User:Chriswaterguy

Me in brief:

• I coach people in clearing anger, bitterness & other negative emotions. I'm keen to be evidence-based about this, but in this field, evidence is often fuzzy, and experience is an important guide.
• I've worked in sustainability knowledge-sharing.
• I know about wikis, and help run Appropedia, the sustainability wiki.

A communication sequence

(Work in progress. Suggestions appreciated.)

Social aspects of communication (or is that a tautology?):

• Levels of communication
• Reasoning isn't about logic (it's about arguing)
• Correspondence Bias (also known as the fundamental attribution error) in brief on the wiki)
• Ask and Guess
• Tell Culture

Emotion, making sense, and anticipating reactions:

• Politics is the Mind-Killer – Avoiding emotional & tribal identity triggers. "Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational." & "it doesn't matter whether (you think) the [specific political party] really is at fault. It's just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics."
• Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided – "there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property." "Two primary drivers of policy-one-sidedness are the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy." Avoid using arguments as soldiers.
• Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided (discusses arguments as soldiers)
• Philosophical Landmines – "If something you say makes people go off on a spiral of bad philosophy, don't get annoyed with them, just fix what you say. This is just being a communications consequentialist."
  • Responding to a landmine explosion: It may be best to "abort the conversation." Alternatively, a commenter suggests, "stop taking sides and talk about the plus and minuses of each side."
• (Something more about emotional triggers?)

Understanding and being understood:

• Off-LW: Be a Communications Consequentialist, Jesse Galef.
• Inferential distance:
  • "a gap between the background knowledge and epistemology of a person trying to explain an idea, and the background knowledge and epistemology of the person trying to understand it." Inferential distance (LW wiki).
  • Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low! – "we tend to enormously underestimate the effort required to properly explain things."
  • Expecting Short Inferential Distances – explaining in evolutionary terms why this is such a problem today.

Biases, heuristics and fallacies that affect communication:

• Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You (in brief on the wiki)
• Generalizing From One Example (the Typical mind fallacy)
• The Halo Effect – "You should be suspicious if the people you know seem to separate too cleanly into devils and angels."

Disagreeing:

• Better Disagreement.
  • Related: Steel man (in brief on the wiki). Principle of charity (Wikipedia). Unpopular ideas attract poor advocates: Be charitable. Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity.
  • Ideological Turing Test (Wikipedia). First described(?) at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html by Bryan Caplan. (As Mill states, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.") Also see: Noahpinion: Against the Ideological Turing Test. Related: Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument
• The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? (e.g. "Martin Luther King was a criminal!")

Online communication (for further exploration):

• Text-based communication
• Dealing with trolls

Dealing with negative emotions

(Againstness, noticing)

Happiness & depression, e.g. Methods for treating depression

Achieving awesomeness

• The Science of Winning at Life - sequence by lukeprog

Plus:

• Nate Soares' posts on productivity, listed on his user page

(+ Look up Eliezer's posts on productivity, effectiveness and akrasia.)

Achieving awesomeness by learning better

(To be developed)

• A brief summary of effective study methods – Arran_Stirton