Communicative Aikido

[nyuanshin]

After several years of arguing, I'm still not too great at avoiding exchanges that lead to frustration -- which is an annoying admission, since I actually know exactly how to do so. For the edification of all, I can condense my accumulated wisdom on this subject into four rules, the thoughtless violation of any of which usually ends badly:

1. Recognize and avoid bait. In a speech act designed to provoke, there's usually a hook with some emotional bait on it. You can typically spot it by the use of either personal pronouns (i.e. "you"/"your" or "me"/"my") or terms that personalize by proxy via reference to a group which one or more of the participants identifies with (e.g. "liberals", "atheists", "Democrats", "Americans", "women", etc). Avoid making or directly responding to statements that use this language.
2. Nonsemantic information trumps semantic information. In any verbal exchange, the context of what is said -- including what's *not* said, phrasing, tone, timing, mannerisms, and so forth -- usually conveys more information than the statements themselves. This information is more reliable as a rule, but it's also more densely encoded and thus harder to get a definite reading of; you have to build your intuitions up from a large set of observations, and words, which are easier to decode, are apt to distract attention from their context simply by being salient. If you notice that someone's behavior doesn't jive with the literal content of their speech, you should weight the former more highly when deciding how to respond. (Most people do this fairly unconsciously but it's something I sometimes neglect and have to think deliberately about.)
3. When in doubt, obey the Gricean maxims. Admittedly this is just a pointer to several other simple communicative rules, but one can't help but avoid misunderstandings to the extent that one follows them. Of course, communication would also get more boring, which is why breaking them on purpose is fun -- but you should only do this when the risks of being misinterpreted are low.
4. If things start going downhill, disengage immediately. If there's no indication that constructive communication is in fact occurring, then just say so and walk away, and stick to that decision -- even if the person tenaciously tries to bait you into staying engaged. There's no virtue in being suckered into turning a small waste of time into a big waste of time.

Not that hard, but given this recent bit of juvenile flailing on my part I clearly need more practice.