Being Nice

[xenologer]

Long (by my standards) but very worthy video that not only fits my experience as a skeptic talking both to other skeptics and to believers who are pretty sure atheists are empty vessels for their apologism, but also as a feminist talking to people who are pretty sure they don't talk to feminists, and as a liberal talking to people who are pretty sure they don't talk to liberals.

"Carrie Poppy, Director of Communications at the James Randi Educational Foundation and co-host of the popular "Oh No, Ross and Carrie!" podcast, discusses the importance of using inclusive language while doing outreach. Combining communication strategy and a spirit of friendly investigation, Carrie suggests that skeptical activists mirror themselves after a group she investigated and joined... the Mormon church."

Sorry I couldn't find a transcript of this talk. I would love one for accessibility reasons and for easy citation, but there doesn't seem to be one.

I think this is a great thing for people to consider. We have to be willing to draw boundaries, but it's also just plain tactically wiser to be kind to people up until the point when they make it absolutely clear that they'll repay it with dickery.

This is why when a friend of mine was finding that he cared more about truth than he did about what the truth could take from him, I explicitly told him not to chew his still-Christian wife's ankles off. I have been the still-identifying-as-theist partner of an atheist, and the best wisdom I had to pass on was that he should not get so excited about what he's figured out that he starts using his wife for target practice.

He took this under advisement. I was pleased. I didn't like the woman, but I felt I had done the right thing anyway, because what she deserved as a fellow human being and what would be most tactically effective for him happened to be the same option: be nice, even when someone is being ridiculous.

(It didn't work, but it was still the right thing to do!)

Now, this approach is exhausting and time-consuming to the point that not everybody can be required or even expected to do it. Additionally, an activist movement needs more than friendly and relateable people willing to connect on an individual level with every single goddamn person we encounter, which means we cannot all be diplomats. We cannot all be ambassadors. If we are all busy welcoming everybody, there's nobody left over to draw boundaries or do guiding work.

However, this kind of ambassadorial work--in my experience--is only effective if you do it the way Poppy describes.

Concede everything possible. Apologize whenever possible. Speak about personal experience only whenever possible. Rather than talking about how someone's unsubstantiated and potentially toxic dogma pisses you off (even though if you give a crap about your fellow humans, it probably does piss you off), speak from a position of sadness and hurt whenever you feel resilient enough to do so.

I cannot understate how important that latter one is. So many people who hold and act on toxic beliefs do so because they don't see the people they're affecting as real. This is true of people who think that atheists are heartless fun-ruining psychopaths just like it's true of people who think feminists are shrieking hysterical castrating harpies who want all babies born with penises to be pre-emptively convicted for rape at birth.

This is not a value judgement; it's a tactical decision. People are armored against outrage almost universally. Not everyone is susceptible to the "listen I am a person like you and I know you care whether you hurt people and this hurts me" approach, but far fewer people are armored against hurt compared to anger. For one example of how I have gotten back to this approach and the results I am having, check out my Obligatory Chick-Fil-A Post, an entry I wrote after all that bullshit with Chick-Fil-A shredded a lot of my peace and patience and I had to climb back up to the point that I was able to do what I know is most effective for me.

I am sure there are people somewhere who can make more progress by saying, "You are an entire bag of dicks and everyone who ever loved you was wrong," because there are lots of persuasive motherfuckers in the world and everybody's got a different approach. I know there is someone on the planet with a Charisma score of like 50 who could say those precise words and have people around them go, "Well I'll be goshderned. Am I a bag of dicks? I should work on that."

I am not that person, though. Here is what works for me.

Granted, it's vulnerable. It requires a lot of courage on my part because it means not pre-emptively striking at people I think are likely to be dickbags, and continuing to work through things this way even though lots of those people *gasp!* turn out to be dickbags after all.

But they won't all turn out to be dickbags, and the people who seem like dickbags but aren't (and instead just have no fucking clue how not to seem like dickbags) are the best candidates for outreach we'll ever get. They are the low-hanging fruit, people. Go get them.

When I have the energy for this exhausting but highly effective approach, I consider it one of the best things I can do for any movement I am a part of, not least because I know how few people have the energy to do a lot of it. The more I do, the better a contribution I feel like I am making, and so I wanted to pass this on in the hopes that others who could be good at the in-group empathy-based ambassadorial approach will take from this entry the motivation they need to give it a try.

The more ambassadors go out and pick up the easy converts, the fewer people our beautiful and precious firebrands will have to go stomp on. That's good for everyone!

Comments

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

So, let's think back to my homeopathy example. Once I'd given up homeopathy for good I started talking to people about it and I told pretty much anyone who would listen. So some people were completely shocked to hear what it was all about and they seemed to genuinely think they shouldn't buy it again. But a number of people just basically insulted me. They told me that I didn't believe in mystery anymore, or that I was a cynic, or that 'we just have to agree to disagree', and they far out-numbered the people who actually took me seriously. And I think that's because as I was reaching our to others, not so well, I'd completely forgotten what had persuaded me or maybe I didn't even know what had persuaded me.

So, who were the people who listened to me? Well my friend Claire listened. Claire is my best friend and as you can see from the photo (picture of Carrie and Claire with their arms over each others shoulders smiling for the photo) that it wasn't hard for her to consider me in-group. She knew about homeopathy actually. She had known since she was a child that homeopathy was made of these highly dilute substances in water and she just thought it worked anyway. That water had memory and that it could cure various ills. So what it took for her, was someone who was in-group, me, coming to her and saying "Well, look but Claire like, you know that I would love this to be true. I mean I've been taking homeopathy my whole life too and it would be great if this medicine that doesn't have any side-effects could do what it claims to do but, dude, did you see this James Rand-eye video? Like, it's NUTS!" She already considered me in-group, so it was very easy for her to take me seriously.

Now, here's someone who didn't listen to me about homeopathy. I don't want you to pick on her if you every find her on the street. What's interesting about her (i'll call her Lola). She is a genuinely sweet person, but she told me to "suck it". Because when she told me that she took homeopathy and that she was using it for allergies, I just didn't even think about it. I just started telling her like all the reasons that "homeopathy is bullshit. Okay, here we go", and I just started listing off point after point. Y'know "Do you know about 'like cures like'?" And just, y'know, giving her this long long list of scientific points. I didn't start from a baseline understanding of what her concerns were. I didn't show her I was in-group, that we shared our most basic worldviews, I just started talking, assuming that the facts would set her straight. And not only did she not buy it, but she told me that I clearly didn't care whether corporations manipulate people. I obviously don't care whether people get sick from medicine. I don't care about a long list of abuses committed in the name of scientific progress. And none of those things are true, but I can't blame Lola because I hadn't shown her that I was her people before I spoke. She didn't know that we shared common ground.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

So, I do this podcast. It's called "Oh no! Ross and Carrie". *applause* Oh stop! Thanks. My co-host Ross Watcher and I, we investigate all sorts of unlikely sounding claims and we join fringe groups. And we generally put ourselves in the position of the new believer and see what happens behind closed doors. So, we have hung out with the kabbalists, Ross has gotten ear-candled (I refused), we hung out with the Sikhs, we got acupunctured, we've been hypnotised, we've overdosed on homeopathic medicine and then chased it with wine (that's how to sugar-crash btw), we've delved into Tarot, we joined the pan-Africans, we joined a couple of creationist groups, we had my dog psycho-analysed by a pet psychic, I did the master-cleanse, Ross had colon-hydrotherapy, we spent six months undercover becoming Mormons, and we spent five months under-cover becoming Raelians (a UFO cult). So our goal has always been to reach beyond the sceptical circle and of course, it's nice to appeal to sceptics and it's fun, but preaching to the choir can be just a nice way to make a lot of pretty masturbation music. So from the beginning we've asked ourselves what we could do to avoid being pegged as sceptics to believers. And we wanted to help believers and the sort of 'undeclared' to see us as their own in-group, which in a sense we are. We're both former believers. We both would be very happy to adopt these claims if they were true.

So here's what we tried. We don't call ourselves sceptics on the show. We never tell anyone that they're wrong. We just ask good questions and see what they have to say to defend their beliefs. And we emphasise our shared history instead of differences in our perceptions. And it works! So since we started the show which is only about 15 months ago now, we've heard from hundreds of listeners and lots of them are current believers or people leaving their beliefs. People are questioning what they were taught. And we also hear from people who are on the fence about unfounded claims and a lot of these people say "Well, I just don't get this anywhere else. Y'know, I talk to my believing friends and they just tell me to pray more" or, y'know, if they're into pseudoscience their friends tell them "well, what we do cannot be calibrated by the scientific method" and things like that. And we also hear from people who hate the show, of course, people who say we don't give them a fair shake. And that's fair. We have to at some point close the investigation and say what we think of it.

But it's clear from the feedback we're getting that the overwhelming response from believers is very positive. And it's interesting that so many people say "I don't get this anywhere else". I mean, how is it that no one is just gently talking to them about their beliefs? And I think, in a lot of our exchanges with believers, myself included, we tend to just give them this message "well I care about evidence and you don't seem to" and that just makes them tune out because they think "I do care about evidence, so obviously you don't understand me". Now of course I'm not making an argument against aggressive activism. I really believe that movements take all kinds of activists, but my clear plea here is that when we're talking to our friends and our colleagues one on one and we want to understand their point of view and for them to understand ours, that we consider that we're talking to human beings and that human beings are tribal animals, so we need to show one another how we are in their tribe.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

So what do you do if you have nothing in common with the person you are talking to? Well I would suggest that you are not the person to outreach to that person and that's okay. There are other people who can do that. But if you are talking to someone and think "well, really I am just not on the same wavelength as you" and their feeling the same thing, they're not going to be able to hear your message. So you might just be digging yourself into a hole. Think how much it would take for you to take life advice from Sylvia Browne or Deepak Chopra. You know we all like to think 'well if they made their claims really well maybe I would', but it would be really difficult, right? And few of us have enough time to wade through each claim from beginning to end and make sure it's scientifically supported. So likewise, if someone sees you as functioning on a completely different wavelength from them, they're probably not going to listen to you. But if you can find that common ground. If you can find a place in yourself that agrees with them, then start there. So for me, now when I talk about homeopathy I say things like "yeah, I used to take that stuff. It was so reassuring to me that it had no side-effects. That it wasn't going to hurt me. It was completely natural. I totally understand why you prefer it. But hey, did you know? It's actually not very effective." And using those direct pleas of personal experience, it doesn't take the place of science but, knowing that personal experience is the primary way that people communicate, we ignore that at the expense of science.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Whoa. You are so cool.