In My Culture

post by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T07:22:42.982Z · LW · GW · 59 comments

This is a link post for https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/in-my-culture-29c6464072b2

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60 comments

This is a linkpost for https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/in-my-culture-29c6464072b2 

One of my colleagues has a neat little trick.

Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation—especially if things are heated or tense or confusing—they’ll pause, and they’ll say something like:

“I’m sorry, but—look. In my culture…”

…and then they’ll go on to explain something that one might easily mistake for a rule, or a request, or the enforcement of a social norm, but which is actually (as far as I can tell) just a statement about the version of the world they carry around inside their head.

Because none of us quite have the same culture, after all. We all differ in different ways from the Basic Package—even those of us who’ve lived in the same towns, gone to the same schools, worked in the same industries, played the same sports, read the same books, watched the same shows—we’ve all got our own unique little takes, built up out of the odd quirks of our parents, tiny traumas and formative experiences, countless accumulated musings about how Things Could Be So Much Better If Everyone Would Just _________!

And so Your Culture, though it might match mine at a thousand different points, will also be noticeably different at a thousand others. You and I would found different churches, write different constitutions, build different schools and startups—

—and we would recognize different things as trespasses or offenses, and react to those trespasses and offenses in different ways.

“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also remember. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”

“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”

There’s a particular school of therapy called Internal Family Systems, which was founded on the basic insight that a lot of the stuff we’d come up with for mediating conflicts between family members could also be used for handling disagreements within oneself. Identify conflicting impulses, goals, and restraints, loosely anthropomorphize them as child-figures or parent-figures or spouse-figures or sibling-figures, and treat them with the same sort of respect you’d offer real quarreling humans, and voilà—suddenly a bunch of interpersonal tools and skills can be used to make personal therapeutic progress.

In a similar fashion, my colleague has been doing something like adapting the tools of international diplomacy for use in difficult conversations between family and friends and coworkers. Not by demanding that everyone follow their rules, and not by asserting any one culture’s superiority over another, but simply by acknowledging the fact that their culture meaningfully differs from everyone else’s. By taking that fact seriously, the same way that diplomats do, and putting forth conscious effort to work sensibly around it.

I don’t claim to know what’s going on in my colleague’s head, but from the outside, the process I see looks something like this:

(It happens to be a part of this particular conversational culture that sharing something about yourself is distinct from making a request of others; i.e. you can say “X results in me being sad” without implying “if you continue to do X, you’re bad/will be interpreted as intentionally trying to harm me.”)

 

I find this beautiful. Beautiful enough that it is now one of the foremost elements of my culture—that in my culture, this is a move people can make, and which I myself will make unilaterally. Not only does it allow me to reduce the number of unnecessary spats and misunderstandings to the theoretical minimum—

(i.e. fewer and fewer trespasses happen “for no reason;” I and my conversational partners asymptotically approach a state in which all the disagreements are real disagreements, and not just translation confusions over what was intended by a given hand gesture or conversational move)

—but it also gives me a glimpse into each person’s vision of utopia. The tiny flaws that each person sees in the larger culture around them, the tiny little fixes and wishes that they’ve built up in themselves over the years—when I’m embedded within a subculture that does this kind of cooperative conversational anthropology on the regular, it feels like I’m constantly expanding my sense of what-better-worlds-are-possible.

And there’s something particularly attractive (to me) about the frame of “this is already true in my culture.” It’s sort of like the NVC shift of expressing emotions and impacts rather than claims about other people’s intentions—even if you’re the only person with your particular culture, you are an example of it working, and so it’s less about arguing over the shared normspace and more about just laying out options and alternatives. “This is how it works for the people of Duncanland” is simultaneously more true and less confrontational than “but we all know we should X” or “obviously things would be better if Y” or “I can’t believe you would Z!”

(I think this applies all over the place. It’s often easy for requests of a cultural nature to either slide toward, or be interpreted as, something like “change your behavior to match my cultural expectations, or be seen as a bad person.” And naturally, even the perception that that’s what’s happening is enough to make some people dig in their heels—from that perspective, someone’s trying to move the overall culture to a new setpoint, and also preemptively allocating the costs of that shift. That’s the sort of thing that will reliably produce resistance in some fraction of humans, no matter the nature or magnitude of the request.

Whereas a statement like, “Oh, in my culture we do X, and we find this low-cost and mundane” highlights an opportunity for greater cooperativeness, but falls short of being a demand. The frame creates a boundary right from the start—this is my culture, not everyone’s culture, and therefore conformity is … contingent on relationship, or something? Like, you’ll certainly need to up your game in this area if you want to do a lot of business with me, but to the extent that our interactions are confined to the broader context culture, and to the extent that the norms I’m personally comfortable with are not actually universal in that culture, it’s more a matter of politeness/friendliness/extra credit. There’s a strong implication that your nonconformity, as long as it’s not clearly antagonistic, will be taken in good faith, just as someone from Greece will likely forgive you if you happen to forget that a thumbs-up is a rude gesture in their home culture. And surprise surprise, that gentler version is often more successful at getting people to willingly and cheerfully put forth effort than a version that is perceived as being tinged with demand or threat or judgment.)

And sure, it’s true that none of us actually have perfect introspection, and that maybe we think of things as being part of our personal culture that aren’t in practice, or we mislabel and misdescribe them, and maybe there are things that kind-of-work for us as individuals that would actually be disastrous if they were installed for everyone, and so on and so on. Perhaps simply declaring “in my culture, X is true” is overconfident or misleading.

But it seems much less overconfident than declaring “X is true for everyone,” or “X should be true for everyone,” and so it feels to me like a step in the right direction, even if it glosses over some important uncertainty/humility.

 

I want to zoom in for a moment and give some examples of the sorts of things that might fill in the blank after the words “in my culture.”

 

The above list was generated mostly by me trying to recall examples of times I’ve found myself in disagreement with other white, college-educated, non-religious, American-raised, upper-middle-class males, to show that even people who look extremely similar to me on paper can still have meaningfully different cultures. And of course, that list could easily have been hundreds or thousands of entries long.

One important thing to note is that even the smallest and most trivial entries (like the cargo shorts thing) are more than enough to send destabilizing waves rippling through the social fabric—to turn a good evening into a bad one, for instance, or to spark long-lasting antipathy between people who were otherwise getting along just fine. The TV show Seinfeld got endless mileage out of just this sort of cultural mismatch, and it was resonant and successful in part because that sort of thing happens all the time. It’s sort of tragic, and it would be nice if we could do better, but as things currently stand it’s a part of our social reality.

This is part of why the diplomatic approach gives me cautious hope. It seems like a hammer in a world full of nails—the sort of thing that might actually make a difference, both in the moment and in the aggregate.

In that spirit, I’d like to take the remainder of this essay to outline a dozen or so of the more important and idiosyncratic customs that are native to my culture. It may be that none of them seem interesting to you, or worth the effort, but it may be that some of them are small gifts you’ll feel like giving me, on the level of learning to say “thank you” in someone’s native tongue, and it may be that some of them are worth taking home and tossing into your own cultural stew.

One last thought, though, before diving in to my own norms and traditions: there’s a difference between

noticing that there are many different cultures, and wanting to find a context culture that allows them to communicate and cooperate to the extent that there is mutual desire to do so

and

treating all cultures as fundamentally equally good or valid.

I don’t want to take a firm stance on the latter question in this particular essay. I certainly have opinions, but those opinions have enough doubt and fog and uncertainty that they’re not worth promoting. I simply want it noticed that you can advocate for the former (for practical reasons) without advocating for the latter (which seems like more of a moral or ethical question). Even when the US and the USSR were at each other’s throats over a conflict of cultures, they still were able to recognize the instrumental value of having a red phone, and that seems to me like it was the right move.

 

In my culture, everybody simply takes for granted the existence of a larger context culture that exists to foster communication, cooperation, conversation, compromise, and so on and so forth. It’s understood that this context culture emerged over the course of long, hard millennia of trial and error, with lots of death and suffering and war and outrage along the way, and that, while it’s far from perfect, it’s absolutely critical to the safety and success that those of us currently living in the developed, modern world rely upon and enjoy.

(For instance, the founding fathers of America were certainly aware of the flaws in the concept of religious freedom, but they rightly recognized that those flaws were vastly less terrible than the history of war and persecution and oppression that came from attempts to constrain how people worship.)

It’s understood that attempts to change this context culture are fraught with risk, and that sometimes even shining too bright of a light on its faults and failings can be a mistake. This is because, in any given room of 100 people, at least some will misunderstand a claim of “some part of this is bad” to mean “this whole thing is bad.” And of those, some will go on to virtuously attempt to tear down the whole thing, not realizing that they’re digging away at the foundation that lets us have any sort of civilization at all.

(To continue the religious freedom example, it’s often not clear to a young idealist why even saying the sentence “hey, is religious freedom actually the right way to go?” out loud in a public forum might be treated as a risky or dangerous act, especially given other cornerstones of our context culture like the enshrined freedom of personal expression. But in fact the sort of unofficial social pressure that is often brought to bear to discourage such expressions is an important part of the context culture’s immune system. Turns out that such sentences are often a prelude to atrocity, and even when they aren’t, it turns out that it’s reasonable for people to experience a kind of background elevated stress in response to hearing them, and even when it’s not reasonable, turns out some people will anyway, with corresponding downstream effects, and that wishing this weren’t the case or talking about how it shouldn’t be the case doesn’t actually fix it, and that much of the time we’d rather keep on quietly and imperfectly cooperating than engage with or tolerate a literally endless series of erosive complaints and suggestions.)

Thus, it’s known and acknowledged (in my culture) that all of the expressions below are things which may not be possible in the broader context culture. They are things which may be negotiated away in the service of building a world that accommodates more people. They are things which may occasionally be sacrificed, for the sake of collaboration across cultural lines. They are things which it is easy to find oneself arguing for with language that implies that disagreement is tantamount to defection—that one is either with you, and on the side of goodness and rightness, or on the other side—and in my culture we take the stance that letting oneself get away with that kind of slippery narrativemancy is a meaningful transgression against the larger context culture that lets us all live side by side in relative peace.

And so, to the extent that we want to continue cooperating with people of other cultures (i.e. to the extent that there is a diplomatic summit going on that you want to be a part of and are willing to make tradeoffs to stay a part of), people in my culture acknowledge that it is important to be careful, and to be charitable, and to prepare for one’s care and charity to be insufficient, and to be wary of poking holes in the social fabric, and to be ready to repair those holes that will inevitably accidentally be poked, and to—when writing an essay such as this one—take pains to draw a bright and solid line between “this is how it is in my home culture” and “this is a bid that the overall context culture shift in my direction,” and to not immediately dismiss a claim that we did not draw that line brightly and solidly enough.

Another way to put this is that, in my culture, if you want to engage in an act of civil disobedience in order to change the culture around you, it’s important that you at least stick around and let them arrest you and put you in jail. Otherwise (so say my cultural norms) you won’t be interpreted as trying to cooperatively influence that context culture, but rather as trying to outright undermine it and replace it with your own.

(Which is sometimes justified, to be clear. Sometimes you are trying to break the context culture, because the context culture is rounding up and murdering Jews and you symbolically going to jail won’t actually accomplish anything. The point is not that you should always cooperate with the context culture, but that you can’t have your cake and eat it too—you can either cooperate with it or break from it, and you should pick.)

(It’s worth noting that these points are so obvious in my culture that the first draft of this essay excluded them entirely, and my friends had to remind me to make them explicit. I just took it for granted that the rest of the post would be interpreted in that light, which is not at all obvious to people in cultures even only just a little bit different from mine.)

 

In my culture, with the exception of certain subsets of neuroatypicals or disabled persons, it is assumed that the vast majority of people over the age of (say) eight or nine are straightforwardly acting in accordance with their will.

This is not to say that people don’t make mistakes. It’s not ignoring the fact that people often have their options constrained by circumstance. It’s not meant to legitimize or trivialize things like oppression and coercion and abuse.

But in general, for most people, most of the time, the assumption is that you are doing things mostly on purpose, and that the sum of your inner values is revealed through your visible actions—that you are pretty much always choosing your most-preferred option from the options available. In my culture, there isn’t really any such thing as akrasia, or a persistent inability to act in line with your values. It’s understood that people often have aspirational values—things which they genuinely wish they could express in their actions even though they currently kind of don’t—but in general if you’re not acting in line with those, it’s assumed that it’s because you have some other (possibly hidden) wants that are getting in the way.

Thus, in my culture, it’s considered reasonable and standard for people to model you and react to you as if you generally want and endorse the things you generally do. Your revealed preferences are taken to be a reflection of your net values in all but a few special cases. Hence, apologies are treated as falling somewhere between predictions and promises—if you are genuinely sorry, then in my culture you will demonstrate it through future action that meaningfully differs from past action. And if your future actions continue to resemble the past, people in my culture will conclude both that you weren’t actually sorry and also perhaps that your word can’t really be trusted in general.

(Another way to say this is that, in my culture, you get to decide what’s true inside your head, but other people are justified and supported in making predictions and taking actions based on what you do in the world. If you have a mood disorder that makes you judgmental and suspicious and unpredictably mean twenty percent of the time, you’re welcome to say “that’s not really me,” but other people are not mistreating you or morally bankrupt if they decide not to take the risk and end up avoiding you altogether—if, in essence, they behave toward you as if that really is part of your character.)

 

In my culture, it’s understood that emotions can be right or wrong—or, to use less charged language, they can be appropriate responses to a situation, or they can be inappropriate responses. In the latter case, it is absolutely still a sacred right to have the emotion (no one in my culture can tell you that you should feel a different way than you feel), but what you do with that emotion is constrained by social norms.

This means that if Alex does something, and Bailey becomes angry, and furthermore if both Alex and Bailey want to avoid such situations in the future, the fix could be on either side. It’s neither obviously on Alex to stop doing the thing, nor obviously on Bailey to leash their anger. Instead, the question at hand becomes something like “what actually happened? What are the relevant contextual details? How reasonable is it for Bailey to feel a sense of trespass at Alex’s actions? Was a commonly-acknowledged boundary violated? What about a rarely-acknowledged-but-previously-communicated-and-agreed-upon one? Sometimes people jump to conclusions, or make wrong guesses at motives, or get angry at a made-up caricature of the other person—is that happening in this case, or is Bailey’s anger a straightforward response to Alex’s observable actions?”

This may sound trivial or obvious, but it’s important to note that what this means, in practice, is that sometimes I will feel wronged, and I will act in what feels like defense of myself or of important principles, and afterward I will have to apologize (and possibly accept punishment), because it will be deemed that my sense-of-being-wronged and my subsequent actions were not, in fact, an appropriate or justified reaction to the situation. In my culture, when we find ourselves on the wrong side of judgment in this way, we often suck it up and make public peace even if we still hold resentment or uncertainty on the inside. Because otherwise—if your peers can’t ask for surface-level amends unless and until you’ve made a deep, internal update—you could simply get away with anything by sort of … weaponizedly never-noticing-you-were-wrong?

To put it another way, in my culture, sometimes one’s personal satisfaction must come second to a sort of public dance which maintains the norms and standards of the group as a whole, and those norms and standards are seen as sensible and necessary and worthy of occasional personal sacrifice.

 

In my culture, there are limits to the judgments you can hold about a person, and the predictions you can make about them, and those limits are derived from the complete set of your previous experiences of that person, leaving out nothing.

Another way to say this is that, in my culture, vague suspicions and unfounded intuitions are allowed only insofar as they are openly flagged as such, and in general will not carry much weight when they’re in conflict with a consistent, coherent, observable record.

(Although if a vague suspicion or unfounded intuition is born out, then the person who registered it will have earned a solid point in favor of being good at making accurate predictions that run counter to existing data.)

This also means that updates about a person must be gradual and Bayesian, and that in general people are expected to seek the smallest possible update. If a seemingly loyal colleague has seemingly betrayed you, you are obligated in my culture to be confused and curious and look for alternate explanations, rather than leaping straight to a new story which contradicts all of your prior evidence. If you learn an unpleasant secret about someone (e.g. that they privately abuse heroin), your update is confined to the domain of that secret, and can’t be used to invalidate or dismiss their record of e.g. completing work projects on time or being kind to animals and the elderly.

(You might easily still be justified in firing them, if they are your employee, or ceasing to associate with them, if they are your friend. For instance, the new data might actually be relevant to your estimate of entangled qualities like their integrity or conscientiousness or decisionmaking or trustworthiness. But in general, even if the new data is damning, people in my culture make a conscious effort to compensate for the human impulse to round everything off to a single answer. Sometimes people aren’t simple or straightforward, and in my culture you can object to the costs associated with one trait without unjustly and inaccurately lowering your evaluation of the rest.)

Symmetrically, in my culture, there are limits to the kinds of claims you can make about yourself. If someone does not believe that you have Trait X, and you believe that you do, you’re not allowed to just declare that you do, and expect them to update. Instead, the most you can do is say something like “Look, of course you’re going to hold this with some skepticism, I endorse that—not that you needed me to endorse it, it’s not like you need my permission—but I claim I have Trait X, and I’d like you to accept that as a hypothesis, and give me a chance to prove it. Like, I’m requesting that you keep your radar open and be receptive to evidence on this question.”

 

In my culture, unless you’ve made a specific commitment to the contrary, you can end any conversation at any time.

There are ways to do this which might be blunt or rude or cruel, and people might dock you social points for your bluntness or rudeness or cruelty.

But they will not dock you points for the leaving itself. In my culture, you do not owe anyone your attention, your ear, or your thoughts. If you and I were romantically engaged, and we broke up, and I am desperate for closure, that is my problem, not yours. If you want to provide me the opportunity to talk further, that’s great, but I have no right to demand it, and if I’m being pushy, other people will step in to remind you that you’re morally justified in simply cutting me off.

 

In my culture, if I cover the check and you agree to PayPal me your share, it is not up to me to remind you.

In my culture, if I lend you a book, I should not have to ask for it back.

In my culture, if you break something that I own, it goes without saying that you will take the initiative to replace it, or reimburse me, or make it up to me in some other fashion.

In my culture, failing to fulfill an obligation until someone else reminds you to do so is itself viewed as a transgression. It’s seen as imposing an additional cost upon your creditor, and onlookers will tend to notice that, and remember. There’s an instrumental argument for people to remind you anyway (since otherwise they might never get what you owe them), but in that case, it’s understood that you’ve lost an additional point, and have to either accept that fact or make up for it with some kind of concrete action.

 

In my culture, if you’re going to a Cirque du Soleil show, and one of your friends is a gymnast, it is viewed as slightly rude to fail to think of inviting them. Ditto if you’re planning a night of Magic: the Gathering and one of your friends is always lamenting a lack of people to play with.

You don’t have to actually invite them, if there’s reason not to. For instance, if you simply wouldn’t enjoy their company, or if they’re incompatible with someone else who’s already going. But it’s expected that you will pause to ask yourself the question. That you will notice the opportunity to include them, especially if their interest is sufficiently well-known that they might reasonably expect their name to come to mind. To fail to do so twice in a row will undoubtedly be taken as a signal that you dislike them or don’t particularly care for them or are willing to prioritize other things above their preferences in this domain, and they will update their expectations with regards to you accordingly.

(There’s an interpretation of this which sounds vaguely threatening, à la “invite me or else.” But in my culture it’s actually much gentler and more stoic than that—it’s more like “invite me, or I’ll update toward believing that you’re not the kind of person who will invite me.” That doesn’t have a strong moral shading of any kind, in my culture—it’s just using the past to make predictions about the future.)

 

In my culture, it is seen as trivially obvious that if a friend has to ask you whether or not you want a hug, the friendship is weak enough that the hug will probably not be particularly nourishing in the first place (since it comes with a reminder of distance and insecurity).

This is not to say that all hugs are always welcome—it’s a bad idea to simply hug people willy-nilly, or to offer hugs as a way to cargo-cult your way into a closer relationship. If you’re not sure, you ask anyway and pay the distance cost, or you just don’t hug at all.

Rather, the thing you aim for is to grow your friendship to the point where your friend knows you well enough, and feels secure enough in their relationship with you, that they can tell when you need a hug, and aren’t the slightest bit anxious that it’ll be taken badly if they happen to be wrong.

 

In my culture, birthdays matter, and celebrating birthdays matters, and remembering to celebrate birthdays matters, and actually knowing what kind of celebration will be warm and wanted is more important and more highly valued than the mere desire to do so.

(Another way to say this is that, in my culture, the thought does count, but other things count more.)

 

In my culture, we play punch bug.

 

In my culture, if I’m trying to help you, it’s important both that it’s not about me and that it doesn’t seem, on the surface, that it’s about me.

(Note the “if.” Sometimes, the situation can be more complex, and my primary goal is not simply to help you, but to investigate a situation, or to protect myself along with you, or to preserve community norms and standards, etc.)

But if I’m actually in it for your benefit, as opposed to because your feeling bad makes me feel bad and what I really want is to stop feeling bad myself—

If that is the case, then it’s important to avoid setting up a dynamic whereby you, who are already struggling and low on resources, feel pressure to reassure me. I don’t want to make it seem like my own failure to help will mean that I will not be okay, such that you have to put on a mask and pretend to have been helped, regardless of whether or not you really have. In my culture, we recognize that this is the opposite of helping—it’s adding yet another item onto the pile of stuff you have to deal with.

(Which is not to say that I’m not allowed to feel distress, and possibly take actions in accordance with that distress, when someone else is sending up distressing signals. If you express extreme depression and suicidal impulses to me, for instance, of course I’m going to have an emotional reaction.)

But absent any of those other considerations—if it’s just you and me in a room and my goal is to help—if I want to have any chance of actually helping you, it’s understood in my culture that it has to be clear that my own ego is not relevantly in the mix. It has to be clear that I’m okay with you being sad/mad/stressed. It has to be clear that I’m there to offer you tools and support to get at the root cause, not to punish you for your symptoms, and furthermore that if you don’t want my tools and support, or don’t find them helpful in the end, that’s okay too.

 

In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is.

When we can’t tell the difference, we intentionally form two reactions—one appropriate for each possibility—and we take only provisional and reversible actions (or actions that are good in both branches of possibility) until we have some hint as to what’s actually true.

(To make this more concrete: in my culture, there simply isn’t anything like the Duke lacrosse scandal. That sort of unjustified public excoriation just doesn’t happen.)

 

In my culture, we believe that a peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

Civilization works (at least in part) by mutual agreement to set aside options. As the Freud quote goes, “the first person to hurl an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” We learn in kindergarten not to hit each other as a method of expressing disagreement—we mutually sacrifice that option, trading the ability to hit at will for the safety of not having to be constantly on alert against being hit.

But in my culture, there’s a distinction between “I agree to follow these rules with everyone I interact with” and “I agree to follow these rules with everyone who also agrees with them.”

This can be tricky when it comes to balancing my culture with the needs of the broader context culture that allows us all to coexist. If Lord Duellington comes from a culture where people get into duels over perceived insults, it needs to be really crystal clear to everyone else at the diplomatic summit that Lord Duellington really understands that this aspect of his culture is not shared, and that there is zero chance that Lord Duellington will propose a duel, regardless of how insulted he perceives himself to be.

Even the mere perception of Lord Duellington as a loose cannon who cannot distinguish between [his own local culture] and [what’s agreed-upon by everyone present] is costly, regardless of whether or not it’s true, because it results in a dynamic where other people at the summit feel like they have to spend lots of energy and attention tracking and maintaining their personal physical safety, rather than being able to rely on the social contract. Thus, it’s important that Lord Duellington not even mutter under his breath that back home, we have a way of dealing with people like you, and it’s entirely reasonable for people to disinvite Lord Duellington from future summits if he does.

(Although it’s also reasonable in my culture for Lord Duellington to object that his track record indicates that he would never actually do such a thing, and that it’s not fair for people to see him as a risk, as noted above. But it can both be true that he’s not actually a direct risk, and also be true that his presence nevertheless puts too much stress on the social fabric to be worth it, and even Lord Duellington will admit that this is possible.)

This is why, for instance, I no longer use my car’s horn as a tool for reacting to perceived defections in traffic. In my home culture, certain traffic violations effectively equate to opting out of the treaty whereby people don’t honk at each other.

In the Bay Area context culture, though, that’s a sort of violence that isn’t justified even by overt defection, as far as I can tell. People will socially punish it even if they agree that the honker was wronged, because use of the horn for that purpose is seen as corrosive in other ways.

(For instance, it hurts nearby people as well, and reduces the effectiveness of the horn as an exclusively emergency signal, and grabs people in a sort of deep, visceral, monkey-brain kind of way that is almost guaranteed to escalate the situation rather than resolving it.)

And it seems correct to conform to the context culture in this way, and for others to expect you to conform, regardless of your home culture. A clause that releases you from the social contract in your home culture does not have the power to release you from the social contract at a diplomatic summit. The whole point of a diplomatic summit is that people are setting aside their native standards for what constitutes transgression, and agreeing to a cooperative compromise culture. If a person isn’t willing to make that sacrifice, then the diplomatic summit can’t afford to have them around, no matter what value is lost in the process of excluding them.

But in my home culture, if Cameron is behaving toward Dallas in ways that are proscribed by social norms, and Dallas has tried a couple of times to get Cameron to stop, and has actually made efforts to bridge the gap, and has taken actions which reasonably rule out the possibility that Cameron was just making a one-time mistake out of frustration or misunderstanding or whatever—

In my home culture, if Dallas retaliates in kind, no one will assign Dallas the sort of blame they would otherwise receive for taking a forbidden action.

And if Elliott steps in to protect Dallas from Cameron, and uses Cameron’s tactics against them, no one will look sideways at Elliott, either.

In my culture, there’s a fundamental difference between people who are trying to play by the rules, and people who are unmistakably willing to violate them. The former category gets a lot of protection, and the latter gets meaningfully less, especially when it comes to open antagonism. In my culture, we try to be really damn sure that it’s actually fire, and not just smoke, but we are indeed willing to fight fire with fire, and we don’t dock one another points for doing so.

I sometimes wish that other specific subcultures had more in common with my home culture in this way, but I think that it’s correct that the broader context culture does not, because the whole thing rests on the idea that there can be clear common knowledge about what constitutes a transgression and what doesn’t, and that everyone can see what’s justified and what isn’t, and that seems to me to be an impossibly naive expectation when we’re talking about a diplomatic summit with representatives from thousands of individual cultures.

 

This is not at all a complete list. On reflection, it’s probably not even the most important differences between my culture and the general culture—just some of the more important ones, the ones which floated to the top over the two weeks I spent tinkering with this essay. No doubt I’ll discover more after hitting ‘publish.’

But it’s okay that this is incomplete, because me sharing my culture is only half of the process. The other half is you sharing yours, and so this feels like as good a place as any to pause and listen, in case you feel like talking.

(If enough people respond in commentary here or elsewhere I may write a followup someday on other people’s specific cultures.)

59 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Taran · 2019-03-10T11:30:03.858Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I use this technique sometimes (my lead-in phrase is the deliberately silly "Among my people..."), but it has a couple of flaws that force me to be careful with it.

Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you're describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you're talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. When you say, "In my culture, we put peanut butter on bread", then you are also saying "in your culture, you do not put peanut butter on bread". At the very most you are asking a question: "does your culture also put peanut butter on bread?" So, do not ever say something like "In my culture we do not punish the innocent" unless you also intend to say "Your culture punishes the innocent" -- that is, unless you intend to start a fight.

Relatedly, you have to explicitly do the work of separating real cultural practices from aspirational ones -- this framing will not help you. When you write "In my culture we do not punish the innocent", probably you are thinking something like "In my culture, we think it's important not to punish the innocent", since mistakes do still happen from time to time. But statements like "In my culture we put peanut butter on bread" do not require this kind of aggressive interpretation, they can just be taken literally, so your listeners might reasonably take "In my culture we do not punish the innocent" as a (false) statement of literal fact. Clear and open communication is unlikely to follow.

(If you feel like you grasp these points and agree with them, here's an exercise: can the section of the OP that starts "In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is." be productively rewritten, and if so how?)

Overall, although I do like this technique and use it from time to time, I don't think it's well-suited to important topics. For similar reasons it's easy to use in bad faith. That's why I present it in such a silly and sociological (instead of formally diplomatic) way.

Replies from: ZeitPolizei, Duncan_Sabien, RobbBB
↑ comment by ZeitPolizei · 2019-03-11T00:50:20.327Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you're describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you're talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. [...] So, do not ever say something like "In my culture we do not punish the innocent" unless you also intend to say "Your culture punishes the innocent" -- that is, unless you intend to start a fight.

Does this also apply to your own personal culture (whether aspiring or as-is), or "just" the broader context culture?

Because in my (aspiring) culture simple statements of fact are generally interpreted at face value and further evidence is required to make less charitable interpretations. This is especially true for interpretations that assume the speaker has made some kind of judgement.

So, let's go meta here and see whether I intended to say "Your culture generally makes less charitable interpretations of statements than mine." I guess the answer is yes, though I would like to point out the distinction here between personal culture and broader context culture, hence my question at the beginning. [Writing this I'm also realizing it's really difficult to disentangle statements about culture from judgments. I'm noticing cognitive dissonance because I actually do think my culture is better, but I don't like myself being judgmental.]

Now why did I write the comment above? Because in my culture-as-is the language used in the OP ("always", "do not ever") is too strong given my epistemic status.

Again, we can analyze the intent of this "In my culture"-statement. Here my intent is to say "your culture uses language differently from mine" OR "My epistemic status is different from yours."

Not a direct response to your comment, but related and gives background to my initial question: In my aspiring culture a straightforward question (whatever that means) is by default meant and interpreted (primarily) as an expression of genuine curiosity about the answer.

Thinking about and writing this comment, I've realized that my own culture may be a lot more idiosyncratic than I thought. I also found it really interesting to see my initial prompt to write this post (an immediate gut reaction of "I don't agree with that") dissolve into an understanding of how the disagreement can be due to either cultural or epistemic differences.

NB: There is some entanglement here between intentions, interpretations and responses. In describing a "perfect" culture intentions and interpretations can be freely interchanged to a large extent because if everyone has the same culture they will make the correct assumptions about other people's intents and states of mind. So saying "In my culture people say X because they want Y" is equivalent to saying "In my culture when someone says X people know that that person wants Y". And then there is to an extent a disconnect between the epistemic status of your interpretation of the other person's state of mind and your own reaction, because different reactions entail different costs. Even if an uncharitable interpretation has the highest probability of being correct it often makes sense to act under the assumption that a more charitable interpretation is correct.

Replies from: Taran, Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Taran · 2019-03-12T08:10:29.830Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Does this also apply to your own personal culture (whether aspiring or as-is), or "just" the broader context culture?

We're talking about a tool for communicating with many different people with many different cultures, and with people whose cultures you don't necessarily know very much about. So the bit you quoted isn't just making claims about my culture, or even one of the (many) broader context cultures, it's making claims about the correct prior over all such cultures.

But what claims exactly? I intended these two:

  1. When you say, "In my culture X", you're also saying "In your culture plausibly not X".
  2. For some values of X, this will start fights (or hurt feelings, or sow mistrust, or have other effects you likely don't want).

It seems like you came to agree with point #1, so I won't belabor it further -- let me know if I misread you and we can circle back. For point #2, I definitely agree that, the more charity the listener extends to you, the smaller the set of hurtful Xs is. But if you rely on that, you're limiting the scope of this method to people who'll apply that charity and whom you know will apply that charity. I picked "punishing the innocent" for my example value of X because I expect it to be broadly cross-cultural: if you go find 100 random people and ask them whether they punish the innocent, I expect that most of them will take offense. If you also expect that, you should build that expectation into your communication strategy, regardless of what your own culture would have you do in those kinds of situations.

Now, the better your know the person you're talking to, the less important these warnings are. Then again, the better you know the person you're talking to, the less you need the safety of the diplomatic/sociological frame, you can just discuss your values directly. That's why I feel comfortable using all that highly absolutist "always/never" language above; it's the same impulse that says "it's always better to bet that a die will roll odd than that it'll roll a 1, all else held equal".

Thinking about it more, I suspect the real rule is that this method shouldn't be used to talk about cultural values at all, just cultural practices -- things that have little or no moral valence. That phrasing doesn't quite capture the distinction I want -- the Thai businessman who won't shake hands with you doesn't think his choice is arbitrary, after all -- but it's close. Another rule might be "don't use these statements to pass moral judgement", but that's hard to apply; as you saw it can be difficult to notice that you're doing it until after the fact.

↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-11T05:25:44.381Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oooooh, I like this a lot. In particular, this resolves for me a bit of tension about why I liked the above comment and also disagreed with it—you've helped me split those reactions out into two different buckets. Seems relevant to common-knowledge-type stacks as well.

↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-10T21:07:37.965Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Strong appreciation for this comment/strong endorsement of the warnings it provides. However, I do nevertheless continue to think it's well-suited to important topics, having seen it productively used on important topics in my own experience.

Replies from: Taran
↑ comment by Taran · 2019-03-12T08:18:46.281Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"Important" was not the right word, I agree; I took a slightly better stab at it in the last paragraph of my reply to ZeitPolizei upthread. Vocabulary aside, would you agree that there's a class of cultural values that this framing doesn't help you talk about?

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-12T16:27:17.115Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I want to think further and also want to answer you now, so: knee-jerk response without too much thought is something like "there's a class of cultural values that this framing is insufficient to help you talk about, but it feels to me like a piece of the puzzle that lets you bridge the gap."

i.e. I agree there are ways this can be counterproductive for whole categories of important communication. But I'd probably route through this thing anyway, given my current state of knowledge?

Would not be surprised to find myself talked out of this viewpoint.

↑ comment by Rob Bensinger (RobbBB) · 2019-03-10T21:12:27.930Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like this comment.

comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T22:22:05.048Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In case it wasn't clear from the bit at the end: I am deeply interested in other people offering expressions of elements of their culture via writing comments here or on Medium or FB, to the extent that that feels like a fun or interesting or valuable thing to do.

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-07T22:58:31.152Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have been thinking about this, but it's taking awhile to solidify. (I don't think I've precisely experienced a "culture clash" precisely in the recent times, although I've observe others appearing to have a culture clash, where Person A clearly cares a lot about X, Person B clearly cares a lot about Y which is in tension/conflict with X, and to me neither X nor Y are sacred but I can see why you might care about them).

[strong upvoted parent mostly because I think having it higher in the comment tree will lead to more interesting and useful conversation]

comment by Raemon · 2019-03-08T19:42:04.843Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As noted elsethread, there are some distinctions between

  • my "culture-as-it-is" vs my "culture-as-it-aspires-to-be"
  • my "personal-culture" vs the "culture-I-am-and-want-to-be-part-of"

i. Common Knowledge and Robust Agency

In my culture (both the culture-that-is and culture I aspire to), we attend to what is common knowledge and what is not. My culture includes (by necessity, not necessarily choice) people who are coming and going all the time. The walls are not secure enough to ensure that everyone inside has common knowledge of all the most important things, and basically can't be.

Sometimes, something is important (and tractable!) enough that we spend a bunch of coordinating effort to make sure there is common knowledge of it's importance and that everyone is in fact reliably working towards it (with some punishment for defection, and buy-in for enforcing said punishment). Most of the time we don't bother, and instead make little work-groups with higher standards when higher standards are necessary.

Meanwhile, we model what is common knowledge (within my-culture-at-large, and within whatever conversation is going on)

Also meanwhile, we are aspiring to be robust agents [LW · GW] together – we are each trying to adopt policies that will work at different levels of scale, with different levels of understanding and skill on the parts of the people participating. And we help each other to do so. [Edit: Because of the aforementioned insecure walls, the policies must also be robust against occasional, actively adversarial behavior].

...

ii. Emotions-as-object

In my culture-as-it-is, if I say something and someone says "that makes me sad and/or angry", I generally do expect some combination of punishment, or a bid for me to change my behavior. Having this not be the case takes work on the part of the person, and on anyone else in the conversation – I need to trust that they have emotional skills necessary to not hold a grudge, that the people listening will not over update (either against me, or possibly against the person who made the claim, in a way that creates more work for me.)

There are cultures where it is more taken-as-default that people are building the skills to take-emotions-as-object, enough so that one either can trust that they have that skill, or that they're earnestly building the skill and it's okay to take emotional risks in the service of helping everyone build the skill.

I think the skill is important. In my culture (my aspiring culture), we definitely spend at least some time building the skills necessary to have tricky conversations that take charged-emotions as object. But, because in my aspiring culture, there is still a mix of people with different skills working together, this is not taken as default. Every time that it is not common knowledge that everyone has the requisite skills, the default assumption is that we can't rely on people having them.

So if you want to talk about tricky emotionally charged things you need to put in extra work that scales with the number of people you're having a conversation with.

...

iii. Distributed Teamwork vs Specialization/Systems

I've changed my beliefs somewhat (although they are still in flux) over the past year. My culture used to take as obvious that the way to get things done was to get a critical mass of people who were paying attention to each other's needs and to the surrounding environment and working together to improve them, to fix obvious failures, and to attend to each other's emotional needs.

I still think that is all quite good, I still aesthetically prefer a world where that is how a lot of stuff gets done. But I know have more awareness of

a) sometimes specialization is just better

b) sometimes you can just eliminate a task completely, and it's often better to look for solutions that don't require everyone to continuously spend attention on a thing.

So in my culture we try to check early and often for how to resolve a thing without coordination.

(an uncertainty of mine is that I think you often will suddenly need the skills of how to do things via distributed teamwork and coordination, esp. when you're starting a new house or organization, so it's important to build the critical mass of that skill even if you try to resolve any given thing without it)

...

iv. Improving our ability to think clearly

In my culture, we have a responsibility to improve our ability to think - both to avoid bias, and to generate useful/creative thoughts.

You also have some responsibility to do your thinking in a way that helps others around you improve their thinking. This, in part, means, thinking transparently so that others can both inspect your thinking and learn from it.

[edit: It also means not doing too much of other people's thinking for them. Try to give people space to think, and sometimes optimize asking questions or answering questions in a way that's optimized for helping other people to learn to figure out the answer on their own, instead of solving it for them]

...

v. in my culture, we type "nod."

(I recently was texting with both rationalist friends and non-rationalist family in NY, and there were brief, jarring moments where they said "wait, did you just type the word 'nod?' Is that a thing you do now?" and I said "I... suppose I do?")

Replies from: Dagon, Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Dagon · 2019-03-09T01:51:27.773Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Put a slash in front, and it's a character emote, very recognizable by old-school MUDders and MMORPG players. /nod is unremarkable in some groups. Also documented in "the jargon file" as common hacker culture as early as the 1970s: http://catb.org/jargon/html/inarticulations.html

comment by Davis_Kingsley · 2019-03-10T22:59:06.980Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

When I have heard people use this "in the wild", it has at times come off as *extremely* insulting or condescending. In particular, when both participants are part of the same culture, it feels like one participant is making an extremely aggressive conversational move, something along the lines of "I understand this culture/community better than you and I declare that you are Out Of Bounds". It is precisely in heated/tense situations where this most seems to backfire, which makes me skeptical of the utility of this technique "in the wild".

I note that most of the examples you give seem innocuous and legitimate and in fact things I'd like to see more of - but somehow in practice this often seems to backfire in the most important instances, at least when I've seen it done.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-11T05:27:23.920Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Did you see Zeit Polizei's comment above? That was super productive for me, on this axis. For instance, taking into consideration (both before and after attempting to make this move) the degree to which the other person's culture is one that leans toward uncharitable or defensive interpretations of what the other person was saying.

Also, it seems in your description of people getting heated that there's no clear distinction being made between claims about one's personal culture and claims about the context culture—the "I understand this community better than you" is triggerable by this tool if you're not careful, but it's not actually the claim I'm making if I say "in my culture."

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-11T05:41:13.862Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(To put this another way: it seems like you missed an important part of the thesis of the piece*, which is that there are no interactions between two people with the exact same culture. While it is in fact the case that some people work differently (e.g. Scott's discussion of high-trust vs. low-trust cultures) and will reliably hear you to be making claims about the context culture if you're not extremely exact, and therefore it's important to be clear and careful and say a few more words to delineate your claims about the context culture from your claims about your own personal sense of what-is-ideal ...

... while it seems true that you should take that into account, on a practical level, it seems that if you have done all that work, and someone reacts hostilely to you as if you are making some other claim ...

... as far as I can tell, in the Berkeley rationalist context culture, the one that most of us agree upon so we can get along with each other, the person who sort of ... refused to believe that I meant what I said? ... is the one who's doing something hostile.

Or at least, it seems to me that there's a principle of "don't claim you understand better than others what's going on in their heads" in the shared context of people you and I hang out with. But maybe I'm mistaken? Maybe this is not the case, and in fact that is just another piece of my personal culture?

*or you didn't miss it yourself, but you're pointing out that it's subtle and therefore it gets missed in practice a lot

Replies from: Davis_Kingsley, Raemon
↑ comment by Davis_Kingsley · 2019-03-11T05:58:20.569Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

To be clear I'm not making the claim that what I described above is an endorsed or correct experience, just how I've actually encountered it in practice at times. I'll try and keep track of my impressions when I encounter this sort of thing in the future, and take what you've said here into account.

↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-11T22:57:29.467Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Or at least, it seems to me that there's a principle of "don't claim you understand better than others what's going on in their heads" in the shared context of people you and I hang out with. But maybe I'm mistaken? Maybe this is not the case, and in fact that is just another piece of my personal culture?

My read on the context-culture is that this isn't very agreed upon, and/or depends a lot on context. (I had a sense that this particular point was probably the thing that triggered this entire post, but was waiting to talk about that until I had time to think seriously about it)

[Flagging: what follows is my read on the rationalist context culture, which... somewhat ironically can't make much use of the technique suggested in the OP. I'm trying to stick to descriptive claims about what I've observed, and a couple of if-then statements which I think are locally valid]

A founding principle of the rationality community is "people are biased and confused a lot, even smart people, even smart people who've thought about it a bit". So it seemed to me that if the rationality was going to succeed at the goal of "help people become less confused and more rational", it's necessary for some kind of social move in the space of "I think you're more confused or blind-spotted than you realize", at least some times.

But it's also even easier to be wrong about what's going on in someone else's head than what's going on in your head. And there are also sometimes incentives to use "I think someone is being confused" as a social weapon. And making a claim like that and getting it wrong

My observations are that rationalists do sometimes do this (in Berkeley and on LW and elsewhere), and it often goes poorly unless there is a lot of trust or a lot of effort is put in, but it doesn't feel like there's much like a collective immune response that I'd expect to see if it were an established norm.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien, Raemon
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-12T00:03:16.496Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This makes sense to me.

Similar caveats as Ray's re: this is more fraught, since here I am trying to describe my observations of the context culture, as opposed to things I'm relatively sure about because they live inside my head. These are not normative statements/shoulds, they're just "in my experience"s.

it's necessary for some kind of social move in the space of "I think you're more confused or blind-spotted than you realize", at least some times.

Strong agree. It seems to me that the additional bit that makes this prosocial instead of a weapon is something like:

I notice that I've got a hypothesis forming, that you're more confused or blind-spotted than you realize. I started to form this hypothesis when I saw X, Y, and Z, which I interpreted to mean A, B, and C. This hypothesis causes me to predict that, if I hadn't said anything, you would've responded to M with N, which would've been miscalibrated for reasons 1 and 2. If I saw you doing G, I would definitely update away from this hypothesis, and certainly G is not the only thing that would shift me. I want to now be open to hearing your response or counterargument; this is not a mic drop.

... where the two key pieces of the above are:

1) distinguishing between a hypothesis and a fact, or between a claim and an assertion. It seems non-rude and at least possibly non-aggressive/non-invalidating/non-weaponized to say "I'm considering [your blindness/biased-ness] among many possibilities," whereas it seems pretty much guaranteed to be taken-as-rude or taken-as-an-attempt-to-delegitimize to just flatly state "Yeah, you're [blind/biased]."

2) creating surface area/showing the gears of your hypothesis/sticking your neck out and making what you've said falsifiable. There are hints of cruxes not only in G, but also in X, Y, and Z, which someone may convincingly argue you misunderstood or misinterpreted or misremembered.

In the swath of the EA/rationalist community that I have the most exposure to (i.e. among the hundred or so Berkelanders that I've interacted with in the past year) the social move of having a hypothesis is one that is acceptable when used with clear care and respect, and the social move of claiming to know is one that is frowned upon. In other words, I've seen people band together in rejection of the latter, and I've heard many different people on many different occasions say things like my fake quote paragraph above.

This also seems to me to be correct, and is part of what I came here for (where "here" is the rationalist community). I notice that my expectation of such (in swathes of the community where that is not the norm) has gotten me into fights, in the past.

↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-11T22:58:40.678Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Random additional note: introspection is a skill, and extrospection is a skill, and part of what feeds into my "it seems like this is complicated" belief is that people can be good or bad at both, and common knowledge about who is good or bad at either is hard to establish.

comment by Raemon · 2019-03-07T07:50:43.117Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I quite appreciated the cultural tool here. I'm not sure whether I'd want to implement with the precise phrasing of it's original inventor (I have a vague sense that prefacing every discussion of this reference class with "in my culture..." could get weirdly grating. But, I think invoking the spirit of that concept is quite a nice idea and look forward to trying it out).

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T09:15:25.862Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"In my religion..."

"The way it works in my head is..."

"For me personally, situations like this..."

"Maybe this isn't generally true, but I found myself..."

A lot of it is pretty NVC/circling norm stuff. But I think there's something uniquely strong about the "in my culture" frame that might make it worth ... saving that actual exact phrase for the top 15% of use cases?

Replies from: RobbBB
↑ comment by Rob Bensinger (RobbBB) · 2019-03-07T21:51:57.113Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For my personal usage, the way I could imagine using it, "in my culture" sounds a bit serious and final. "Where I'm from, we do X" is nice if I want something to sound weighty and powerful and stable, but I just don't think I've figured myself out enough to do that much yet. There might also be a bit of confusion in that "in my culture" also has a structurally similar literal meaning.

"In Robopolis" seems to fix these problems for me, since it more clearly flags that I'm not talking about a literal culture, and it sounds more agnostic about whether this is a deep part of who I am vs. a passing fashion.

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-07T22:12:21.967Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"In my culture, saying 'in my culture' sounds serious and final." :P

Replies from: RobbBB
↑ comment by Rob Bensinger (RobbBB) · 2019-03-08T00:03:09.758Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That was my draft 1. :P

comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2020-12-06T06:37:18.948Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(I'm not sure I've ever actually read this post the entire way through, but the "In My Culture" framing device has been occasionally useful.)

Replies from: David Hornbein
↑ comment by David Hornbein · 2020-12-21T11:59:37.793Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For this reason, I wouldn't want this post included in the 2019 highlights. I just looked at this for the review, and the part which some people report finding useful is in the brief description of the concept at the very beginning. The bulk of the post is a freeform, rambling exploration of the concept and its implications which I mostly couldn't bring myself to focus on; this exploratory style seems totally appropriate for a personal blog post, but it's not the sort of thing I'd want to read if I were looking back at a curated list of the best stuff from 2019.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien, David Hornbein
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2020-12-21T19:59:31.153Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(I strong upvoted this comment because it is wise.)

Replies from: meedstrom
↑ comment by meedstrom · 2022-02-11T01:02:12.051Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
↑ comment by David Hornbein · 2020-12-28T15:29:53.968Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In the spirit of "how could this post be improved, such that it makes sense to include in a 'Best Of', or otherwise enter into Lesswrong's longterm memory" [LW · GW], my suggestion would be "publish an summary version which is just an abridgment of the current piece's introduction plus maaaybe a few selected paragraphs from deeper in, probably no need to bother writing any new words."

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2020-12-29T04:00:30.724Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(note: it'd actually be helpful if you re-posted this as a Review comment so that our system for checking which posts have been reviewed at least once can notice it)

comment by Raemon · 2020-12-29T23:01:18.773Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would probably include this post in the review as-is if I had to. However, I would quite prefer the post to change somewhat before putting it in the Best Of Book.

Most importantly, I think, is the title and central handle. It does an important job, but it does not work that well in the wild among people who don't share the concept handle. Several people have suggested alternatives. I don't know if any of them are good enough, but I think now is a good time to reflect on a longterm durable name.

I'd also like to see some more explicit differentiation of "aspiring culture" vs "culture-that-is".

Someone else suggested splitting off the second half of the essay. I'm not sure I endorse that. On one hand, the first half of the post does feel sort of complete and standalone. But I think it is actually pretty useful to have an example of what such a culture looks like, so people can more easily  see what their own might look like. Perhaps an optimal version of this post includes a few different cultures at the end? (Maybe less comprehensively?)

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2021-01-12T00:08:42.216Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

FWIW, I would be willing to cut it, if it makes the cut overall, such that the essay is shorter and primarily about the core concept and includes only enough Duncan-specific stuff to get that core concept across.

comment by Pattern · 2019-03-08T19:16:20.512Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This was really interesting. It was also very long, and if it were split in two, it might be more clear whether reactions are to the first part ("here's this cool thing") or the second part ("here's how things usually work").

comment by someonewrongonthenet · 2019-03-07T22:58:06.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So...I actually happen to have converged upon the same insight, and have actually tried to use this exact phrase in the wild.

Unfortunately (being an immigrant) people understandably often assume I was talking about nation-level differences involving my country of birth, rather than my particular family and the specialized microcosm of friends that I surround myself with. Any ideas for making the wording more precise so as to avoid this?

(I've tried modifications like "in my family" or "the way I grew up" or "how I was raised" but more or less the same problem occurs. "Among my friends and I" sort of works, sometimes? But mostly I've just given up on trying to reference culture in navigating misunderstandings.)

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T23:15:32.284Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My closest answer would be something like "in my version of utopia," although maybe that's too strong? Or perhaps (depending on how nerdy the group is) something like "if I were having this meeting with five clones of me..."?

Another clunkier version is just to port over the WHOLE concept, of not only personal culture but also context culture: "I mean, there's a sort of thing where we kind of have norms and customs about how to communicate, and maybe they're a little different from what any individual wants or would do, and that's good, I'm not trying to say the group norms should exactly match my individual preferences, but like in my own little one-person culture, X, and I imagine maybe some people here didn't know that."

Replies from: Raemon, Vaniver
↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-07T23:21:58.061Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I expect that if you abbreviate that to "Hmm. In my own one-person culture, X", you'd probably accomplish most of the thing.

I notice as I reflect on this that I have separate buckets for "my culture as it actually stands" and "my aspirational culture that I'd like to be true but isn't actually yet", which seem differently important.

↑ comment by Vaniver · 2019-03-08T18:54:21.409Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My closest answer would be something like "in my version of utopia," although maybe that's too strong?

I think this implies way too much endorsement. I often find myself editing a document and thinking "in American English, the comma goes inside the quotation marks," even though "in programming, the period goes outside the quotation marks".

comment by Raemon · 2020-12-09T22:26:40.531Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think the current implementation of this post is ideal (the phrase "In my culture..." doesn't seem to always translate with the intended connotations, in particular online in low-context settings). 

But, I think the general problem this post was trying to solve is quite important, and I think it's at least an incremental improvement over the status quo to have this concept-handle.

I think of "how to navigate divergent cultural expectations" as one of the central coordination (and rationality) problems we face. I think it's significant that it's cultural, rather than simply "a set of personal practices" because I think humans are largely built out of culture, and even imaginary cultures have weight. And as Malcolm Ocean notes in Reveal Culture [LW · GW], it often matters a lot that there be shared cultural assumptions.

Meanwhile, there are competing access needs that different cultures can attempt to resolve in different ways. Archipelago [LW · GW] is good, even if it's leadership bottlenecked. So, having tools that are specifically for resolving cultural clashes seems pretty important.

comment by Dagon · 2019-03-07T19:12:32.958Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I like the transparency and effort at NOT claiming universality. The use of the phrase "my culture" doesn't resonate as strongly for me. It still seems to be claiming some larger context of one's expectations, and can be taken as pressure to conform to that cultural expectation.

I prefer "for me", or "in my mind", "my initial reaction ", or more self-deprecatingly "in my naive interpretation". This still makes it transparent and clear where the miscommunication or conflict is, without claiming any outside authority for my interpretation.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T19:24:44.551Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree that "in my culture" works if and only if there is *also* a common-knowledge understanding that we're in the metaphorical diplomatic setting and that it's not a bid for changing that diplomatic setting's context culture. I also agree that a lack of intent to apply pressure doesn't always equate to a lack of perception of pressure.

I have a friend who advocates "in my religion" as the superior phrase for that reason—we already have clear common-knowledge boundaries around how religion is personal and sort of self-aware/known to be something other people won't pick up. I feel a little squidgy around that one myself, though, because it seems *too* self-deprecating in populations with a high percentage of atheism.

Replies from: Dagon
↑ comment by Dagon · 2019-03-07T21:47:35.586Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Interesting. Most of the discussions where I want to use this mechanism are atheist, but tolerant and curious enough that I'd expect to immediately sidetrack into "what religion is that, and how does this interpretation relate to those teachings"?

I think "in my mind", or "my initial reaction" will remain my go-to phrasings for this kind of identification of miscommunication.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T22:25:04.740Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I do think that "in my mind" and "my initial reaction" gets a lot of the value. I'm curious if you ever run into people who are uncertain whether you mean "Dagon is expressing a personal thought?" or "Dagon is making a bid to change our broader conversational API"?

For me, that was the biggest thing that I got, once my colleague started doing this—the distinction between their culture and their bids to change the norms.

Replies from: Dagon
↑ comment by Dagon · 2019-03-08T00:15:15.910Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Uncertain whether you mean "Dagon is expressing a personal thought?" or "Dagon is making a bid to change our broader conversational API"?

Also interesting - I'm happy to be having this exploration! I think I use this phrase in both cases, and also when I'm unsure whether either is true! It's mostly a bid to open the meta-level discussion about how the communication is happening, separate from whatever it is that we're (failing to) communicate.

comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2021-01-12T07:08:22.603Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The post attempts to point out the important gap between fighting over norms/values and getting on the same page about what people's norms/values even are, and offers a linguistic tool to help readers navigate it in their life.

A lot of (the first half of) the post feels like An Intuitive Introduction to Being Pro Conversation Before Fighting, and it's all great reading.

I think the OP wants to see people really have conversation about these important differences in values, and is excited about that. Duncan believes that this phrase is a key step allowing (certainly Duncan) to have these conversations, and I am happy that this seems accurate for some number of people.

There are many perspectives on why people avoid having conversations about value differences. Scott has written a lot trying to encourage people to have actual conversation about values differences, such as Guided By the Beauty of Our Weapons and Fundamental Values Differences Are Not That Fundamental. I think often there are forces that try to delegitimize honest talk about values differences in favor of just punishing those that don't share their values, in an attempt to gain power. I think it's also the case that many people have a kind of learned helplessness of values talk – they're scared because they expect those forces are out to get them, and that phrases that attempt to move the conversation there are just scary.

The post doesn't address this much, and in that regard it feels a touch naive to me. That said, I think we can build our own small, walled garden here and have trust in each other to have real conversations. And for that purpose, this sort of "laying out the basics and offering a linguistic tool" has a lot in common with how much of the sequences provided value.

I haven't ever used the phrase myself. One way to update on that would be "this is evidence that it's not the right phrase", but on reflection I feel more like "I regret not doing so and would like to make an explicit effort to try using it 3 times".

I think overall it's very clear and is valuable as a post for many to read. I expect to vote for it with somewhere between +2 and +4.

I think if it's included it would probably be good to include some of the comment section which was also good.

--

P.S. For me, while I liked the post, I didn't really get the phrase until I saw it being used in the wild a bunch of times. I think I would've grokked the phrase sooner if there was a concise instance early on of how both sides of the conversation go. For example, I think (?) that in most interactions, it's good for both people to use the phrase in my culture and explain what norms they think are right, and then decide which norms they're going to coordinate on together.

comment by WilliamTerry · 2023-04-13T20:25:59.354Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

From a practical standpoint whenever I hear that kind of talk, I nod to signify comprehension, understanding and tolerance and say something such as "Noted. That's very interesting, but unfortunately that's not the culture that I (or preferably "we" - if the context will allow) happen to operate in." It's equally as silly and does a nice, quick job of reversing the burden of the proof.

comment by Elo · 2019-03-07T10:00:57.508Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For me I try not to endorse or propagate frameworks that are designed to subtly oppress other people.

That includes calling out bad behaviour when I see it. I strongly disagree with this post. It's not demonstrating healthy agency, it's not delineating from unhealthy agency, it's not couched in sensitivity and it's not going to make the world a better place. And it doesn't belong in rationalist cannon.

Replies from: Benito, Raemon, Duncan_Sabien, Pattern
↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2019-03-07T10:29:51.707Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Elo, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you point to something specific in the text? My read of the post is a bid to reliably make implicit culture explicit in cases where interpersonal conflict is happening, plus a ton of examples of Duncan making his own implicit culture explicit, with an explicit tag of “I’m not advocating for these”. I’m not sure whether it’s computationally simple to notice when and when not the conflict is due to difference of implicit norms, but the OP has clearly had a bunch of effort put in to understand how people will read it and try to help them understand precisely what is and isn’t being said, and is definitely intending to make the world a better place.

In general spending a paragraph publicly punishing a post without showing how the post violates any norms is IMO a bad faith way of enforcing norms, though I may have misunderstood you.

↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-09T19:48:09.901Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

[further edit: I've locked this thread until Tuesday, on Monday will review it and think about whether there's anything else that needs saying]

[mod hat]

Elo,

I think there's a few things you could have said here that would have been fine. I'm not 100% sure I understand your concerns but something like:

"This post seems dangerous to me, and I felt a strong sense of being manipulated while reading it. I don't think this post accomplishes it's stated goals. The 'my culture' frame doesn't stop the statement from being pushy and coercive about your norms, I think it's even worse because it gives the appearance of trying to not be pushy but actually just being subtle about it."

I think it's important that people be able to raise flags about manipulative speech without being able to clearly articulate what's wrong, because often the whole issue with manipulative speech is that it's hard to pin down exactly what's coercive about it.

But, importantly, until we've gotten to a point where we can pin down (or at least roughly gesture at) what's wrong, it's not okay to pre-emptively punish people for it. I even think it's okay to give people some leeway to respond more emotionally when they're reacting to a feeling of coercion. But your comments here seem way over the line of what is acceptable on LW.

Your words here are extremely aggressive, aiming to persuade without much attempt at explanation, and this is part of a pattern you've been demonstrating for awhile. We've previously issued you a warning for similar behavior [LW(p) · GW(p)]. If you do this again you will be banned for 3 months.

Replies from: Elo
↑ comment by Elo · 2019-03-09T20:35:42.983Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would propose that the other warning was an entirely different case, and something that I stopped doing. If you want to call them the same, that's up to you.

Comparing comments:

(you) “This post seems dangerous to me, and I felt a strong sense of being manipulated while reading it. I don’t think this post accomplishes it’s stated goals. The ‘my culture’ frame doesn’t stop the statement from being pushy and coercive about your norms, I think it’s even worse because it gives the appearance of trying to not be pushy but actually just being subtle about it.”
(me) For me I try not to endorse or propagate frameworks that are designed to subtly oppress other people.
That includes calling out bad behaviour when I see it. I strongly disagree with this post. It’s not demonstrating healthy agency, it’s not delineating from unhealthy agency, it’s not couched in sensitivity and it’s not going to make the world a better place. And it doesn’t belong in rationalist cannon.
(you)“This post seems dangerous to me, and I felt a strong sense of being manipulated while reading it.
(me) For me I try not to endorse or propagate frameworks that are designed to subtly oppress other people.

You changed the frame of reference between internal (for me) and external (this post seem... -to me). Which means you broadened a subjective statement. I also didn't include an "I felt" or I would have probably included an "I feel" present tense statement if I were to include any.

(you) I don’t think this post accomplishes it’s stated goals.
(me) I strongly disagree with this post.

I didn't hedge with "don't think". I just stated my position, raw, "strongly disagree". I'd find mine better, but also add the comment that I didn't "think" about it, I "felt" strong disagreement. You shifted from "feeling" to "thinking". While I didn't state, "I feel strong disagreement" this is an entirely different frame of reference to "I think strong disagreement".

The ‘my culture’ frame doesn’t stop the statement from being pushy and coercive about your norms, I think it’s even worse because it gives the appearance of trying to not be pushy but actually just being subtle about it.”
It’s not demonstrating healthy agency, it’s not delineating from unhealthy agency, it’s not couched in sensitivity and it’s not going to make the world a better place.

I see that I used, "It's" and that was unclear. I was referring to the whole post. That's fine. I made a list of factors here. That might not have been clear:

  • not demonstrating healthy agency
  • not delineating healthy from unhealthy agency
  • not couched in sensitivity

. And because of this list (emotive argument follows without explanation) is not going to make the world a better place.

Your list:

  • pushy and coercive
  • worse because it gives the appearance of trying to not be pushy but actually just being subtle about it

Your list covers half of my list.

There's also the poetic intention of using a culture setting paradigm to describe how I would set a culture differently that seems to not transmit through text (for me... calling out bad behaviour... I strongly disagree...). If I were to rewrite:

The way I see this framework being used in the post, it feels like it's being used to subtly oppress people. I strongly disagree with this post. Here's what I would like to see in a better version of the post:
  • Demonstrating healthy agency
  • Delineating from unhealthy agency
  • Language use that is couched in sensitivity
  • Clear explanation of how this makes the world a better place
  • examples of where this can go wrong, and what not to do

Subtle pushiness is worse than overt pushiness because if someone does not want to overtly "follow me and do as I say" they have a chance to say so when I'm obvious about the instruction. There's less of a chance to avoid coercion when the instruction is, "haha, that's not how we do things where I'm from" (yes this is a strawman version but there's no guidance in the top post for navigating between the healthy and the unhealthy types of the framework).

I'm happy to discuss what makes a good comment and what makes a bad comment. Or my comment. Or my take on the two versions.

note. I seem to be paying attention to, gathering and including more detail than you are. I suspect this is causing more of a mess than I want. It also means that I am catching details of communication that are not always noticed by other people.

For example:

  • poetic writing
  • frames of reference
  • hedges
  • I think/I feel
  • list included in a paragraph
  • tenses
  • scope of statement
Replies from: Duncan_Sabien, Raemon
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-09T23:53:55.563Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't want to engage with most of the above, but one small note on my personal impression of the context culture of LW.

It seems to me that:

  • not demonstrating healthy agency
  • not delineating healthy from unhealthy agency
  • not couched in sensitivity

are each claims that themselves require some form of justification. i.e. sure, it makes sense that you would say "because of A, B, and C, I conclude this is bad," and I expect that most LWers would agree about the logic of that if-then.

But I also expect that most LWers would not find your three premises obviously true, and would therefore receive them as un- or underjustified assertions, and (given the local norms) expect you to include, from the beginning, more details of your underlying world model (and certainly expect you to be willing to expound upon them if asked, as I and Benito and Pattern have all asked).

(I note that in your response to Pattern you use a larger number of synonyms to repeat "X is bad" but don't actually explain why or how with e.g. claims about causality that can be investigated, or analogies to known phenomena whose aptness or inaptness can be discussed, or illustrative examples that others will find evocative, or anything like that.)

↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-10T01:17:09.885Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Quick note: I most likely won't be responding more until Monday, and generally think I've said most of what I felt needed saying.

(I will add one quick clarification for onlookers that in my example of what to do different, one important aspect was the removal of the phrase "that are designed to subtly oppress other people", which was making assertions about the internal design process that didn't seem justified to me).

I am locking this thread until Tuesday (on Monday someone on the LW team may review it, and see if there's anything else that warrants a mod response)

↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-07T18:10:56.933Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems important to me to distinguish between "designed to subtly oppress other people" and "will necessarily have the result of subtly oppressing other people."

It is not the former (and the implication that it is sounds to me like the motte version of a claim whose bailey is "Duncan is lying/manipulative," or like an assertion that you know better than I do what is going on inside my own head).

I am genuinely interested if you can shine light on the latter in a concrete, specific, and here-are-the-lines-of-cause-and-effect sort of way, since subtly oppressing other people is counter to my goals.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-08T06:26:37.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(I note for onlookers that I found this tool, as opposed to designing it myself, although my descriptions of it, and the way I made meaning out of my observations, are entirely self-generated and no one else's fault.)

Replies from: Elo
↑ comment by Elo · 2019-03-09T04:31:36.494Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You'd have to be an evil nincompoop to design and then publish, instructions for subtle manipulation on purpose. So no, I can't give you the credit of being that evil to purposely do that.

I wonder what culture it takes to make you as you are. In the way that you don't see what I see.

I will compile a list.

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2019-03-09T05:19:41.259Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

[mod hat - haven’t had time to respond to this properly but flagging that the mod team is discussing it]

↑ comment by Pattern · 2019-03-08T19:04:46.905Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I noticed the post had a "here is a thing/technique I find useful" component and a "here is an example of something like me using the thing/technique". Did you disagree with the meta part (people talking about where they come from) or the specific part (where the author comes from)?

Replies from: Elo
↑ comment by Elo · 2019-03-09T04:15:23.686Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If I think of a tool like "genetic selection". We can have a conversation about how genetic selection is a neat tool that allowed us to select wheat and build the modern bread industry. However if I start talking about genetic selection in terms of the reduction of inferior people and extermination of cultures that don't fit my vision of the right thing, we are suddenly not talking about the use of a tool. We are instead talking about the use of manipulation to get what I want.

The "in my culture..." linguistic strategy tool is just a tool.

In how it's being talked about, in how it's being presented and in the examples, it's being used in ways that manipulate, reject, oppress, suppress, override, and imply "rightness" over other people who might be unsuspecting to the method. I object to the propagation of the strategy without emphasis on the care, consent, acceptance, kindness aspects of interpersonal culture.

It feels like poison is seeping through every other sentence of the main document. Part of me is terrified to even touch this unholy mess for fear of accidentally picking up on the subtle manipulation techniques that are so deeply ingrained that they are such a blind spot for the author that he can't even notice the way it comes out in all his language.

I expect this is going to hit a sore spot. That's the nature of how people will often respond to manipulation. And the knee jerk reaction to people being challenged with such claims.

I want to note that my comment was the soft version of my brain repeating, "kill it with fire" as I read the document.

Replies from: Duncan_Sabien, Pattern
↑ comment by Duncan Sabien (Deactivated) (Duncan_Sabien) · 2019-03-10T00:00:14.705Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
it's being used in ways that manipulate, reject, oppress, suppress, override, and imply "rightness" over other people who might be unsuspecting to the method

This reads to me as an assertion in need of justification, via a more detailed description of the underlying causal model, or analogies to known phenomena, or illustrative case-study style examples, or something. Another way to say this is "I hear what you believe, but I do not hear why you believe what you believe."

↑ comment by Pattern · 2019-03-09T17:36:51.585Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Based on your response I'm guessing, you disagree with a) 'the author's culture', b) the wording ("in my culture"), c) not having enough cautionary remarks (or instructions on how to help people develop memetic immunity/etc. so it can be used responsibly in the group). Would you have responded differently if the post had focused more on reciprocation/negotiating a set of norms as a group, or, in order (counterfactually) for you to have responded differently, would that require too many changes to list?