post-blame apology
- Subtitle: I owe apology an apology
- (Maybe? although owing someone an apology is maybe kinda sus and not really what I'm talking about)
- other ideas:
- An apology to apology
- I'm sorry apology
- Dear apology, I'm sorry
- (huh, if I were actually writing the thing in this format though, I'd want it to embody this very principle of apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame)
- Rehabilitating apology into something post-blame.
- Warning: this is an advanced technique, to be practiced in contexts that already have some amount of shared frame on why you might want to do away with apology altogether, and why nobody is to blame / blame is a confusion.
- (edit much later: eh I think it's potentially fine for anyone to use it. not that there aren't downsides but this isn't the central one)
- You might get some mileage out if it in other contexts, but I make no guarantees about those contexts. I mean, I can't make guarantees in any case, since there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, so if you try this and it doesn't work for someone, it doesn't work for them.
- Relatedly: don't apologize to angry mobs making demands, because then they'll conclude that since you admitted you were wrong, they must be right, and they'll try to enact ever more from you.
- TL;DR =
- (this should maybe just be the blog post title)
- you're not apologizing for what you did; it was coherent
- you're apologizing for the inevitable impact of what you did; you see now that it was unworkable for the other person
- Prose draft:
- For nearly a decade I've been aiming to live in a culture that has a principle of not apologizing. I wrote a blog post about this 8 years ago: Apologizing and Forgiving
- I've since come to realize that while there's something really powerful that happens in a post-apology frame, my old post-apology frame didn't have an adequate replacement for the speech act known as apology.
- This is an equivalent realization to one I recently had around post-regret, recognizing that while in some sense nobody has ever made a mistake in the entire history of the universe, it's important to be able to have the thought "ahh I fucked up there"
- Why no apology? The case against
- Implied debts, implied blames
- Apologies can readily evoke a blame frame, or the idea that somebody did something wrong.
- In my 2013 post I wrote:
- > An apology, we teased out, has three parts:
1. acknowledging your actions and the negative impact that they had
2. stating that you wish you had done things differently (and, if applicable, that you intend to do things differently in the future)
3. asking for forgiveness
- Why apology? The case for
- Implied in an apology is an acknowledgement and a question around trust.
- The acknowledgement is: based on what happened here, you may not trust me in some way.
- A sincere apology isn't just saying that that's so, it's also doing so in a way that says "it makes sense that your trust in me may have shifted based on what happened"
- The question is: do you want to reconcile, and what will that take?
- Present in here is an acknowledgement that you can't directly control whether someone forgives you.
- Forgiveness is a bit of a nebulous thing.
- This is related to you can't trust any more than you can trust; if someone can't forgive you then they can't forgive you (until they can). And that may be partially about you, and partially about them. Maybe they haven't learned how to
- (punishment doesn't restore trust)
- My new synthesis: coherence-aware post-blame apology
- Arguably one could say "apologies are still bad and it would be better to just do extra acknowledging & questioning moves to achieve these new pieces you didn't understand in 2013". And... that's an option! I may try it a bit myself, and if you do so, let me know how it works and whether it feels adequate.
- As I started taking frame dialogue more seriously, I realized that the issue with standard-issue apologies is that they do frame equivocation, ie they aren't clear whose frame they're in. As usual, this frame equivocation ends up even denying that there are different frames.
- This has a powerful and problematic effect. Since an apology says "you were wronged", if there's no space for different frames, that directly implies that I did something wrong! Which is blame, and blame is a confusion.
- Accepting blame can be a dangerous thing to do, particularly when people are looking for someone to punish: Relatedly: don't apologize to angry mobs making demands, because then they'll conclude that since you admitted you were wrong, they must be right, and they'll try to enact ever more from you.
- Right and wrong don't exist in an absolute global dualistic sense, but they do as personal experiences that we have, and so something I do that was locally right for me to do might create a wrongness for someone else, which means that it was wrong for the two of us.
- So in order to reconcile this situation, I need to acknowledge how the other person was wronged, without making myself wrong. The other person was wronged in their own frame, so the proof of work of my apology is to convey that I understand it, in their frame. It's
- How is this different from "I'm sorry that you're upset"?
- Fragments
- Nobody wants to hold a grudge, if they have a better option. It's not fun. We must thus conclude that anyone who is not able to forgive someone else doesn't feel able to do so (safely / without otherwise incurring some cost greater than the poison of resent).
- something about right/wrong not existing in a global sense, but existing in a local/personal/subjective sense
- I can't do anything wrong, but I can wrong you.
- Notes/desiderata:
- Hmm, this could use a nice example, either something fictional or a real case study
- I have relevant recordings February 26th, 2021 (of me & Sarah)
- this almost certainly contains an example but I forget if the example would be good for a blog post
- there's a really good comment on LW that someone linked from my fall 2013 post on apology
8 linked references
November 21st, 2022
- there's a bit at @ 22:35 in MS convo
November 1st, 2021
- T > sorry as apology being more like the sorry after someone dies
- feeling sorrow with
September 15th, 2021
- post-post apology case study post-blame apology
- see recording of debrief w Eric
apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame
- wait actually see this page for the content of this thesis
September 4th, 2021
- started working a bit on post-blame apology, writing up a sort of blog post draft there
- feeling a bit stuck/bleh/whatever there though
- lemme quickly make sure to note down all thoughts I have briefly though before they're gone