I'm trying to remember the name of a novel I read in which a long-married couple had a system for working out whose preferences should take precedence on any given occasion that seems to relate to your theory of drama. The system was that each of them would act out, emote, orate, and generally perform just how much whatever it was meant to them and each would look at the passion of the other's performance and think, hmm, yes, he/she does seem to feel more strongly than I do about this one, we'll go with his/her idea.

The unspoken - but unbreakable - rule of this system was, of course, that one must not act above one's level of emotional commitment / use superior acting skills to get one's way, because that would be cheating and would destroy the whole system.

I'm not entirely sure how this would work in real life, but there was something very appealing about how rationally they had worked out this game.

Catherine

It might have been by Spider Robinson.

Oh, it was, too - I think it was the one about the missionary who had time-travelled the hard way. Thank you!

In the Berkeley Hate Camp, when two people want to compare utility, they stand side-by-side and push against each other until one person gives up. The idea is that you feel just how badly the other person wants whatever it is.

-Nisan

Ooh, that sounds really interesting.

How does that work if there's a large strength difference?

Well, I've never tried it, but I assumed the idea was to get an idea of how people felt, not to automatically award the argument to the "winner".

It might even be an instructive example: imagine a parent playing this with their child, it might accurately reflect that parent often CAN override the child, but may not always want to if the child actually feels strongly about something, not just acting out of naivity..?

What is Berkeley Hate Camp?

The most interesting account of Hate Camp is here:

http://everything2.com/title/The+Berkeley+Hate+Camp

I don't know if it still exists.

-Nisan

Actually, "hobos with oboes" only returns 36 results. If you get to the last page of results, Google will collapse its guesstimate into the actual number of hits. [/pedant]

It's actually sort of odd to think that the entire collective mass of humanity, writing and communicating over twenty-odd years, would only mention hobos with oboes thirty six times. And most of them probably aren't even independent results.

I was being half-serious. I was thinking more of a situation where one partner winds up significantly worse off because the other partner cares more about most individual disputes, leading to the first partner yielding most of the time. I wasn't thinking of the incentive to modify yourself into a utility monster, although you have a good point there.

Come to think of it, a lot of political discourse (across the political spectrum) seems to take the form of "modifying yourself into a utility monster" in order to win interpersonal utility comparisons for the benefit of your cause or faction.

relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k

Hmmm, I know I read that post and at least skimmed the comments. I wonder if I read that comment and internalized it, but didn't notice that I was remembering the idea rather than coming up with it on my own.

[interpersonal utility comparison] as a conflict-resolution algorithm would fail horribly if you happen to be dating a Utility Monster.

From what my friends tell me, this is what living with a toddler is like. The toddler seems to be equal parts Utility Monster and Utility Monster Impersonator. I've rarely wanted a cookie badly enough to riot against all known authority for 40 minutes when it isn't given to me, so toddlers don't seem to be using my utility function. But I think the most important signaling they seem to always do is to signal that their utility function does NOT include positive outputs from your utility function.

-MS

This is not related to your actual point, but have you tried white noise or Brownian noise for the "loud music" problem? I've had good success with that for dealing with dorm noise. Turning on fans has also been helpful.

Yes. I have used white noise every night for the past ten years or so, but it's not enough and it never gets the low frequency noises.

I recall that Pink Noise is biased towards lower frequencies, and Brown Noise is biased even further still, so they might help more. White Noise tends to just leave me vaguely irritable, but pink and brown have actually occasionally helped.

That's really interesting. A few random thoughts:

Yes, I think people were suggesting "toss a coin" because the "walk the dog" example sounded unusual and approximately equally inconvenient for both.

I also forgot to mention another alternative, walking the dog together on the ground that may be much more pleasant. If they're both seriously short of sleep, that's probably not better, but for many tasks, it turns out that some of the time social effects can have a larger effect than just how pleasant the task is to do normally.

This is a situation where "utility monster" is an actual problem, in that some people (both accidentally and maliciously ignorantly) do act as if only their utility is important, and it can be really awful to be close to someone like that, or to have to work for them. You need some way of stressing that even if you don't yell about every little thing, your preferences are as valid as theirs.

This might actually be an effective costly signal,

That's actually really interesting. I've observed before that some of the time (fortunately not with my partner or parents so much), I have a really hard conveying "I actually care about this" before breaking out in screaming and/or tears. Realising that I need a specific way of conveying ""

Edit: Realising that I need a specific way of conveying that so it's clear I actually mean it and am not going to express that level of discontent over every little thing I want to change may really really help.

alicorn24 really doesn't like people in the kitchen when she is cooking.

I realise you've solved this problem already, but I thought it was a good example, in that for many people who don't want someone there when they're cooking, what they really want is no risk of someone commenting on their cooking for whatever reason. And even an apparently innocent comment from someone who doesn't know or care much about it can be stressful if you expect people to interfere.

In which case a sensible compromise can be "you can come through, but only come straight through and not speak to me". But that's hard to think of, because most people, once they're in the kitchen, will see SOMETHING that could be made strictly better with a small change, and HAVE to comment on it, thinking it's purely helpful.

And the person cooking will get really, really upset, and the kibitzer will say "but I was right there, surely you don't expect me just to be silent". But if the kibitzer actually understands that yes, for complicated reasons that aren't obvious to them, they do need to be silent if they value the other person's emotions at all. And many people literally won't be able to do that, because "talking to someone who's there" is normal, so they'll need repeated screaming fits to train them out of it. But if someone IS able to accept that, sensible or not, that's a commitment they need to make and keep seriously, and the other person trusts them, then a compromise of "walk straight through and don't interrupt AT ALL" may work well, it's just that most people will agree to it without realising they can't keep it, so the person cooking doesn't want to agree to it without making the seriousness of their feelings known.

An obvious counterpoint is that the kibitzer may feel very rejected to see a friend/partner/family and not speak to them, which may be resolved with another compromise, that the cook stresses to them that they DO care about them, and not talking to them doesn't mean they don't, it's only in this one specific situation, or that they can say hello, but not have a conversation.

Or that the kibitzer may want some talking-to-each other time, but needs to verbally articulate that as "I just want to talk to you for a bit, can we spend some time hanging out after dinner?" and realise that the normal social paradigm of "don't say anything, assume partner will preemptively make time if they really like you" doesn't apply and asking explicitly doesn't make the request invalid.

Of course, that's probably not YOUR situation, but I thought it was a good example of hidden preferences.

This is actually not my problem. I don't care if people stand just outside the room and talk to me, about the cooking or anything else. I just can't retain the skill of cooking *and* the skill of being-a-person *and* the skill of modeling something that moves as erratically as a human within the same space as me. A number of my skills (mostly the ones that involve moving stuff around) disappear when I'm trying to model humans. People can pass through the kitchen as long as they go in a straight line at a constant speed and I can model them as Newtonian objects instead, but under ordinary cooking conditions I can't stand, for instance, someone trying to get a glass of water, even if they don't interact with me at all en route. (But I can get a glass of water *for* them and pass it out of the room.)

Edited at 2012-10-10 05:38 pm (UTC)

Ah, sorry! Thank you. I knew I was likely to be off target by speculating, but I thought the topic of how to compromise was sufficiently interesting it was worth talking about, even if it was inappropriate to you and scott :)

It sounds like you do have a very good idea of exactly what's ok and (presumably) you found some way of avoiding those specifically, which if so is a pretty good role model.

Wow, that's me exactly.

The worst is when people try to get only very slightly out of my way (which means they will be in my way again in about 0.5 seconds).

I think the worst thing is when I need things A and B, and people get out of my way so I can get A, by moving in front of B.

And come to think of it, I do the same when I feel a mountain of pressure is being piled on me at work or somewhere else I'm responsible for doing something -- I feel like because someone's asked me to do something, it must be reasonable, so it's rude to stress out, but the only way to show I'm melting down is to visibly melt down, so I feel like I have to wait until I've no choice but to boil over, but want that to happen as soon as possible.

Whereas if I accepted that I had to push back beforehand, even if it was rude, I might be able to head off the problems.

I have a really hard conveying "I actually care about this" before breaking out in screaming and/or tears.

On a basic level, I've found the BDSM concept of "safewords" is useful here - basically, it's a word that means "Stop. No, really, seriously, this IS NOT OKAY, this is NOT CONSENSUAL, STOP!"

The thing is, most people compartmentalize these to actual BDSM, whereas my house has posted rules that mention these and invite our guests to use them if it's ever necessary to communicate that no, seriously, something is bothering them.

I recently discovered that my brother uses the same basic concept as a way of signalling "okay, drop this topic NOW and don't revisit it any time soon" in his social group.

I've found that the gradient between "please stop" and "STOP!" that this gives me really helps some times.

It's also worth noting that you can relabel it to something other than a "safeword" if you want to avoid the BDSM reference. I keep it as "safeword" because most people I deal with find it a useful "hook" to understand where I'm going, but I can see how it would bother others :)

That's really interesting. In fact, my problem is probably that I'd be happy to say or hear "safeword" when something is absolutely unacceptable, but I'm often in the situation of wanting to say "this hurts me lots and lots and I don't know if you realise that, and I don't want to impose on you to say you CAN'T do this because maybe there's a good reason I don't know about, but can we talk about it?"

Now I think about it, I realise there's probably a lot of situations where I should take the responsibility to decide something is unacceptable, but when I'm stressed I feel unable to decide that very objectively and I'm scared I'll become a utility monster by objecting when it's actually really unreasonable of me.

The trouble is, there's often things that are perfectly fine, actualy really good, in smal doses, like being corrected, but if I get it solidly for a whole afternoon or every time I see someone, I start to melt down. I'm scared to become a hypocrite who can't ever take correction, but also, when I spend a whole day where everything I say is subject to a cascade of correction I get massively sensitive. Now I say that, I realise I should probably be more alert to when something is bothering me (whether or not it's objectively "sensible") and ask for a break, even if I want to come back to the situation when I've calmed down a bit.

Funny, I often see safewords specifically used for "wow, okay, pause and talk for a minute" or "while I'm normally fine with this activity, now is NOT the time / I'm overwhelmed".

I personally use it any time I'm in approximately that uncertain emotional state you describe, because I don't want to say "Wow, what the hell? How could you DO that" but just saying "knock it off" is unlikely to work.

Ooh, you're right, thank you! Yes, that's exactly what I need. I guess I was hung up on the terminology, but having identified the concept, I can easily label it, whether that's a safeword, or a traffic light system, or just "I feel overwhelmed, can we come back to this in half an hour?"

Glad I could help! :)

Most techies really hate being interrupted while concentrating. Most managers thrive on constant interruption and assume everyone else does too. Unless the manager can model the techie, or at least have some simple rules to follow (like "only use email to contact me, unless the servers are actually on fire"), this will not end well.

-- random Firedrake

On the more serious sort of questions (ones like "have child?" and "move to Arizona?") I think a lot of the time the answer is that being in a relationship with someone who has a radically different utility function to you is really really hard work and seems to me to be unlikely to be worth it.

I guess you still have the difficulty of knowing if they have a radically different utility function or were just on the off-chance mentioning something they vaguely thought might be nice to see if you agreed. I think you need a lot of trust to get to the point where when someone says "I really am afraid of the dark so I really don't want to walk the dog" you know they actually are afraid of the dark not just too lazy to walk the dog.

This is interesting to me since I've fairly recently started sharing an apartment with a friend of mine. Thinking about it, when I get into such situations with her I often end up thinking in terms of rights and reciprocation.
To take one example out of many, she often brings home a friend of hers who I don't like much. I decided not to object for two reasons: first, it's her house and it seems to me she has a right to bring whoever she likes, unless I have some very serious reason to object (on the order of 'he's a convicted criminal!' not, 'we just don't get along'.) Second, because I want - and expect - her to not object when I bring my friends home.
Interesting - I hadn't really thought about my rule-making process before, but now it looks like I apply this 'do unto others' thinking to all sorts of situations.

"I really dislike noise"

Yay, I'm not alone in having that preference, with that sort of outlandish severity, and having everyone treat me like I'm some sort of Utility Monster for expressing it!

No joke, way back in high school I was almost in a band called Hobos with Oboes.

Is Alicorn okay with you giving those real-life examples about her? I wouldn't want strife between you two for failing to account about what detail is private and what isn't.

I got both of them pre-approved by her before posting, and changed the wording slightly by her request. I hope she is comfortable enough to refuse to let me post them if she doesn't want me to do so.

Edited at 2012-10-10 11:07 pm (UTC)