nonviolence

thoughts on communication, safety, ai

for most of my life i thought you could minimize pain through a combination of two strategies, both of which i’ll invent names for. the first is deterrence - projecting competence and confidence, being very explicit about intentions and consequences, and other ways of discouraging people from taking advantage of you. the second is desensitization - putting up barriers, decreasing the surface area of things you’re insecure about or vulnerable on, and generally making yourself less sensitive to actions other people might take

nowadays i don’t think that deterrence and desensitization are incorrect ideas, but i do think they’re incomplete, especially because pain often comes from well-intentioned friends rather than bad actors. what if there was another way of doing things - deterrence not by intimidating other people but by addressing their needs, desensitization not by shielding yourself but by understanding the intent behind other peoples’ actions?

i always found this scene from infinity war memorable: star-lord prepares to shoot gamora, but when he pulls the trigger on his gun, only bubbles come out. it’s an idea echoed later in the same movie, when thanos spawns a black hole only for doctor strange to transform it into thousands and thousands of butterflies. this is what i have been looking for: a way to transmute bullets and black holes into bubbles and butterflies that disperse harmlessly into the air

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around a month ago a coworker (let’s call them L) recommended that i read nonviolent communication (henceforth abbreviated as nvc). the book had some good ideas, though it was also a bit painful to get through, mostly due to repetitiveness and subpar poetry. the central question nvc tries to answer is: how does one communicate in a way that makes other people respond with compassion rather than defensiveness? to which it provides many suggestions - using more specific and positive language, “i feel” statements, and so on

(i’ll mention another that nvc doesn’t cover but which one of my friends wrote about - becoming less insecure. or, to put it differently, “When you walk around feeling small and helpless, you tend to bulldoze other people without knowing it. You assume that they don’t respect you (the same way you disrespect yourself)... So you bring a giant pile of weapons to a tea party and then wonder why people react like you’re some kind of a ghoul or war lord. You think you’re just making your point, trying to be heard, but you’re swinging a battle axe around, smashing everyone’s tea cups”)

nvc is far from perfect. one important clarification L made is that there are two main kinds of listening - understanding (observing without bias, trying to uncover the truth behind statements that may not initially make sense, etc) and evaluating (figuring out what to prioritize and what to discard, making judgements, etc). nvc suggests only understanding and never evaluating because the author comes from a peace negotiator background where understanding is helpful and evaluation is often counterproductive, but for most people understanding and evaluating are both very useful and one of the keys to having extremely productive conversations is knowing when and how to switch between them

everyone agrees that i am excellent at evaluating and worse at understanding; i think getting good at understanding is not that hard and am figuring it out right now, and i’m also trying to get good at switching between the two though that is a more difficult skill. i guess i will be practicing a lot at my job

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lately i’ve been paying more attention to the cycles of violence and safety around me: how my insecurities (self-violence) sometimes bring out the worst in other people. how the stress and boredom of airport security puts both staff and passengers in a bad mood and creates more stress and boredom. how one of my friends often holds grudges, ostensibly for protection, that only end up hurting them more. and on the other hand, how feeling cared for has allowed me to care for my friends better in the last few months. to be honest i haven’t actually used nvc at all yet (largely because i haven’t had much conflict in my relationships recently), but it’s been helpful regardless for noticing how violence and safety propagate themselves. as the book foreword says:

“One of the many things I learned from Grandfather [Gandhi] is to understand the depth and breadth of nonviolence and to acknowledge that one is violent... We often don't acknowledge our violence because we are ignorant about it; we assume we are not violent because our vision of violence is one of fighting, killing, beating, and wars - the types of things that average individuals don't do.”

this all started when L pointed out that there is a difference between directness and bluntness, and that my bluntness was mostly a skill issue that i could fix while remaining as candid as i wanted to be. how it took me so long to realize that is beyond me. i think i had to hear it from someone as truthful as myself to really believe it

there’s a funny meme from the fate anime that i think about once every few years

i’ve heard this anime suffered from a number of japanese-to-english translation problems (in another scene the same character says “people die if they are killed”). i find the mistranslation to be surprisingly relevant though. i have been correct very often in my life; i have been right much less often

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john green once said about the anthropocene reviewed that “i wanted to write a soft book for a hard moment.” i probably won’t ever write a book, but i think this idea comes close to capturing one of the roles i want to fulfill - to struggle with hard problems and digest them into soft resolutions. to be sea glass. to terraform the world one corner at a time, whether that’s by giving my friends fun socks or adding :blobheart: to my slack workspaces or writing blog posts that people find helpful

i am far from good at this and am still figuring out how to cultivate a greater sense of safety in my interactions. one thing that’s become clear recently is that i have very poor awareness of how other people perceive me. my coworkers have been giving me helpful feedback - apparently i am much friendlier on zoom than in person, i often come off as disinterested or judgemental, and so on. it will take a lot of work to change these peoples’ existing stories of me and sometimes i wish i could start over with an entirely new set of strangers whose impressions i could mold from scratch, but i think it will be okay. i think the challenge will be good for me. this is something i must eventually learn to overcome anyway

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the other day i was in a work meeting where everyone went around and listed things they wanted to come out of the future of ai. a lot of the usual suggestions were floated - automating chores like filing taxes, building a bunch of cool personalized software tools, sweeping away the details of execution to empower people to focus on higher-level ideation, and so on - and then someone (let’s call them C) observed that a world where all of these things came true would actually be kind of miserable and not feel super different from life today, it would mostly just be more steps along the hedonic treadmill

we talked about how there could be a world where ai “empowers” individuals to be more productive and lead their own projects and “optimizes” communication so that team members don’t need to do as much meeting or collaboration, and… that would actually be kind of tragic? and how maybe the goal isn’t to automate away meetings, it’s to conduct them in a way that sparks joy, similarly to how the goal isn’t to get rid of laundry and taxes but rather to find a way to enjoy doing them. and how by default most of the technology we’ve built over the last two decades (eg. the internet) has made it easier for the individual to focus on themselves and block out the rest of the world, but we could choose to build things differently to increase awareness and presence (eg. aliving the web)

an example from C that i really liked - if i wanted to feel safe in my home i could install advanced security and gating and locking mechanisms with many layers of redundancy, and then i would indeed be safe at home but would probably still be distrustful towards my neighbors and anxious about walking around outside and so on. and perhaps a less physically secure but more complete form of safety would come from having good relationships with my neighbors and being confident that they cared about me and knowing that they’d tell me if they noticed that i’d forgotten to lock my door or that there was suspicious activity outside or etc

of course it is unreasonable to expect to get along with my neighbors in this manner, but in the relationships i have choice over (friendships, communities i help create, and so on) i think this is the kind of safety and nonviolence i want to move towards