Anonymous asked: How do you do it? How do you ooze compassion and kindness in every word you write? Were you always like this? Is it a skill you learned and then how?

I think I’ve gotten nicer and better at communicating over the course of the last few years. It’s a skill, like most things, and responsive to trying, like most things, but really I suspect that a lot of it is being in a situation where you can sustainedly try; most people who are jerks on the internet are not trying to be kind and failing, they’re trying to do something else, and unless being kind meets their needs they won’t do it.

For me, a situation where I can sustainedly try to be kind means having social support and affirmation that I am safe, that I have interesting things to say, that I can do independent moral reasoning, and act on it, and this isn’t presumptuous or selfish but is an essential skill for everybody. I think that people who find themselves being meaner than they intend to on the internet often don’t have that, or don’t have enough of it.

If that’s you, prioritize being equipped to be nice, instead of trying to already be nice when you’re scared and hurting. Prioritize finding people and ideas and inspirations that make you feel good about who you are and what you have to say and about your right to engage in internet discourse as much or as little as you please. When you feel secure, and assured in your right to think and express yourself, when being wrong wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world because you know yourself to be valuable in many ways, then you’re equipped to be nice, and it’ll come much easier.

(There is a kind of niceness that comes from being scared that ever disagreeing with anyone makes you bad, or that to be worthy of participation in the world you have to be perfect, or that you should keep trying interactions that make you miserable because prioritizing yourself would be selfish. This is lousy cut-rate niceness. Reject it. Reject it by ceasing to care about being nice, if you need to do that.)

And from that point then I think it’s practice. Some specific things that help me:

1) When i write, I try to have a wide audience of people in mind. I try to imagine someone who has done the thing I’m condemning; someone who has been hurt by it, someone who thinks it’s bad but is in an environment where that’s unacceptable to say out loud, someone who thinks they’d be a bad person to have an opinion about it… When I write a sentence that is going to make one of those people stop reading, I try to rewrite it. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I could but it’s too much effort and I want to actually get this post out. But when I can, I think it makes my writing kinder.

2) When someone is a dick, you can actually just pretend they weren’t.

The rationalist community periodically has fights over steel manning, which is where you try, when you encounter an argument, to think about and develop the version of the argument most compelling to you. (Advantages: you can end up understanding ideas you hadn’t really understood, and being better able to imagine why you might hold them. Disadvantages: if you are talking to someone, you are suddenly talking about ‘the version of your position that makes sense to me’ which is often not their actual position, which is extremely frustrating.)

So steelmanning has problems, but I’ve had great luck with nicemanning, which is where you just respond to exactly what someone said but ignore the thing where they’re being an asshole. I think at least some people on tumblr are jerks to get attention, and if it doesn’t work they stop. Some others are jerks because they’re upset, and when they’re calmer, rereading what they said will probably bother them more than a scolding from you about it. I delete a lot of obnoxious anons and I’m much more likely to delete anons if they’re obnoxious, but if I decide to answer one I try to answer it exactly like I’d answer if someone asked that question without being rude. They usually stop being rude, if they continue the interaction.

And often people weren’t trying to be a jerk, and interacting with them like they were nice and reasonable turns out to be 100% correct because they were trying to be nice and reasonable and just miscommunicated. And on those occasions I always feel really glad that I treated them that way.

(There are lots of problems with this if you would feel obliged to answer an ask if it were polite, instead of feeling free to answer whatever asks you please. Or if you feel miserable when you get anon hate and it’s painful and stifling not to call them on it, or if you will beat yourself up for being even the tiniest bit rude to someone who just was horrible to you. Like I said earlier, lots of being nice is about having the sources of support and confidence which you need. If trying to be nice is making you miserable then something has gone wrong somewhere.)

3) Vary topics a lot. I think there are a few things you’ll have to say on any given topic, and then all the discussion that follows will get steadily more about social/cultural/tribal stuff, and it’s so much harder to be nice when you’re doing that. Say those first few things. Then leave that topic until you have more new things to say, and talk about something completely different. If your blog is mostly about your ideas, then it’s much much easier for it to be a kind blog than if it’s mostly about people, who are not always possible to consistently be kind about. I suspect that this also changes the tenor of your audience - you attract people who are there for the ideas, and they will ask you questions about ideas and help you refine your ideas, and the community will be pleasanter, and this will make it easier to be kind.