to them, confers the implication that the subject is doing it on purpose, when they would rather just send a friendly note. I think they're wrong (or malicious). It is possible and preferable to simply stop a person doing harm regardless of their intentions. If they are incompetent they should probably not be in that position and if they are malicious that friendly note would have merely given them a heads up to get craftier. To stop someone is not to assume guilt or to commit to punishment, it is simply a reliable first step of harm prevention which works in all scenarios.
While not necessarily paranoid in the conventional sense, I am an incredibly neurotic person and fear for death or catastrophe at basically any given moment. As such I try quite hard to engineer safety-nets for both myself and others and keep a pretty explicit mental register of people who are under my protection, perhaps in hopes that the same will be extended to me. This is not to say that I am necessary risk averse, just that I do not gamble everything irrecoverably in situations where others may not even see that potentiality. I used to be obsessed with guides and tips to surviving homelessness because I always expect the worst and need to control my maximin losses. A generally good strategy towards being protected by people is to be useful to them. I try painfully hard to be useful. Often at significant cost.
I am all things considered a pretty spiteful person. I am more likely to forget than to forgive and I cannot truthfully claim to not feel joy when harm befalls those I hate. However, I do not believe that punishment is effective in terribly many cases. To harm people I hate in ways which do not stop them from causing harm is very rarely a beneficial action, and as such resources should not be wasted on it. I am more than my base desires and me saying that a person should probably not be kicked in the shins for all of eternity does not mean that I don't think they deserve it. It just means that I believe it to be pointless. Analogously me indulging in thought crimes does not mean that I believe it to be a good idea to commit them.
When I say "trust" without any further qualifiers, I don't tend to mean "trust their honesty/truthfulness" but "trust them to have my best interest at heart". Me trusting someone means that I expect of them that they will lie point blank to my face if they believe doing so is to my benefit, and that I believe them to have a good enough model of me to make mostly correct assessments about whether this is the case. A person of whom I believe that they would always tell me the truth regardless of circumstance is not a person whom I can (capital T) Trust to the fullest extent.
I am meta honest in a deeply useless way because I believe meta honesty to be mostly useless and glomarization to only "work" in rare high-trust cases. I will not lie when a highly honest, good person would not, and if you ask me which circumstances I would lie in, I will give an absolutely honest answer which boils down to "if I strongly predict that lying causes less harm to good people in the long run, when accounting for the game theoretic effects of being an agent who can be expected to lie in that circumstance". I have no idea how this would ever be helpful to you, but there you go.
Most people don't try to reliably steer towards globally nice outcomes. Most people try to achieve the appearance —both to themselves and others— of being a good person by performing some minimum of culturally-agreed-upon-to-be-good actions, and when they overshoot this amount by happenstance, they often feel like they now get to take "a cheat-day" and take an action they consider to be ethically sub-par because their balance allows for it. They will very rarely allow themselves to truly think about anything that would call their self-perception of goodness into question and as such will not make the changes that actually being good would require. This is already terrible. You don't get to fuck someone over today because you did pretty well yesterday and you don't get to do a bunch of harm "passively" because you are consciously or subconsciously keeping yourself from thinking about the harm you are doing, since this would make larping as a good person harder. The majority of humans suck in this way. There is a significantly smaller set of people which only cares about appearing good to others and feels no need whatsoever to bullshit themselves, and an even smaller (largely very dysfunctional) set which cares about neither. While this may sound bleak, I think it is very possible to work with pretty bad people on achieving good outcomes. The road to heaven can be paved with ill intentions when you build the incentive structures right, and you will certainly fail if you refuse to work with them, as they are the overwhelming majority. Sometimes you may be able to inscribe a lemniscate in one of them, but don't bank on it. The important part is that while pretty bad people are frequently insightful, frequently fun, frequently useful and not beyond saving: They cannot be Trusted in the capital T sense. Someone with mental safeguards against considering the types of harm they might be doing cannot be expected to honestly model the sorts of things that are in other people's best interest.
This is quite obviously an enormous show of trust and as you will have gathered by now I am not a very trusting person. Having read this, if it succeeds in making me easier to understand and engage with, it will also make me easier to manipulate. If I become convinced that you are doing that, I will go out of my way to protect people from you in ways that may be significantly harmful to you. If you would maliciously exploit such attempts to foster understanding then honest communication requires your destruction. I will happily be part of that incentive structure, so that trust may become more and more defensible as a strategy.
If you are genuinely, without convenient self-deception, convinced that the greater good (by the terms of my personal utility function) could be advanced by harming or destroying me in some convoluted circumstance, I hereby give you permission to do so. You should not need my permission, but whatever it takes to increase the odds of you acting correctly in that situation. Just... You know: Really think about it first. Please do not sacrifice me fruitlessly.
I am very quite easy to bait and have a profound need to make myself understood. When someone has no interest in engaging in good faith, I tend to have a hard time accepting that fact and will instead continue to explain myself in excruciating detail for hours at what is essentially a brick wall in hopes that I will stumble across the correct combination of words to snap them out of it. A part of this is me finding it very rude to assume people to be beyond reason, even as evidence of this notion mounts. Another is me not thinking about this sort of thing at all and just naively trying to complete what I am internally framing as a discussion, now that it has been started. If you notice me doing this, it is probably a good idea to break me out of it. I may have my teeth dug in pretty deeply and resist attempts to pry me off, but I will regret time spent this way and it tends to wrack up large amounts of frustration which I only become aware of after the fact. I will be thankful to you in an hour or two.
Sometimes, depending on what we are talking about, how we are talking about it and within what context we are doing so, I may be or become sad, frustrated, angry or manic. If witnessing this is deleterious to you, I can usually mask the symptoms when you tell me. I also will not hold it against you if you leave, should you for example have a very understandable discomfort around anger. It is not however your obligation to calm these passions for my sake. These emotions are part of me working through the concept-cluster at hand and neutrality, while more comfortable, is not always an appropriate tool. It is okay and often necessary for me to be sad or angry, and attempting to alleviate these symptoms without attacking their root-cause is likely to frustrate me, cause a conversational deadlock and uncomfortably extend the whole situation. Managing my emotional state is never, under any circumstances, your job.
Some people feel soft, fuzzy and cared for when others make clear that they are worried for their well-being by requesting regular updates etc. I am not one of them. Knowing that someone is worried about me will simply make me stressed and unhappy and in need or performing random actions in order to not cause distress to that someone. To put me in this situation is a good way to cause me not to tell you things.
I do not care for memetic parasites hand crafted to manufacture new needs within me so as to enrich their creator. I have enough unfulfilled wants already and I neither crave more of them, nor do I find the process of adversarially implanting them morally tolerable. I cannot believe that this needs to be said, but: Do not tell me about advertising campaigns. I do not care whether they are funny or infuriating or otherwise interesting. They win by way of me knowing about them at all. It is genuinely irrelevant to me how tasty the poison is. Do not feed me poison. I advise that you refrain from being a disease-vector at all and that you commit to not doing this to anyone, but if you do it to me in particular I will probably stop talking to you. You may recommend products and services which you strongly believe to have value due to reasons which are not their advertising, ideally only after asking whether I am already interested in something in the vague reference-class. None of this is an exaggeration. Complicity in malicious brain-hacking is a profoundly violent act which I experience as severely mentally painful. I reflexively look away from billboards before I can process what they say.
When unsure whether I believe you to be an idiot, it is generally sufficient to ask yourself whether I am talking to you of my own accord. If I am, then I believe you to be smart enough to be worth talking to. While I do not usually get outwardly annoyed at people not understanding things, my general disposition and conduct is sometimes perceived as condescending or haughtily superior. I do not generally perceive myself as being these things, but I have, of yet, only a fuzzy idea of what it is that causes this perception and thus cannot reliably prevent it. If you can point me at a particular thing to avoid I will be happy to do so or explain why I can't. I may believe you to be mistaken or uninformed about something. I may believe you to be consciously or subconsciously deceptive, and I may be frustrated at my own inability to explain something successfully after a couple of attempts, but if I am freely talking to you then I do not believe you to be stupid. I have no interest in killing myself marginally.
Money is a thing which allows you to stay alive in hell, and as such I try to spend as little of it as feasible. Large transfers stress me out tremendously and I have slept on park benches, consumed very dubious food and overall sacrificed great quantities of other resources to avoid paying for things. I think only part of this is an anxiety around money specifically (though I certainly have that) and that another is a straightforwardly lower need for comfort than what most people (in western europe) seem to have. I'm fine eating only apples and bread for a week. I'm fine sleeping on a yoga mat in a cold attic. These things genuinely do not bother me and I would always rather sleep on your floor than at a hotel. People have in the past both failed to make me offers which they perceived to be ridiculous but which I would have jumped on, and wasted mental resources being anxious about my level of comfort when I was in fact doing great.
I am not good at distracting myself or others from the horrors and neither do I believe this to be a particularly noble thing to do. My default reaction to the many facets of hell is to focus on them relentlessly until I can think of something to be done about it or (at least when in good mental condition) until I can confidently conclude that I have exhausted my options. In the meantime I will make a lot of very bleak jokes and laugh despairingly in ways which some people have found in descending order of frequency:
I can try not to do this if it causes you harm, but that will require a decent amount of emotional labour and if I am currently going through it then I may not have particularly well-stocked supplies.
It is not inherently virtuous to be moderate. It is not inherently virtuous to claim some middle ground between all options presented, because "all options presented" are not guaranteed to form a benign, random-error scatter-plot around truth or goodness. If you wish to support a proposal or analysis with the fact that it is balanced, you will first have to make a compelling argument for why you believe the common viewpoints to lie in a benign random-error domain. Truth is partisan.
Whether by nature, nurture or their interplay, my brain works in ways that are significantly different from the norm on a number of fronts. As such, a number of things that are very intuitive and obvious to most people are solved through elaborate, hacky, duct-tape-and-pulleys constructions in my own cognition and a number of things that are obvious and intuitive to me would require duct-tape-and-pulley-monstrosities in others. It is generally a good idea to keep this fact in mind before growing frustrated that either I seem to deny something utterly commonsensical or that I seem to be condescending to you about a very strange and hard-to-compress thing, as though it did not even warrant explanation. It follows that when I give advice, the fact that a certain scheme works very well for me does not mean that it is at all suitable to anyone else's cognition.
Some parts of this document may read quite self deprecating to you. This is understandable and a number of the statements made herein might certainly come verbatim from the mouth of a person with genuinely low self confidence. Thank you for your concern, but rest assured that I am not that and that I neither need nor want a pep talk. I believe that I am significantly more competent than most people in ways which derive at least to some small degree from my own efforts. I believe that most people who hold affection for me are largely justified in doing so. When I describe aspects of myself as though they are malfunctions, it is only half of the time because I actually consider them maladaptive (you can tell because there will be a note saying that I am working on this). The rest of the time it is simply a tongue-in-cheek way of empathizing with you, who are probably unaccustomed to —and thus at least partially frustrated by— these features. I simply don't believe that "being more competent than most people" is remotely enough. Those aren't laurels worth resting on. I have actual standards for myself with regards to most things and I do not take kindly to attempts to make me set them aside. To be very clear: I consider this to be my single best quality.
Decision fatigue seems like one of the most spoon-eating daily occurrences and so long as the choices made are not significantly sub-par, I consider not being confronted with choices to be a straightforwardly kind thing to do. I enjoy most foods when competently prepared and will almost always vastly prefer being told that some random dish is being made over being asked what I would like to eat. similarly, when a group is trying to make a decision and seems stuck in a limbo of multiple choices, all of which seem pretty good to everyone, I have recently stated making a habit of just randomly claiming a preference, which tends to resolve those much quicker. it seems that this is not as mentally taxing for most people as it is for me, but depending on my current mental environs I will grind internal gears painfully into each other, trying to figure out whether I can construct some barely-perceivable hierarchy between the options of a choice that I don't really care about. This goes on until I either come up with some slight, plausible reason for one over the other, which was never worth stressing my brain over, or until I (usually much to late) remember that I can just throw a mental coin. If I was actually unhappy with the choice made on my behalf I would complain. If you suffer from similar malfunctions I'll be happy to make random choices for you and let you object when applicable, but since this doesn't seem like a problem most people have, I do not do this by default.
One big part of a space being safe is it being predictable. If it contains people, then these people also need to be able to predict me quite well (since, if they take actions based on faulty predictions of me, they will in turn end up being unpredictable to me). I do not feel safe around people who do not seem to model me well. This is perfectly fine outside of the safe-zone, but inside the safe zone, a person who may take absolutely random actions because they don't have a good way of telling how/whether I'd react to them is a constant additional source of uncertainty and distrust. I can like people a lot without considering them to have a good model of me. This will simply mean that I'll need to take breaks from them.
I make "a habit of making habits and a show of sticking with them" as part of my particular scheme of progress by a thousand steps. I do not object-level need to type a few paragraphs or to look up a few phrases or to draw a quick doodle or to do one push-up. The single, microscopic practice-session is probably not particularly useful, but to skip it sets a terrible precedent of these things being optional, which is a connotation they must never under any circumstances acquire. It may seem silly how desperate, frantic and hard-headed I can get about doing something so small and inconsequential for seemingly the hell of it, but trust me that this is vital for the functioning of the greater machinery. I know what happens when this breaks.
My mind is structured in such a way as to suffer large spoon costs from interruption and low spoon cost from tedium. I would much rather do a mindless, annoying task for five hours than do it for four hours with an interruption in the middle. Getting (back) into it is the hard part, following inertia is easy. My mind draws a lot of satisfaction from check-marks and does not perceive a large difference between not having gotten something done in its entirety and not having done anything at all. Therefore open ended interruptions in which I am unsure whether I will get back to The Thing at all are especially harmful. Having "a mission" is very easy, rewarding and smooth for me. Having a number of open ended micro-tasks to juggle between is immensely stressful and draining regardless of the actual difficulty and time commitment associated with those tasks.
Sometimes, when a day is going poorly or has thus far contained draining/stressful/sad experiences, I will double down on it and get annoying/dreaded/painful tasks done right then. The thought process is something like "Well, today already sucks. I won't be able to redeem it by doing nice things now. If I'm already in a bad mood, I might as well do the stuff which would otherwise drain my vitality, so I don't have to ruin a good day with them". This does not reliably happen, but it happens often enough to confuse people. It seems that my brain generally prefers having one really bad and one really good day over having two average days.
I like going on adventures, i.e. consciously making the decision to exist for a while in an unknown environment, and/or taking actions which are very out of distribution of what I would normally do. This is obviously pretty in-keeping with "novelty is inherently good", but it is somewhat surprising given my general neuroticism. The critical bit here is that adventures are deliberate. I had time to mentally prepare and I had a fallback plan if things go south. I can sometimes scramble those together if suddenly thrust into an adventure (which may then very well lead to me having a good time!), but that first bit will eat a lot of spoons which had better be on store. As a general rule I will be very stressed by getting thrust into A Situation on short notice and/or without consent, and I will, in all likelihood, have a terrible time if there isn't a fallback and/or a known end-point. I need to recoup between adventures. Rest may be brief to almost instantaneous, but the important part is getting-to-return-to-home-base and making a choice of next moves from that place of comparative safety. I don't necessarily need to actually rest, I just need to know that rest is a real option.
While I am bad at having meaningful interactions in a way that adheres by the bulk of social convention and while I am as a whole more of a cult-favourite than a crowd-pleaser, it is by no means beyond my skill-set to be conventionally charming and decorous in self-contained bursts of character acting. This is to be treated as a customer-service smile and requires some emotional labour, though I do enjoy doing it from time to time especially when there is something to be won. If you want me to play a human for something, I am generally open to do so.
If you have a variety of tasks to be done and you want to give some of them to me —either requesting it as a friendly favour or as par for the course in some context in which we are working together— I would significantly prefer it to be given a small number of large, solid tasks over a large number of small, porous tasks. It seems that most people are capable of experiencing the bubbles in porous tasks as genuine rest. I have not yet figured out how to do that. A task which takes one week from beginning to completion, but only requires two hours of actual work distributed throughout that week in small increments, will feel much more like a week-long task than a two-hour task to me. Additionally I am extremely good at powering through on inertia and somewhat below average on re-adjusting and getting into the head-space for the next thing. I would prefer one assignment of six hours over two assignments of two hours. If you want to get the optimal use out of my time: Give me a big, concrete mission with a clear end-point.
I am punctual and get quite annoyed when other people are not. This is somewhat mediated by knowing how late they are going to be. I am hesitant to do something productive during the wait, since I do not know when I will be interrupted by the arrival of the other party and thus whether starting anything is worth the spoon cost of being ripped out of that head-space again later. If I know how long I have, I will be able to do anything sensible at all, though I probably won't have a task of the exact right length lined up. If I don't know how long I have to wait, I am likely to waste a significant amount of time pacing circles.
I consider having my time wasted a milder form of murder. Between depriving a person of one hour of their life and depriving them of the whole of it, there exists only a difference of degree. Both communicate nothing short of a complete disinterest in that person's lived experience and the things they intend to do with it. I react quite poorly to attempts to kill me (or anyone else) marginally.