In my experience, the most important parts of a sensitive discussion is to display kindness, empathy, and common ground.
It’s disheartening to write something on a sensitive topic based on upsetting personal experiences, only to be met with seemingly stonehearted critique or dismissal. Small displays of empathy and gratitude can go a long way towards this, to make people feel like their honesty and vulnerability has been rewarded rather than punished.
I think your points are good, but if deployed wrongly could make things worse. For example, if a non-rationalist friend of yours tells you about their experiences with harassment, immediately jumping into a bayesian analysis of the situation is ill-advised and may lose you a friend.
(Written in a personal capacity) Yeah, agree, and your comment made me realize that some of these are actually my experimental thoughts on something like “facilitating / moderating” sensitive conversations. I don’t know if what you’re pointing at is common knowledge, but I’d hope it is, and in my head it’s firmly in “nonexperimental”, standard and important wisdom (as contained, I believe, in some other written advice on this for EA group leaders and others who might be in this position).
From my perspective, a hard thing is how much work is done by tone and presence—I know people who can do the “talk about a bayesian analysis of harassment” with non-rationalists with sensitivity, warmth, care, and people who do “displaying kindness, empathy and common ground” in a way that leaves people more tense than before. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t generally better advice, I think it probably is for most people—and I hope it’s in people’s standard toolkits.
In my experience, the most important parts of a sensitive discussion is to display kindness, empathy, and common ground.
It’s disheartening to write something on a sensitive topic based on upsetting personal experiences, only to be met with seemingly stonehearted critique or dismissal. Small displays of empathy and gratitude can go a long way towards this, to make people feel like their honesty and vulnerability has been rewarded rather than punished.
I think your points are good, but if deployed wrongly could make things worse. For example, if a non-rationalist friend of yours tells you about their experiences with harassment, immediately jumping into a bayesian analysis of the situation is ill-advised and may lose you a friend.
(Written in a personal capacity) Yeah, agree, and your comment made me realize that some of these are actually my experimental thoughts on something like “facilitating / moderating” sensitive conversations. I don’t know if what you’re pointing at is common knowledge, but I’d hope it is, and in my head it’s firmly in “nonexperimental”, standard and important wisdom (as contained, I believe, in some other written advice on this for EA group leaders and others who might be in this position).
From my perspective, a hard thing is how much work is done by tone and presence—I know people who can do the “talk about a bayesian analysis of harassment” with non-rationalists with sensitivity, warmth, care, and people who do “displaying kindness, empathy and common ground” in a way that leaves people more tense than before. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t generally better advice, I think it probably is for most people—and I hope it’s in people’s standard toolkits.