Rule 1, part 3: Compliment management

I should start this one off by pointing out that there isn’t usually an issue with falling for flattery. More to the point, if you’re falling for flattery, then there isn’t much I can do to help you. The truly problematic targets of compliments involve targeting our superiority drive.

Truth vs Fact in the world of compliments

Hopefully, by now, you’ve picked up on the substantial difference between truth and fact. I draw a harsh line, but this is one of the ways that it’s useful. It is incredibly difficult to present an undeserved compliment in the form of fact. Identifying how tightly the compliment corresponds to fact provides a solid foundation for identifying the validity of a compliment.

All men are created equal

This statement, while bandied about a lot, is not literally true. I’ll never run as fast as Usain Bolt. My particular flavor of idiot savantry means that some things that you do every day are impossible for me, and that I can do some things that you would find impossible. This is almost always true between any two humans you might select.

There are a plethora of ways one can measure superiority. Our natural inclination is to find one that suits us and push it as the one true scale. The strength vs intellect rivalry is familiar to us, but at least they aren’t mutually exclusive. The rivalry between zero-sum and cooperation is much harsher.

The “all men created equal” clause basically states that there is no single all-encompassing trait that makes someone superior in a way that gives them the right to rule over others. It was written at a time when people still believed in Divine Right, the idea that God assigned some people to rule over the rest of us. We’ve mostly gotten over Divine Right, but we still think that being born into money provides us with de-facto superiority, so we’re not quite there yet.

Nonetheless, the philosophy provides a simple rule for your memetic firewall. Any time someone is suggesting that you are innately better than others, they are attempting to take advantage of a memetic exploit.

Dunning-Kruger and metaskills

Dunning-Kruger has been a fun catch phrase for last decade and, as we can expect, it’s been badly abused. The root of it says that 70% of people think that they’re better than average. Some people claim that it means that some people are just plain stupid, but that’s not the lesson to learn. What you really want to focus on is metaskills.

Metaskills absolutely cannot be over-valued. They are how you know whether or not you’re good at anything. If you don’t know how to measure yourself against others, or if you think that you don’t have to, then you are a walking opportunity waiting to be taken to the cleaners.

To understand Dunning-Kruger, we start with your standard bell curve of raw talent. Consider that this is theoretically lower than the average skill level of someone who actually works at it. If you have good metaskills, you can figure out what “better” means and head that direction. If you have poor metaskills, then you’re going to pick a random direction and head THAT direction.

Maybe you get lucky or maybe you think that letter-perfect standards compliance improve execution efficiency of software. Everyone will rate their actual skill level based on how far they’ve gone in their chosen direction, because that’s all they have to go on. This skews the bell curve of skills into the Dunning-Kruger curve.

The lesson to be learned is that metaskills are often more important than the corresponding primary skills. In school, we learn to hate tests them because it’s another opportunity for people to berate you for not doing what they want you to do. If they were presented and treated as an opportunity to gauge our own capabilities, I think everyone would be much happier.

The right to harm

I’m going to ask you to engage your cognitive dissonance management skills for this one. The easiest way to spot a harmful complimentary meme is by identifying that the meme gives you a right to harm others.

Right to harm is a true intellectual iceberg of a topic. It starts out looking like an obvious thing that is easy to spot and avoid, but the more you dig into the implications, the more you realize that it has its roots in the foundations of our society.

Let’s start with a simple, obvious case. One that sane people can recognize. You are an upstanding member of (insert religious sect here). Being gay is a sin. If people continue to be gay, then they will burn in hell for all eternity. Therefore, it is your god-given right, your responsibility even, to make being gay as unpleasant an experience as you can manage.

This case has all of the classic signs. It boosts your sense of superiority, identifying you as someone with very high moral standing. It identifies harm that people are doing to themselves. It states that your superior understanding of morality and damnation puts you in a position of responsibility. It identifies the perpetrator as clearly not understanding the long-term effects of their behavior.

Pardon me while I whip out a six syllable word. If we give the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt,and presume that they are not purposely doing the work of the Devil, this is a form of infantilization. The carrier of this meme is presuming that they know what’s good for someone better than the person, themselves, does.

Never underestimate the power of infantalization. Let’s move on to a harder case. One that you might not agree with.

Our country has a drug problem, but maybe not the one you’re thinking of. Medical professionals and politicians (contrast intended) all over the world have spent a great deal of time learning about those drugs and the people who use them. They believe that such knowledge gives them the right to tell everybody which drugs are good for them, and which drugs aren’t.

This sounds reasonable, but it’s a con game. Politicians have been using it to convince American that things like pot and mushrooms are worth jailing hundreds of thousands of people over. There’s more than ample evidence that the motivation for starting the war on drug was as a mechanism to oppress blacks and hispanics.

At least 20% of us go along with it because it gives us a sense of superiority. There’s no other rational reason for declining pain killers when you’re in pain. Others go along with it for political gain, or social standing, or because we don’t want to stand out. More than half have used street drugs. The remaining 30% have used prescription drugs in non-prescribed ways. It’s all different levels of illegal, and it invariably boils down to the zeroth commandment. Thou shalt not get caught.

If a gateway phenomena exists, you can look to the link between infantilization and dehumanization. I feel that one is just a milder case of the other, as with nationalism and racism.

When someone starts suggesting a right to harm, then you know they’re playing your ego.

Closing

Do you have other ways to spot harmful complimentary memes? If so, let me know and I can add it to the documentation.