7 Cups Community Feedback Survey

I responded to today's survey:

Your username? * RarelyCharlie

Where are you from, and a few sentences about yourself? I'm from England.

How did you hear about 7 Cups? * It was mentioned in a comment on some blog I follow, but I don't remember which blog.

Why did you want to be a part of 7 Cups? * To be a listener.

What community activities do you participate in? * None. I don't think of anything I do at 7 Cups as participating in a community activity.

What do you get out of participating? * —

What do you enjoy most? Why? * Listening, because it seems to be most helpful thing I can do.

What's frustrating? Why? Lack of certainty about 7 Cups' overall direction and strategy, lack of transparency, lack of technical agility. Because these limit my participation.

Are you interested in participating more in the community? What would you like to do? * Yes, but I don't know what, partly because of that lack of direction, strategy and transparency.

If you could wave a magic wand and summon any tool or resource for community members like yourself, what would you ask for?
If it's limited to tools or resources, chat reporting that doesn't rely on screenshots (as discussed in the forum).

For future reference, what other questions should we have asked here? Anything else youd like to share? Questions: How do you hope 7 Cups will be different a year from now? 5 years from now?

Charlie

Internet safety

I'm impressed by Tumblr's approach to teaching their users about Internet safety. Their focus is on a fairly small number of key messages, presented in an attention-grabbing video format.

To combat bullying, for example, they've been working with experts—the UK-based international anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label, which has its own Tumblr blog at @ditchthelabel.

You can see the anti-bullying video here (less then 3 minutes):

Don't @ Me

It starts by providing general information about cyberbullying:

The use of digital technologies with the intent to humiliate, harass, or abuse another.
Therefore anything that hurts, intimidates or humiliates counts as cyberbullying.

Then it addresses victims of bullying, listing three things to remember:

#1 Never reply

#2 Report and block

#3 Talk about it

I think it's unfortunate that this advice partly conflicts with the rules and traditions at 7 Cups.

Finally, the video explains three things to do to ensure you aren't bullying people without realizing:

#1 Never ever say things online that you wouldn't be willing to say to that person's face.

#2 Don't troll another person – especially if you don't know them IRL.

#3 Never threaten anyone online, even if you think it's just joking around.

I think it would be good if 7 Cups and other platforms could consider adopting common advice on Internet safety issues such as bullying. Different advice on different platforms is confusing and leaves vulnerable people more vulnerable. Partering with Ditch the Label could be a useful starting point.

Charlie

The Power of Bad

I've just finished reading The Power of Bad by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. It's a well-researched exploration of the strong bias for negativity in human psychology, and the many effects it has on our lives:

The Rule of Four: It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing.

This negativity effect, the authors say, explains a wide range of phenomena—for example, Safety Junkies:

Of all the forms of addiction, the most costly is the one that gets the least attention: an addiction to safety. We pay so much attention to bad things—reliving them, imagining them, avoiding them—that we let fear run our lives and become irrationally cautious.

And what they call the Crisis Crisis:

Apocalyptic predictions have become so common that when a national sample of preteen children in America were asked what the planet would be like when they grew up, one in three of the children feared that Earth would no longer exist.

However, opposite forms of bias in human psychology counteract the negativity effect. For example, research into social media showed a positivity bias at work:

People who post more positive messages are considered more attractive, get more social support in return, and consequently feel happier, whereas those who post downbeat messages get less encouragement and can end up feeling worse.

So, although this book is filled with great examples and the notes are filled with great references backing everything up, in the end I found the negativity bias and the positivity bias hard to disentangle.

I think, to oversimplify, it seems to be almost like: when we receive information we have a negativity bias (paying much more attention to negative information), but when we provide information we have a positivity bias (saying that things are far more positive than they really are).

Anyway both biases probably mess up active listening, because the intention is for members to feel heard, valued and understood, but in order to achieve that listeners must overcome their bias in both directions.

Negativity bias would lead to a (fictitious) chat like this:

Member: I'm feeling much better today. My bf finally got some days off work and we spent a great weekend together, even though it rained all the time lol

Listener: Oh no, I'm so sorry it rained

Positivity bias would lead to a (fictitious) chat like this:

Member: I've been very severely depressed for more than twenty years. I've given up any hope of a normal life.

Listener: I'm so sorry you've been feeling sad recently. Remember to stay strong

The Power of Bad has a positive message overall, which is that if we can understand these sources of bias in ourselves and everyone else we can function much better:

There will always be social stupidities and moral panics, but individuals can learn to think for themselves. That's why we wrote this book.

Charlie

I liked this very short story about authenticity and being a listener:

I didnt know what to say, so I didnt say anything.

Peer Behind the Mask of My Smile by Melissa Toni

Charlie

Tim Kreider is a writer whose blog post last year, I Am a Meme Now — And So Are You, is a reflection on the loss of ownership of ourselves that the Internet imposes on any artist, or indeed anyone at all:

The issue isnt that youll be despised for who you really are... Its scarier than that: its that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that youre not who you thought you were.

But he concludes that being defined by what other people think of us, not by the image we'd like to project, goes back a long way:

...as The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we dont become fully real except in other peoples eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other peoples perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.

(The story of The Velveteen Rabbit was somehow missing from my childhood—I'd never heard of it until I read this and looked it up.)

All this came about because of a 2013 essay, I Know What You Think of Me, that was published in The New York Times. The essay's last line was:

if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known

That one line kind of escaped into the wild and became an Internet meme, losing its context and the meaning the author intended.

This seems very relevant on 7 Cups, where few of us use our own names and photos. We become real on 7 Cups in a way that doesn't necessarily match the reality of who we are anywhere else.

Charlie

I previously mentioned Goodhart's Law in the context of 7 Cups' top three weaknesses.

Yesterday I noticed a blog post explaining how Goodhart's Law can undermine people's goals for self-improvement: Dont Goodhart Yourself

Goodhart's Law can be summarized as:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

For example, you notice that when you're depressed you don't do the dishes. So doing the dishes becomes a measure of how depressed you are. But if you make doing the dishes your target, that doesn't help your depression. As soon as doing the dishes becomes a target it's no longer a good measure of how depressed you are.

More generally this is a way of saying that people sometimes undermine their own plans for self-improvement when they focus on improving something symbolic that isn't the thing they really want to improve. The blogger, Ozymandias at Thing of Things, gives examples from a variety of contexts, such as relationships, self-harm and depression:

You think youve fixed your depression, but actually youre just willpowering your way through doing the dishes.

This is relevant to a very wide range of things that people struggle with.

For listeners at 7 Cups it might often be helpful to notice and reflect when a member is Goodharting themselves—when they are working to achieve a target that in some way represents the thing they want, but in reality is not the actual thing they want.

Listeners who like to solve members' problems and make helpful suggestions should also, perhaps, take care to ensure that they are not encouraging members to Goodhart themselves by pursuing targets that don't directly match their real goals.

Charlie

The blue pointy hat

A well known California psychiatrist and blogger recently described the difference between being a psychiatrist and being a therapist. I think it's a gem:

I wear a psychiatrist hat and a therapist hat. I love the psychiatrist hat. It is blue and pointy and has little glowing stars and moons on it. When I wear it, then with sufficient knowledge and understanding I can give people substances that release obsessions, calm fears, and brighten sorrows. Sometimes I can help people solve their unbearable hopeless problems, and its the best feeling in the world.

I hate wearing the therapist hat. I put it on as rarely as possible. I dont advertise myself as a therapist, and if people ask me to therapy them, I try to refer them to someone else. But if someone wants to talk about their problems in a session, you cant just say no. And so they tell me about being trapped in an abusive relationship, or haunted by guilt, or trapped in a dead end job with no prospects for improvement. And then they expect me to be able to say something that makes it all better. I know that the textbook response is something about how therapy does not solve problems per se, but by sharing them with someone else it makes them more bearable and adds perspective. Unfortunately, my patients didnt read that textbook, and they put hope in me, and as often as not I betray it.

Listeners, too, will know the feeling—"unfortunately, my members didn't read that textbook". More on this later...

(The quote is buried in a long book review about something else entirely: Book Review: The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work.)

Charlie

Free will

I've just read a short but annoying book by Sam Harris: Free Will

One of the reasons it's annoying is that it doesn't start from scratch and explain with any clarity what free will is. It just jumps straight in and assumes the reader already knows such a basic thing.

So after a few pages I had to stop reading and think hard about what I myself mean by free will, to provide some starting point for understanding the book. Unfortunately, doing that made the rest of the book seem even more annoying.

The rest of the book makes the claim that free will doesn't exist. I think it does this in an illogical way that I didn't believe in at all.

The basic reasoning is like trying to prove that air doesn't exist. You can say that air is mainly nitrogen, with some oxygen, a little water vapour, a tiny amount of argon, a teeny-tiny amount of carbon dioxide, and teenier-tiner amounts of other gases. Therefore air, itself, doesn't exist. Only these separate gases exist.

This is nonsense. Air is a perfectly good term for the overall mixture.

This book does that with free will. If you examine free will in a lot of detail you can say that it's derived from a lot of other things going on in our brains. Therefore free will, itself, doesn't exist. Only these other things exist. I think this is just foolish.

I think free will is when, from the point of view of an external observer, someone appears to choose between doing one thing and another for reasons that appear to be partly internal to that person.

To develop an example from the book, if I observe Sam Harris having a second cup of coffee and I have no knowledge of any external pressure forcing him to have a second cup of coffee, then I use the term free will to describe his decision-making process. He chose to have a second cup through his own free will.

When I think about my own free will, I'm saying that when I imagine observing myself, I appear to choose between doing one thing and another for reasons that appear to be partly internal to me.

Going into detail about the mechanisms in the brain that are involved in making choices is like going into detail about the gases that make up air. It's nonsense to pretend that free will and air don't exist just because they are made up of other things. Like air, free will is a perfectly good term for the overall end result.

I might have made it sound as if the book is just stupid. But it's not. It's very clever at presenting its argument in a confusing way.

For example, several of the choices described in the book are to do with horrific murders. A more reasonable book would not use emotionally charged events like those to help make its claims. And the book often leaves logic behind entirely and simply states, with no explanation at all, that free will does not exist. A more reasonable book would explain in more detail and not simply skip to the author's desired conclusion.

At 7 Cups I think it's probably important to acknowledge the existence of free will and the possibility of making deliberate choices. I'm freely choosing to ignore what this book has to say about it

Charlie

More censorship

The chat censor was recently changed to ban certain words by replacing them with asterisks. There was no announcement about the change, and there are some indications that it might have been a mistake.

Chatroom users will be familiar with the problems and also the merriment this causes, but as I don't go in the rooms this has been yet another opportunity for me to giggle at 7 Cups' childish attempts at censorship.

The first time I noticed was when I tried to use the word shit in a chat—not as a swear word, I meant actual excrement. I can't reveal details of the chat, of course, but this was a perfectly legitimate use of the word. Honest. The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

Sense of "excrement" dates from 1580s (Old English had scytel, Middle English shitel for "dung, excrement;"

7 Cups' censor would have been OK with excrement, dung, crap, poop, or almost anything else, but in that chat shit was replaced by ***, to my surprise. Computing the number of asterisks to match the length of the word might perhaps have been too challenging, or perhaps it would give too much away.

I had a look at the other banned words. I believe the examples that follow were correct at the time of writing, but the word list can change at any time.

A couple of words I didn't recognize turned out to be Hindi (written in English letters), though one of them is misspelled or unusually spelled so that if you spell it normally it won't be censored. I guess Hindi probably contains more than just a couple of bad words, though, and these two are not the worst. I wonder if the current translation project will include lists of banned words in every language.

The well known American Sign Language problem is still there—we can't say ASL. If you're in the habit of writing JFC to mean "just for clarification", that is also banned. And the less well known skyscraper problem is still there, too, but for a slightly different reason.

OMG is allowed, but don't try to make it more forceful because OMFG is banned. Go even further with ZOMFG and it's fine, though. Similarly, STFU is banned but going further with GTFO is fine. You can see the pattern. IDGAF is banned, but the more forceful IDGAFF is OK.

We are banned from mentioning a certain country in West Africa, a certain district in Newfoundland, and a certain village in Norway. Which they are is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you met your true love on Tinder you cannot say so, but if it was on Grindr (or almost anywhere else) that's fine.

It's strange to see that we can't say penis or vagina, because those are the actual correct terms. Some other actual correct medical terms are banned, together with a lot of common slang terms, of course, but some of the most vulgar slang around is allowed. Delicacy restrains me from giving examples.

There are well over 200 banned words, so remembering them all is not a solution. Most of them are allowed if you mistype them in various ways, but a few common misspellings are listed separately in order to catch us out.

I hope this diasppointing feechur will be removed soon. When shit turns into *** it's just amusing, but when a member who might be very upset about something is not able to tell a listener what happened it's a very real concern. For example, someone who's being bullied should be able to tell a listener what the bully actually said.

Charlie

Automatic links

There has always (or as long as I can remember) been a bug in chats and chatrooms. If you type three dots (an ellipsis) like this... then 7 Cups automatically makes it into a link, so in the past you would get this... Well, someone has changed the code so that doesn't happen any more. Instead, you get: http://this... That's right, they made it worse!

In fact automatic links are quite difficult to get right. The enhanced editor that I'm using in the forum to type this post also has an automatic links feature. It correctly leaves things like this... alone, but it still doesn't get absolutely everything right. I noticed a while ago that a link containing an equals sign wasn't being converted correctly, so this morning I fixed that.

A URL like this should now be converted into a link correctly: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=linkify

While I was there, I added a face with medical mask to the emoji

Charlie