# Navigating Respect: How to bid boldly, and when to humble yourself preemptively

In previous posts, we covered how [attention is how you get results](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iwDH6GtzaERKnxzCa/setpoint-the-experience-we-attend-to), and why [respect is necessary in order to direct attention](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZeTmtD6efTmfLTM23/the-role-of-respect-why-we-inevitably-appeal-to-authority). Basically, people have to perceive a reason to listen to you. Like attention, respect can also be negotiated, and comes with its own key questions for each direction. In this post, we'll cover how to *give* people a reason to listen to you -- or notice when there isn't one and what we can do instead.

The cleanest example I have for negotiation of respect -- and the one that really clarified this dynamic for me -- involves someone telling me that she didn't think she could be hypnotized, and asking me to hypnotize her. It was a silly stance, because I had *already* hypnotized her, leaving zero chance that she "couldn't". She did have an experience *failing* to be hypnotized at a stage show since then, and I suspect she had some other reasons for making things less than perfectly straight forward, but regardless of her reasons, she was claiming that she couldn't do a thing she could clearly do *and* that she wanted to do it, and that's just silly.

So when she asked if I'd hypnotize her I said "Sure. Just lemme know when you're ready". She laughed. Okay. That's fine. Get it out of your system, and let me know when you're ready. She settled down, and said "Okay". "You ready?". She laughed again, harder. This just kept going and going.

Negotiations for respect are about the value of information. To the extent I respect you, your perspective means something to me, and to the extent that I don't it doesn't.

Imagine you've tried a certain wine and didn't like it. Then some dummy tells you that it's the *best* wine that all the *best* wine tasters like (but the rubes lack the sophisticated palette to appreciate it), and you're going to like it too. False. Empirically disproven. You tried it, and you *didn't* like it.

But what if, instead of some dummy it's actually someone who knows his wines and has proven time and time again that he aces blind taste tests and isn't lying to push a product or an ego -- and furthermore that he understands *your* tastes in particular, and is five for five on prior recommendations. When *this* person tells you that it is a bit of a weird one, but that it's actually really good and you'll learn to appreciate it if you play with it a bit... it starts to feel like maybe it's not so "empirically disproven". Maybe there's something you missed. There might be some value that his perspective points at.

The measure of this value of information is something you feel. When you start to get hungry, at first it's easy to ignore or even miss the sign that you need food. Go longer without food, and it starts to tug on your attention more strongly. If you put your hand on the hot stove -- or pick up the wrong end of a fire poker -- that burning pain is information *that you care about*, and you know you care about it by how it commands your attention. Negotiating for respect, therefore, can be expected to share this quality.

And sure enough, it does. Watch [this American Idol audition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndw9Y5bfngc), for example. Any audition is a bid for attention (i.e. "listen to me sing!"), and the implicit claim is that his singing is good enough that he could conceivably win the competition. The claim isn't just something that "turns out to be false". The idea that him winning would even be conceivable is *laughable* to them. They're not just telling the contestant "No, you didn't make it", but also "We can't take your audition seriously". But learning that this piece of information is false isn't just "Oh. Okay, updated", because it *matters* to him. You don't go on a show like this without some sort of hopes and dreams attached, and what does it mean about those, if you were wrong to think you even had a chance? Does it mean you need lessons? That you shouldn't even hope? Being wrong about things like that is *uncomfortable*; even the judges were uncomfortable enough to shield their faces.

That doesn't mean it's always uncomfortable to spark laughter. If it's a joke, for example, then it's good if people don't take it seriously. If you say "Why doesn't the M&M factory hire blondes? Because they keep throwing out the Ws", then you probably don't want people saying "Makes sense. That's why I don't hire them". The difference is that those bits of laughter are rejecting bids for respect that you *yourself* reject (No, I don't *actually* think blondes are too dumb to hire. You're *supposed* to laugh at that bid for that idea to be taken seriously).

Nor do bids for respect don't have to be laughed off to be denied, though that is an illustrative extreme. If someone just ignores you, that shows a lack of respect. Or if they just turn their back and walk away, that too. It's the serious disagreement over value of information that makes things uncomfortable. There's an impulse to fill the gap, release the tension, and as a result immediately stop any respect negotiation that may be going on -- even though it may have led to productive resolution if you had let it continue.

One example that comes to mind is when I was trying to sign up with a gym membership I had bought at Costco. The lady working there told me she couldn't sign me up with that because I had previously had a membership at that gym and the Costco deal was supposedly for new members (or something like that). She then started listing details of the deals she *could* offer me, with the expectation that I accept her bid for "No Costco deal, sign up the regular way". The easy ("non awkward") thing to do in such situations is to say "Oh, okay", and either pick a deal she offered or say "Thanks anyway" and leave. Or, for that matter, to get pissy and scream at her until security throws you out (because hey, no need to expect that to work, so it's easy to get your expectations fulfilled).

The slightly harder -- and conspicuously awkward -- thing, is to decline to accept her bid *and* decline to close the negotiation on your own. When she said she couldn't do it and started rattling off alternatives, I just thought for a moment. After recognizing that I had no compelling argument for why she had to accept the Costco thing, and that I *also* wasn't going to sign up for a regular membership on the spot, I told her "I'm not going to do that today". I could have added "Thanks, bye", and got out of the tension by cutting the negotiation prematurely. If she would have said "Okay, come back if you change your mind", I would have, because at that point it wouldn't have been premature. But I didn't know that there was nowhere else the negotiation could go, I just knew that I wasn't gonna do that today. So I said that I wasn't gonna do that today, and waited for her to respond.

Yes, it was a bit awkward. Yes, I felt the tension too. And after a couple seconds she decided that you know, she actually *can* accept the Costco deal, and just make an exception for me. I wasn't expecting that, but it was nice. Her demeanor had also completely changed from a cold and "professional" to warm, friendly, and even rapport seeking. To caricature a bit, if I had asked her where the nearest McDonalds was or some other slight favor, I would have expected something like "I'm just here for membership questions" before the shift, and "On the corner of such and such. You know the Starbucks? Yeah, right past that and to the left!" after[^u19zbqme2vc].

  
 

I also found this to be useful when working with the hypnosis chat bot. When doing text hypnosis I would usually try for a phenomenon (e.g. "you feel your hand getting tingly" to start with), and then if I didn't get a confirmatory response, I would layer onto it, describing in increasing detail what the suggested experience was to feel like. I was lazy with the chat bot though, and the chat bot would just sit there indefinitely until you told it you felt it or told it you didn't -- and surprisingly enough, it was getting *better* results than I was! Looking through the logs, sometimes people just sat there for minutes, long after I would have given up and concluded "it didn't work". The "patience" of my bot held that expectation until it built up enough that they started enacting the suggestion to get out of the tension. When people *knew* they were dealing with a chat bot, the same words led to a different experience. Instead of "Oh, this person *still* expects me to respond", and feeling that tension build until it motivates a response, they knew there *was* no expectation on the other side of the screen. The screen was just showing words, it just felt like "Oh, I guess it didn't work", and there was no negotiation to increase "respect" as needed to achieve the results. Same words, no negotiation for respect, different results.

With my "I can't be hypnotized!" friend, it was the opposite side of this. She *knew* I was a real person, and she could *see* me holding a real expectation that she could be hypnotized if she wants. With every laugh it was obvious that it just wasn't changing my mind -- not because I was shutting it out, just that her laughter wasn't evidence that my perspective was mistaken. It wasn't uncomfortable on *my* end, because I knew she had that capability and she wanted to be there. On her end though, for whatever reason the "I can't" had been taken pretty seriously, so when in contact with my "Oh, that's definitely not true" stance, there was some nervous laughter as we essentially played the Aumann Agreement Game[^1vq4l88zdcs]. And because I stayed engaged, it continued to provide evidence that this strong expectation she somehow had of not going into hypnosis was just wrong.

It took an incredible *forty minutes* for her laughter to die out (which I was fine with, because it was fascinating to me), and for her to settle into "Okay, I'm ready". Once she did all I had to say was essentially "Okay, remember what it's like to be in hypnosis? Good. Go back into hypnosis now". After all that "I can't", it turned out to be completely *trivial* \-\- if you don't count as nontrivial the knowledge that she definitely could, and the ability to recognize when she was actually ready to try.

Like bidding for attention, bidding for respect can be as simple as repeating the same thing, or just waiting. The important part isn't which specific things you do to bid, because that's all downstream of embodying the belief that your perspective is meaningful. The important part is whether you know you can support the bid, because that determines what you'll find downstream.

If you bid strongly, your bid will probably be rejected -- at first. They might ignore you. They might laugh at you. *They might be right to*. Have you thought that through? Do you know what laughter means, and at which point you will start to become uncomfortable yourself as you pick up on signs that you may have over asked?

When you can hold your ground in the face of laughter and rejected bids, your bid can continue to tug and create tension that tells them "Maybe I've underestimated, and should reconsider". The natural tendency is to *avoid* being laughed at, and that has it's place, but when you're confident that you can justify higher levels of respect that inclination is directly backwards. Sometimes, when done in contact with reality and when reality supports it, "being provocative" has a purpose -- or, coming at it from another angle, "Sometimes the truth is provocative, and therefore it becomes very difficult to convey the truth if you shy away from saying things which people are uncomfortable with".

This is part of what was going on in the [jacuzzi example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JpY7uztEdTF7HSDrT/beneath-psychology-introduction-part-2-the-solution-and-what). When I hinted that her own perspective framed her as ugly without invalidating the idea, that was pretty provocative. Normally, when you say something like that and the person responds "Are you calling me ugly!?", you feel a pressure to backpedal so as to avoid offense. But I knew the judgement wasn't coming from me so it couldn't be pinned on me, and I felt pretty sure the contradiction was worth at least gesturing at. The risk of her humiliating me by pointing out how her perspective didn't actually imply what I thought seemed pretty low, so I was willing to stick my neck out and take that risk. I anticipated that once we both faced reality long enough for one of us to see what we were missing, and be forced to laugh at ourselves, it'd be her. So I held my ground with a smile on my face, and sure enough she came around to the idea that she was taking her own neuroticisms a little too seriously, and that maybe this stranger's perspective would be worth hearing.

So that's the "bid for respect" move. "How can I set myself up for unmistakable humiliation if I'm wrong?" and then do that -- if you dare[^wzvw5lqso1].

  
When you daren't, there might be good reason for that. If you aren't *completely* comfortable setting yourself up to risk humiliation, that's a hint that *you* anticipate a nontrivial chance that you're missing something important. You're always free to bid less boldly and avoid the laughter, and a good way to avoid being taken down a peg or two is to refrain from putting yourself on a pedestal to begin with. In fact, you can *work to climb down*. Maybe take yourself a little less seriously. Maybe offer to take *them* a little more seriously, and ask with sincere intent whether they're feeling respected enough by you.

This is *also* part of what was going on in the jacuzzi example.

I did poke a little fun by framing her own perspective in words that made it *visibly* silly, but I didn't *tell her* that she was being silly. I mean, maybe she wasn't. What if I'm wrong? It was clear to me that *she* wasn't seeing her concerns as silly. I didn't really feel like I could *overtly* laugh at her, while looking her in the eye and caring how she feels, and *not* feel a convincing amount of "Oof, maybe she's worried about something important that you're not seeing, and you're just being an overconfident ass". So I didn't do that, and instead offered to take her seriously. As seriously as she wanted me to, while also not hiding from the fact that it *did* seem a bit silly to me.

The words I said were "Yeah, don't do it. Your makeup might wash off, and then people would see what you really look like", but one of the things that was communicated by *the fact that I was saying it in the way that I was saying it*, was "I'm willing to take you as seriously as you want. How seriously *is* that?".

Partly bidding for respect by poking fun with a hint of a smirk and a wink as if to say "I bet you'll come around to my perspective, and I'm willing to eat a little humble pie if you can tell me I'm wrong". Partly giving her room to give me respect by offering her as much respect as she wanted and needed, so that she didn't need to make it a zero sum fight out of it, and we could simply play with the data as it comes out.

In this case she did come to agree with my initial perspective, but just like the attention question of "Am I missing something?", the answer you get in response to "Am I taking you seriously enough"/"Is my own perspective worth less than I think?" can be that you *are* overvaluing your own perspective with respect to theirs. If you're confident in your own stance, you can see if you can hold that smile and confidence for forty minutes of them laughing at you, and sometimes it'll pan out. In other situations though, you're going to feel your confidence dwindle at each moment their confidence doesn't, and the quicker you get out in front of the inevitable reality the better off you're going to be.

  
Most of the time, it's about saying "oops" earlier, rather than more boldly laughing at people or inducing them to laugh at us. The extremes serve to illustrate the full space of possibilities, and the directions in which we might want to take marginal steps, but most steps *are* on the margin. And at least at first, most of them are in the direction of humbling ourselves.

To give a more common place example, think of the stereotypical guy whining that his stereotypical girlfriend ["Doesn't want solutions"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg), and judging her as "emotional" and "irrational" for "just wanting him to *listen*"[^u1ncn544k4n]. When he says "Then don't talk to Becky. Problem *solved*", she probably doesn't spend even a moment being present with that and feeling her perspective shift, because she *immediately* rejects his perspective as coming from a place of *not getting it*. And when she complains that he's not listening, he *also* probably isn't spending any measurable fraction of a second being moved by her words -- instead immediately blowing off her concerns as not-informed by the critical piece of information that he just gave: "This is a non-problem". This "You need to listen!"/"Nuh uh, you do!" problem is a common example of where disagreements fail to resolve due to missing respect. No amount of bidding seriously for attention will help, because the bid isn't *disagreed with*. It's *dismissed*.

So how can we navigate the layer of respect in order to resolve this?

Theoretically, we could just poke fun and troll our boyfriends/girlfriends until they recognize that we're actually definitely totally right, and not at all flinching from reality. And if you can pull that off, good for you. Realistically though, we're usually not so confident and usually can't pull that off without that little "I wish they'd just give me the respect that I deserve!!!" nagging through and pointing out that we don't have the security needed to play this game right now.

The option that we *do* usually have, is to notice that this lack of security (which shows up as "I can't actually have fun and anticipate that they'll validate my rightness when I poke fun at them") indicates that we don't *actually* know that we're right about our perspective being worth what we present it as worth.

And then, once we notice, it's pretty natural to consider the other person's perspective a bit more. How *could* it make sense to want to be listened to more than to have your boyfriend try to fix your problem? Oh, right. "He's an idiot that *doesn't know* what the problem is". *That's* why it's important to her that I listen first. Maybe the problem isn't just the nail, but the fact that she somehow ended up with a nail in her head, and it's likely to end more poorly next time. Seriously, who the fuck sees a nail in their girlfriend's head and has no curiosity about how it got there?

Or like... maybe he *does* get it. Maybe it really *is* just about the nail, and it was a freak accident which won't happen again. Have I actually considered that? Do I even know what it would *look like*, if my boyfriend had already done his homework, and I'm just not giving credit where it's due?

  
If you expect people to wonder in awe when you ask stupid questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or actually look for how you could be right when you tell them "Apparently you can just decide to not swell" -- or even just ask for your perspective on the necessity of their makeup -- you're going invite push back at first. People are going to laugh at you, and not take you as seriously as you want, and watch to see how you respond.

And if you can stay engaged with a smile on your face as you face the challenges, you'll earn your way there.

When you can't, because *your own beliefs* are shifting in response to evidence that maybe your perspective isn't so superior as you think, then the earlier you start acting in line with your own best estimates the better off you'll be -- in your own best estimates.

The bolder you let yourself consider being, the easier it becomes to notice the calls for humility. Like target shooting and negotiating for attention, negotiating for respect is simple. Aim for the truth, and make up your mind before you flinch.

How much respect *do* you deserve here?  
 

[^u19zbqme2vc]:  It might be tempting to wonder "Is that really respect though?". Maybe it was just flirting, which doesn't imply she thinks you're right about anything. Or maybe it's simply avoiding awkwardness. And the answer is "Yes, it is respect".There are a couple things here to notice.First, respect is expected value in attending to a thing, not probability that a thing is right. If we someday elect a president who thinks it would be a good idea to "solve poverty" by simply banning it, and you find yourself in the position of adviser to the president, what are you gonna say? "Pshh, that question is too stupid to justify with a response"? And get replaced with someone who doesn't respond that way? You could, but do you expect that to lead to the outcomes you want? Or you could say "Help me understand where you're coming from here, I want to make sure I get this right"? The latter is very obviously more respectful, and that does not at all imply that you think it's a good idea -- just that you recognize it's worth engaging with his ideas because he's the one that has power to do something.Secondly, because of this, respect generalizes. Maybe you listen to someone because you think they have all the right answers, or because its important that you can make sure they do because they're the one with the finger on the button. Or maybe because they're kinda cute and you want them to like you. Or maybe you are just uncomfortable holding a firm "no" because you don't respect your own ability to justify a "no". Regardless of the reason, the result is the same; you're listening, and following their lead.If you "respect your physics prof on the subject of physics but not politics" and respond to his broaching the topic of politics with "Obviously you're very intelligent and have lots to teach, but what makes you think the things you have to teach extend beyond your expertise in physics?", you're still considering his bid even though you would have otherwise not been interested in going there. On the other hand, if you were to respond "Yeah yeah whatever, no one cares what you think. Now explain this equation, physics monkey" then no one is going to confuse that with respect.Or another way of saying it, if there's only one direction you're willing to "follow their attention" then it isn't them directing attention, and you are demonstrating no respect. 

[^1vq4l88zdcs]: "Aumann's agreement theorem. roughly speaking, says that two agents acting rationally (in a certain precise sense) and with common knowledge of each other's beliefs cannot agree to disagree"This relies on belief in the other Bayesian reasoners conclusions are meaningful evidence, which is another way of saying "respect".  

[^wzvw5lqso1]: As another example of "techniques fall out of the framework, when they're appropriate", "How can I set myself up for humiliation" sounds like a good description of the iconic PUA technique called "peacocking", where they dress up in goofy hats and goggles. Note that this isn't one of the notorious techniques, and this one gets them laughed at more than hated. I'd be embarrassed dressing up like that for no reason, and that's the point. 

[^u1ncn544k4n]: Reality isn't stereotypes, of course. I actually identify with the stereotypically female frustration here more than the stereotypically male side. But that just means that we have to watch out on both sides.