I tend to agree with this. I struggle with non-violent communication. All the violence I've experienced in communication has been high social skill people passive aggressively using "appropriate channels" and "emotional intelligence" to harm me. I tend to prefer directness whether it's up or down the power ladder, and yet the trend is away from that overall. It's sort of minority rule too, where most people prefer directness, but a few people really hate it and force "non-violence" on everyone. Of course, the forcing bit implicates violence...
You're describing an algorithm, albeit an informal one. The problem is that there is no general algorithm for social skills, which means that this algorithm is useless in the general case. Now, if one treats your listed points as a set of heuristics rather than an algorithm and then perceptively applies them to a given social interaction, they probably will be useful. But, of course, the ability to do that is exactly the same thing as having social skills. This explains why it strikes many people as both patronizing and unhelpful: because it is.
There obviously is a general algorithm for social skills; otherwise humans couldn't socialise.
However there is no algorithm independent from what other people say and do. So any strategy that doesn't involve carefully considering what other people say and do is bound to fail.
I disagree that a thing has to be decidable for there to be a relevant algorithm; an algorithm is a defined set of steps to take for a given input. And there is always the option of modelling social interaction as a decidable system then come up with an algorithm for the model (which is how most algorithms are used in practice, any decidable algorithm performs strangely in a physical world when it has to cope with cosmic rays hitting the CPU).
For people to be able to interact socially they have to make predictions about the consequences of their actions. That can be formulated as some sort of stochastic model. This is enough of a hook that algorithms can be used.
Anyway, that is fairly academic because in practice humans are obviously very predictable and tend to have quite stable personalities over time. There is a wealth of psychological literature classifying major personality traits [eg, 0] and most people respond in a normal way to incentives and social hierarchy with some adjustments for their cultural background.
> All the violence I've experienced in communication has been high social skill people passive aggressively using "appropriate channels" and "emotional intelligence" to harm me.
What would be useful is a kind of "defense against the dark arts" program aimed at teaching people who prefer and practice direct communication to defend against these harms without feeling like they have to start using manipulative tricks themselves.
This is what I've been building for the last four years—mostly offline, but putting more stuff online:
emotionalselfdefense.com
...unless you were referring to NVC itself, as I think it could also be used for this, although much of the work that I do is trying to build on the shoulders of NVC.
