Tag Archives: Discussion and Philosophy

Conversations, Arguments, and Listening to Other People's Experiences

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The other day I was reading a document by the Civil Conversations Project  and a sentence struck me. Under “Tools for Moderating”, they had written, “You can disagree with another person’s opinions; you can disagree with their doctrines; you can’t disagree with their experience.”
True. Doing so implies either that the person doesn’t know what’s going on in their own mind, or that the person is lying. Either implication is offensive. So this is a good rule to bear in mind.
You might think that this issue mainly comes up when conversing with someone whose life and experiences have been very different from one’s own.That is certainly an important time to remember the rule. However, even among family members and friends, people’s experiences differ in ways that create conversational blocks. That’s what I want to talk about here.
I’m going to start with something a friend told me. When she was a teen, she told me, she sometimes came downstairs and said to her mother, “I’m cold.” Her mother would reply, “You can’t be cold.”
Not an unusual exchange, but if we take the mother literally, she is denying that her daughter feels cold. By implication, either her daughter doesn’t know how she feels, temperature-wise, or she is lying.
Some mothers might not mean it literally. It might be short for, “I am astounded and mind-boggled to learn that you are cold, because I feel as if I am in a sauna,” or possibly “I think you are really saying that the house is too cold, but 68F is a perfectly reasonable temperature for winter, so go put another sweater on.” My friend was certain that her mother really did not believe that she was cold, and my friend found it infuriating.
Now, I do have to say a word on behalf of parents. When your child is a baby, she doesn’t know how to articulate what she is feeling. Gradually she learns to recognize what word describes what state of her insides, and also what the feelings mean about her body. (“I’m hungry—I need food,” “I’m too hot—I need fewer clothes or cooler surroundings,” “I have a pain in my toe—better see if it’s injured.”)
This learning process is not without error. I remember walking my daughter home from school when she was little and listening to her complain the entire way that her feet hurt, that she couldn’t keep walking,.. and wondering if something was wrong with her shoes. Or maybe something was wrong with her feet? Did I need to take her to the doctor? Then we got home and she went racing around the yard, foot pain forgotten. She hadn’t been lying, but she hadn’t been a very good judge of the condition of her feet, either.
Somewhere between our kids’ babyhood and adulthood, we have to accept that they are just as good at describing their own experience as we are at describing ours. Even if we can’t understand how it is possible that they are feeling cold/hurt/achy or have trouble believing that things could really have gone the way they say, we have to take them seriously.
Besides being insulting, attempting to disagree with someone’s experience is an attempt to deny reality. Denying reality is not a good start to a conversation, and it’s also not a good start to an argument.
I have in mind a situation from many years ago, when a group of friends somehow ended up on the subject of putting the toilet seat down. (Important policy discussion here.) Most of the group were female, if I remember correctly, and someone pointed out that if the seat is left up, women sometimes sit down without looking and fall in. Ick. Wet. And in winter, cold.
The one guy in the group found this impossible to believe. How could women sit down without noticing that the seat was up? He even tried putting a scrap of paper on someone’s chair when she left the room so when she came back and picked it up, he could say, “See, she looked before sitting that time.”
But the fact is, sometimes women do sit down without noticing the seat is up. It happens. You can’t deny the facts. Had he accepted that as a given, he could have gone on to consider the larger situation. He could have argued that even if women do get wet behinds now and again, that isn’t a good enough reason to insist that men put the seat down. Alternatively, he could have suggested that everyone put the lid down, so that both sexes would have to do something and no one would fall in, either. He probably could have come up with a lot of things to say, but instead he got sidetracked by his refusal to accept what we were telling him about our experience.
Finally, I want to add two things. First, I recognize people do sometimes lie or exaggerate. But you should be cautious about coming to that conclusion. Assuming that a person must be lying because what that person is saying doesn’t fit your own experience can have terrible results. (For a drastic example, see the bit about car batteries and fishing in “What We’re Fighting For”, NYT.) Second, there’s a difference between knowledge of one’s own experience and one’s interpretation of other people’s actions. Why did my friend’s mother say that she couldn’t possibly be cold? My friend can make guesses, but only her mother knows for sure.
Till next post.

Feedback Fatigue–too many requests, useless forms, and grade inflation

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I’m tired of getting email requests to rate products and services, and phone calls asking me to answer a survey.
I looked online and found a name for this: “feedback fatigue”. Seriously, I get emails from doctors and medical facilities, hotels and travel services, HVAC companies and companies that have installed windows for me, companies I have bought stuff from on-line and sometimes in-store, the school system, and sometimes even from the town I live in. If I go to a conference, there’s a form to fill out at the end, and if I sign up for a class with some organization, they want an end-of-class rating. Finally (I hope) strangers occasionally call to ask my opinion on politics, products, or services. I’m getting good at saying, “No, I don’t want to take a survey” before they get too far along in their spiel.
In fact, I’ve basically given up filling out any feedback requests or surveys at all. I don’t respond when a company I’ve bought from eagerly requests a rating, though I realize I use such ratings myself to figure out if they are reliable. I don’t fill out surveys from my doctor’s practice or the hospital, after filling out a few too many and trying to remember details like how long I waited (which appointment was it, again?) before actually seeing the doctor. I tend not to respond to surveys from services I’ve used, either, unless I actually want to rate them. That is, sometimes the service person was so nice I want to say something nice in return, or I thought they were particularly efficient, or else I have a (mild) complaint I’d like to register.
I really hate situations where the person indicates that getting a good rating would help them with their job–that has occasionally happened and I hate feeling pressured. And of course, if I’m supposed to fill out a form in front of them (which happened at least once) the feedback becomes insincere and totally useless. I also hate having to rate a perfectly adequate but unexceptional experience on a five-point scale.
The problem with the five-point scale (or the ten-point scale) is that somehow an adequate experience such as “it arrived on time and was what I ordered–no complaints” is supposed to get a 5, which means that it gets the same rating as “your sales people were so helpful in finding what I needed and shipping it to me even though I didn’t know what it was called–thank you!”. Back in the brief period when I taught, I told my students that I regarded an A as signifying above and beyond the usual, not merely “you didn’t do anything wrong.” Otherwise, how could I single out the really top-notch students with a high grade?
As long as I’m on the subject of grade inflation, by the way, what is it with the applause inflation? I go to a performance of some kind and almost without fail people rise up and stand during the applause. When did a standing ovation go from being a response to a truly amazing performance to being the usual response to a merely good performance? I want to save something for those performances that blow me away, but I feel like a curmudgeon if I remain seated when everyone else is standing.
Anyway, the problem with the feedback requests isn’t just dealing with the five-point scale, or even the sheer number of requests. Often the questions themselves are hard to answer. Sometimes they don’t seem important. I can understand a doctor’s office being concerned about cleanliness, but I’ve seen questions about cleanliness for situations where it didn’t seem that relevant. I don’t want to have to decide if a store was a 4 or a 5 for cleanliness. Just leave me a comment space. If the store rated a 2 in cleanliness, you can be sure I’ll say something.
One of the things I liked about the book The Circle by Dave Eggers was the way it highlighted the problem of feedback requests by twisting and exaggerating them. In the book, the main character’s job required her to request feedback for every transaction and anything below nearly perfect had to be followed up to make everything right, which then necessitated a request for feedback on the follow-up experience … It was crazy. And then there was the guy who took the whole idea much too far by asking for numerical feedback on his performance in his personal life (yes, that performance). Talk about putting someone on the spot. The last thing we need in our personal relationships is numerical ratings.
Getting back to the non-fictional world–I realize that appropriate feedback can help one improve. But how to avoid creating feedback fatigue? For starters, I would like the option to “just click here if things were okay and you have nothing else to say”. I might be willing to give one click to help a deserving business accumulate an adequate rating. There could be an option to fill out a longer form for those who actually have something to say–good or bad—and who want to leave comments.
Even so, the forms need to be better thought out (see the bit about cleanliness questions.) Sometimes in surveys the school sends out, I don’t understand what they are asking about (avoid acronyms!) or else the wording of the question makes any answer misleading. This is especially true of questions that ask about multiple people or events. If two teachers are great, two are okay, and one is dreadful, how do I answer a question asking me to rate my child’s teachers overall on a five point scale? (I think that was a real question.)
Will feedback requests and surveys get better (and shorter) as people respond with increasing irritation? Are we doomed to years of being buried under such requests, just as we are constantly fighting spam and junk telephone calls without an end in sight? Is it part of the human condition?
Am I so fatigued by feedback requests that I’m getting downright silly?
Yes.
Till next post.

"A Little Princess"–self-discipline, kindness, and imagination…and a bit of moral luck

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Even if you have already read the book A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it is well worth re-reading. I picked it up again this past week to check a quotation and kept finding more and more to like in it.

 For starters, the book is full of lively descriptions. Sara’s wardrobe is enviable, with dancing frocks of rose gauze, petticoats with lace frills, and “velvet dresses trimmed with costly furs.” (14) There are comfortable rooms, with pleasant fires in the grate and soft chairs in which to sit, furnished with books and pictures and “curious things from India”. Later, we find ourselves in rooms in the bare and unwelcoming attic, with hard beds and whitewash flaking off the walls–but such a view of the sky and roofs! Sara herself provides lavishly imagined scenes through her story-telling–laughing merbabies with stars in their hair, fields full of fragrant lilies in heaven, and a sumptuous (though imaginary) feast.

But a story needs more than description, and A Little Princess has more. It has its heroine, Sara Crewe. When the story begins, Sara has just arrived in London from India, the only child of a doting and very rich father. But she is very far from the stereotype of a spoiled rich brat. She is well-mannered, kind-hearted, and very much in control of herself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a particular point of the importance of self-control, and we see how Sara manages to restrain herself from unkind or ill-mannered responses, even when she has been much provoked. We admire her for it, and are delighted at how infuriated Lavinia or Miss Minchin is at being faced with such composure and steadfast good manners.

The restraint is not some magical innate goodness, but an effort that Sara makes–sometimes quite a difficult effort.

“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage […] It must be remembered that she had been very deeply absorbed in the book about the Bastille, and she had had to recall several things very rapidly when she realized that she must go and take care of her adopted child. She was not an angel, and she was not fond of Lavinia.” (59-61)

Sara reminds herself that she is pretending to be a princess.

“If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages.” (62) 

Her imagination helps her with the difficult work of self-control.

Sara’s imagination makes her an appealing heroine because she uses it to tell stories to herself and to others. It draws the other children to her (in a world without videos or internet, a storyteller is much valued). Her imagination also helps her through hardships, as she can imagine more pleasant surroundings for herself–or if that is just too hard, she can pretend she is part of some dramatic and romantic story. Rather than living in a dreary attic, she is a prisoner in the Bastille, with Becky as the prisoner in the next cell.

Because Sara is so good at imagining how things might be different, she is also struck by the role of luck in her life. As she speaks with Becky the scullery-maid, she says,

“Why… we are just the same–I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!” (53)

At another point, she tells her friend Ermengarde,

“Things happen to people by accident.[…] A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. it just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? […] Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.” (36)

Of course, when her trials do come, she acquits herself admirably, but we can still puzzle over the role of luck (especially moral luck) in nature and in nurture, and wonder how one person comes to be so patient and determined, while another is self-centered and spiteful.

Sara’s strength and imagination would not make her nearly so appealing if they were not accompanied by great kindness. Sara is kind to the younger children and sympathetic to anyone who is suffering, whether they are suffering from hunger or from humiliation. We want Sara to flourish and be happy–she so deserves it.

I have two last remarks about this book. First, the movie they made of it some while back (set in America) makes a complete mess of it. It mistakes the crucial point. It is not the case that “all little girls are princesses”, as I believe Sara is made to say in the movie. It is true that being a princess is not a matter of wealth or birth or beauty, but Lavinia, for example, is clearly not a princess because she does not behave like a princess. She is neither kind nor well-mannered when things don’t go her way.

The second remark is that this is an old book, and while Sara’s kindness extends to all beings, the book still reflects to some extent some of the attitudes of its time and place. It is worth keeping in mind, but should not stop anyone from reading it.