This content was moved from the main body of the post to this comment. After receiving some good feedback, I've decided I'll follow the template of "advice section in comments" for most of my posts.

Some Quick Advice

Awareness

• See if you can notice conversational cultures/styles which match what I’ve described.
• Begin noticing if you lean towards a particular style.
• Begin paying attention to whether those you discuss with might have a particular style, especially if it’s different from yours.
• Start determining if different groups you’re a member of, e.g. clubs or workplaces, lean in one cultural direction or another.

Openness

• Reflect on the advantages that cultures/styles different to your own have and others might use them instead.
• Consider that on some occasions styles different to yours might be more appropriate.
• Don’t assume that alternatives to your own culture are obviously wrong, stupid, bad, or lacking in skills.

Experimentation

• Push yourself a little in the direction of adopting a non-default style for you. Perhaps you already do but push yourself a little more. Try doing so and feeling comfortable and open, if possible.

Ideal and Degenerate Forms of Each Culture

Unsurprisingly, each of the cultures has their advantages and weaknesses, mostly to do with when and where they’re most effective. I hope to say more in future posts, but here I’ll quickly list as what I think the cultures look like at their best and worst.

Combat Culture

At its best

• Communicators can more fully focus their attention on their ideas the content rather than devoting thought to the impact of their speech acts on the emotions of others.
• Communication can be direct and unambiguous when it doesn’t need to be “cushioned” to protect feelings.
• The very combativeness and aggression prove to all involved that they’re respected and included.

At its worst

• The underlying truth-seeking nature of conversation is lost and instead becomes a fight or competition to determine who is Right.
• The combative style around ideas is abused to dismiss, dominate, bully, belittle, or exclude others.
• It devolves into a status game.

Nurture Culture

At its best

• Everyone is made to feel safe, welcomed, and encouraged to participate without fear of ridicule, dismissal, or judgment.
• People assist each other to develop their ideas, seeking to find their strongest versions rather than attacking their weak points. Curiosity pervades.

At its worst

• Fear of inducing a negative feeling in others and the need to create positive feelings and impressions of inclusion dominate over any truth-seeking goal.
• Empathy becomes pathological and ideas are never criticized.
• Communicators spend most of their thought and attention on the social interaction itself rather than the ideas they’re trying to exchange.

There is another story I have heard of the chavrusa. Two Talmudic students were going hammer and tongs, as they do, when one of them found himself at a loss how to reply to the other's latest argument. As he struggled in thought, the other stepped in and said, such-and-such is how you should argue against what I just said.

This is a good post; thank you for writing it. I think this dichotomy, while perhaps not a perfect categorization, is pretty good, and clarifies some things.

My background and preference is what you call “Combat Culture”. “Nurture Culture” has always seemed obviously wrong and detrimental to me, and has seemed more wrong and more detrimental the more I’ve seen it in action. This, of course, is not news, and I mention it only to give context to what I have to say.

I have two substantive comments to make:

First, “It devolves into a status game.” is something that easily can, and often does, happen to “Nurture Culture” spaces also. What this looks like is that “you are not communicating in a [ nurturing | nonviolent | prosocial | etc. ] way” gets weaponized and used as a cudgel in status plays; meanwhile, participants of higher social status skirt the letter of whatever guidelines exist to enforce a “nurturing” atmosphere, while saying and doing things whose effects are to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage contrarian or opposing views. (And the more that “nurturing” communities attempt to pare down their “nurturing”-enforcement rules to the basics of “be nice”, the more the “tyranny of structurelessness” applies.)

Second, it has been my experience, in my personal relationships, that the more comfortable a person feels around another person or group, the more the first person is willing to be “combative”. A very “nurturing” type interaction style—where you don’t just tell a person they’re wrong, but “open-mindedly” and “curiously” inquire as to their reasons, and take care not to insult them, etc., etc., does indeed work well to avert misunderstandings or overt conflicts between near-strangers, casual acquaintances, etc. It also tends to be a near-perfect sign of a low-intimacy relationship; generally speaking, as people get to know each other, they tend to relax around each other, and drop down into a more “combative” orientation in discussions and debates with each other. They say what they think. (Of course, this could be a selection effect on my part. But then, this seems correct to me, and proper, and expected.)

Two dimensions independent of the two cultures

Having been inspired by the comments here, I'm now thinking that there are two communication dimensions at play here within the Cultures. The correlation between these dimensions and the Cultures is incomplete which has been causing confusion.

1) The adversarial-collaborative dimension. Adversarial communication is each side attacking the other's views while defending their own. Collaborative communication is openness and curiosity to each other's ideas. As Ben Pace describes it [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

I'll say a thing, and you'll add to it. Lots of 'yes-and'. If you disagree, then we'll step back a bit, and continue building where we can both see the truth. If I disagree, I won't attack your idea, but I'll simply notice I'm confused about a piece of the structure we're building, and ask you to add something else instead, or wonder why you'd want to build it that way.

2) The "emotional concern and effort" dimension. Communication can be conducted with little attention or effort placed on ensuring the emotional comfort of the participants, often resulting in a directness or bluntness (because it's assumed people are fine and don't need things softened). Alternatively, communication can be conducted with each participant putting in effort to ensure the other feels okay (feels validated/respected/safe/etc.) At this end of the spectrum, words, tone, and expression are carefully selected as overall a model of the other is used to ensure the other is taken care of.

My possible bucket error [LW · GW]

It was easy for me to notice "adversarial, low effort towards emotional comfort" as one cluster of communication behaviors and "collaborative, high concern" as another. Those two clusters are what I identified as Combat Culture and Nurture Culture.

Commenters here, including at least Raemon [LW(p) · GW(p)], Said [LW(p) · GW(p)], and Ben Pace [LW(p) · GW(p)], have rightly made comments to the effect that you can have communication where participants are being direct, blunt, and not proactively concerned for the feelings of the other while nonetheless still being open, being curious, and working collaboratively to find the truth with a spirit of, "being on the same team". This maybe falls under Combat Culture too, but it's a less central example.

On the other side, I think it's entirely possible to be acting combatively, i.e. with an external appearance of aggression and hostility, while nonetheless being very attentive to the feelings and experience of the other. Imagine two fencers sparring in the practice ring: during a bout, each is attacking and trying to win, however, they're also taking create care as to not actually injure the other. They would stop the moment they suspected they had and switch to an overtly nurturing mode.

A 2x2 grid?

One could create a 2x2 grid with the two dimensions described in this comment. Combat and Nurture cultures most directly fit in two of the quadrants, but I think the other two quadrants are populated by many instances of real-world communication. In fact, these other two quadrants might contain some very healthy communication.

[Update: the new version is now live!!]

[Author writing here.]

The initial version of this post was written quickly on a whim, but given the value people have gotten from this post (as evidenced by the 2018 Review nomination and reviews), I think it warrants a significant update which I plan to write in time for possibly publication in a book, and ideally the Review voting stage.

Things I plan to include in the update:

• Although dichotomies (X vs. Y) are easy to remember and talk about, different conversational cultures differ on multiple dimensions [LW(p) · GW(p)], and that ought to be addressed explicitly.
• It's easy to round-off the cultures to something simpler than I intended, and I want to ward against that. For example, the healthy Combat Culture I advocate requires a a basis of trust between participants. Absent that, you don't have the culture I was pointing at.
• Relatedly, an updated post should incorporate some of the ideas I mentioned in the sequel [LW · GW] about the conditions that give rise to different cultures.
• A concept which crystallized for me since writing the post is that of "the significance of a speech act" and how this crucially differs between cultures.
• The tradeoffs between the two cultures can be addressed more explicitly.

Overall, I think my original post did something valuable in pointing clearly at two distinct regions in conversation-culture space and giving them sufficiently good labels which enabled people to talk about them and better notice them in practice. The fact that they've gotten traction has surprised me a bit since it pointed out perhaps a hole in our communal vocab.

Crisply pointing at these two centroids in the large space necessarily meant sacrificing the nuance and detail from the multiple dimensions in the space. I think the ideal treatment of the topic both provides easy-to-use handles for discussion as well as more thorough theory of conversational-cultures. In truth, probably a sequence of posts is warranted rather than just a single behemoth post or something.

A point interesting to me is that the post differs somewhat in style from my other posts. With my other posts, I usually try to be very technically precise (and end up sounding a bit like a textbook or academic paper). This post's style was meant to be more engaging, more entertaining, more emotional, and I'm guessing that was part of its appeal. I'm not sure if it's entirely a good thing, since I think trying to write in the evocative way is in tension with writing in the most technically precise, model-rich, theoretically-accurate way. 

In updating the post, I expect to move it to the latter style more and make it relatively "more boring read" even as I make it more accurate. I could imagine the ideal for authors to be is to have one highly-engaging, evocative post for a topic that draws people in and another with the same models in their full technical glory.

Lastly I mention that I think there's so much detail in this domain that alternative takes, e.g. Abram Demski's Combat vs Nurture & Meta-Contrarianism [LW · GW], feel like they're describing real and true things, yet somehow different things than what I addressed. I don't have a meta-theory yet that manage to unify all the models in this space, though that would be nice.

This is a false dichotomy. But whenever someone marks two points on an otherwise featureless map, typically the rest of the space of possibilities that the world explodes with disappears from the minds of the participants. People end up saying "combat good, nurture bad", or the reverse, and then defend their position by presenting ways in which one is good and ways in which the other is bad. Or someone expatiates on the good and bad qualities of each one, in multiple permutations, and ends up with a Ribbonfarm post.

Said Achmiz has spoken eloquently of bad things that happen in "nurture culture". For examples of bad things in "combat culture", see any snark-based community, such as 4chan or rationalwiki. All of these things are destructive of epistemic quality. (If anything, nurture goes more wrong than combat, because it presents a smile, a knife in the back, and crocodile tears, while snark wields its weapons openly.)

When you leave out all of the ways that either supposed culture can go wrong, what is left of them? In a culture without snark or smothering, good ideas will be accepted, and constructively built on, not extinguished. Bad ideas will be pointed out as such; if there is something close that is better, that can be pointed out; if an idea is unsalvageable, that also.

Several Japanese terms have gained currency in the rational community, such as tsoyoku naritai and isshoukenmei. Here is another that I think deserving of wider currency: 切磋琢磨, sessa takuma, joyfully competitive striving for a common purpose.

Communication can be direct and unambiguous when it doesn’t need to be “cushioned” to protect feelings.

I don't believe that communication becomes direct in a combative discussion. Participants in a combative discussion usually try to hide spots where they or their arguments are vulnerable. This means it's harder to get at the true rejection [LW · GW]of the other person.

There's a huge problem in our Western culture where having knowledge is seen as the ability to have a opinion about a topic that can be effectively defended intellectually instead of knowledge being the ability to interact directly with the real world or to make predictions about it.

In a combative environment I can't speak about those things that I know to be true where I can make good predictions but that I can't defend intellectually in a way that makes sense to the person I'm speaking with.

Great essay!

Another aspect of this divide is about articulability. In a nurturing context, it's possible to bring something up before you can articulate it clearly, and even elicit help articulating it.

For example, "Something about <the proposal we're discussing> strikes me as contradictory -- like it's somehow not taking into account <X>?". And then the other person and I collaborate to figure out if and what exactly that contradiction is.

Or more informally, "There's something about this that feels uncomfortable to me". This can be very useful to express even when I can't say exactly what it is that I'm uncomfortable with, IF my conversation partner respects that, and doesn't dismiss what I'm saying because it's not precise enough.

In a combative context, on the other hand, this seems like a kind of interaction you just can't have (I may be wrong, I don't have much experience in them). Because there, inarticulateness just reads as your arguments being weak. And you don't want to run the risk of putting half-baked ideas out there and having them swatted down. So your only real choices are to figure out how to articulate things, by yourself, on the fly, or remain silent.

And that's too bad, because the edge of what can be articulated is IME the most interesting place to be.

(Gendlin's Focusing is an extreme example of being at the edge of what can be articulated, and in the paired version you have one person whose job is basically to be a nurturing & supportive presence.)

Most people who commented on this post seemed to recognise it from their experience and get a general idea of what the different cultures look like (although some people differ on the details, see later). This is partly because it is explained well but also because I think the names were chosen well.

Here are a few people saying that they have used/referenced it: 1 [LW(p) · GW(p)], 2 [LW(p) · GW(p)], 3 [LW(p) · GW(p)] plus me [LW(p) · GW(p)].

From a LW standpoint thinking about this framing helps me to not be offended by blunt comments. My family was very combat culture but in life in general I find people are unwilling to say “you’re wrong” so it now comes as a bit of a shock. Now when someone says something blunt on LW I just picture it being said by my older brother and realise that probably no offense is meant.

Outside of LW, this post has caused me to add a bit into my induction of new employees at work. I encourage a fairly robust combat culture in my department but I realise that some people aren’t used to this so I try to give people a warning up front and make sure they know that no offense is meant.

***

There were a few examples in the comments where it seemed like the distinction between the two cultures wasn’t quite as clear as it could be.

Ruby updated [LW(p) · GW(p)] the original distinction into two dimensions in a later comment – the “adversarial-collaborative” dimension and the “emotional concern and effort” dimension. The central combat culture was “adversarial + low emotional effort” and nurture was “collaborative + high emotional effort”. However there are cultures which fit in the other 2 possible pairings and the original framing suppressed that somewhat.

I personally would like to see a version of the OP which includes that distinction and think that it would likely be a good fit for the 2018 review. Short of making that distinction, the OP allows for people to fit, say, “collaborative + low emotional effort” into either the nurture or combat culture category. If the combat-nurture distinction is to be used as common knowledge then I worry that this will cause confusion between people with different interpretations.

My other worry about including this in the 2018 review is a claim of what the default should be. If the post claims that nurture culture should be the default, does that then seem like this is how LW should be? This counts even more as the post is by a member of the LW team.

Finally, in my mind if this post (or a version of it) was included in the 2018 review then it would benefit from including something like the excellent section [LW(p) · GW(p)] which Ruby later moved into the comments. For the post it made sense to move it to the comments but it would be shame to miss it out entirely for the review.

This post is well written and not over-long. If the concepts it describes are unfamiliar to you, it is a well written introduction. If you're already familiar with them, you can skim it quickly for a warm feeling of validation.

I think the post would be even better with a short introduction describing its topic and scope, but I'm aware that other people have different preferences. In particular:

• There are more than two 'cultures' or styles of discussion, perhaps many more. The post calls this out towards the end (apparently this is new in v2).
• The post gives two real examples of Combat Culture, and only one made-up scenario of Nurture Culture. It does not attempt to ground the discussion in anything quantitative - how common these cultures are, what they correlate with, how to recognize or test for them, how gradually they may shade into each other or into something else altogether.

I don't want to frame these as shortcomings; the post is still useful and interesting without them!

I read this post when it initially came out. It resonated with me to such an extent that even three weeks ago, I found myself referencing it when counseling a colleague on how to deal with a student whose heterodoxy caused the colleague to make isolated demands for rigor from this student.

The author’s argument that Nurture Culture should be the default still resonates with me, but I think there are important amendments and caveats that should be made. The author said:

"To a fair extent, it doesn’t even matter if you believe that someone is truly, deeply mistaken. It is important foremost that you validate them and their contribution, show that whatever they think, you still respect and welcome them."

There is an immense amount of truth in this. Concede what you can when you can. Find a way to validate the aspects of a person’s point which you can agree with, especially with the person you tend to disagree with most or are more likely to consider an airhead, adversary, or smart-aleck. This has led me to a great amount of success in my organization. As Robin Hanson once asked pointedly, “Do you want to appear revolutionary, or be revolutionary?” Esse quam videri.

Combat Culture is a purer form of Socratic Method. When we have a proposer and a skeptic, we can call this the adversarial division of labor: You propose the idea, I tell you why you are wrong. You rephrase your idea. Rinse and repeat until the conversation reaches one of three stopping points: aporia, agreement, or an agreement to disagree. In the Talmud example, both are proposers of a position and both are skeptics of the other persons’ interpretation.

Nurture Culture does not bypass the adversarial division of labor, but it does put constraints on it - and for good reason. A healthy combat culture can only exist when a set of rare conditions are met. Ruby’s follow-up post outlined those conditions. But Nurture Culture is how we still make progress despite real world conditions like needing consensus, or not everyone being equal in status or knowledge, or some people having more skin in the game than others.

So here are some important things I would add more emphasis to from the original article after about a hundred iterations of important disagreements at work and in intellectual pursuits since 2018.

1. Nurture Culture assumes knowledge and status asymmetries.

2. Nurture Culture demands a lot of personal patience.

3. Nurture Culture invites you to consider what even the most wrong have right.

4. Sometimes you can overcome a disagreement at the round table by talking to your chief adversary privately and reaching a consensus, then returning for the next meeting on the same page.

While these might be two cultures, it’s helpful to remember that there are cultures to either side of these two: Inflexible Orthodoxy and Milquetoast Relativism. A Combat Culture can resolve into a dominant force with weaponized arguments owning the culture, while a Nurture Culture can become so limply committed to their nominal goals that no one speaks out against anything that runs counter to the mission.

SUPPLEMENTAL CONTENT FOR V2
 

Please do post comments at the top level.

At first, I felt that 'nurture' was a terrible name, because the primary thing I associated with the idea you're discussing is that we are building up an axiomatised system together. Collaboratively. I'll say a thing, and you'll add to it. Lots of 'yes-and'. If you disagree, then we'll step back a bit, and continue building where we can both see the truth. If I disagree, I won't attack your idea, but I'll simply notice I'm confused about a piece of the structure we're building, and ask you to add something else instead, or wonder why you'd want to build it that way. I agree this is more nurturing, but that's not the point. The point is collaboration.

But then my model of Said said "What? I don't understand why this sort of collaborative exploration isn't perfectly compatible with combative culture - I can still ask all those questions and make those suggestions" which is a point he has articulated quite clearly down-thread (and elsewhere). So then I got to thinking about the nurturing aspect some more.

I'd characterise combative culture as working best in a professional setting, where it's what one does as one's job. When I think of productive combative environments, I visualise groups of experts in healthy fields like math or hard science or computer science. The researchers will bring powerful and interesting arguments forth to each other, but typically they do not discuss nor require an explicit model of how another researcher in their field thinks. And symmetrically, the person responsible for how this researcher thinks is up to them - that's their whole job! They'll note they were wrong, and make some updates about what cognitive heuristics they should be using, but not bring that up in the conversation, because that's not the point of the conversations. The point of the conversation is, y'know, whether the theorem is true, or whether this animal evolved from that, or whether this architecture is more efficient when scaled. Not our emotions or feelings.

Sure, we'll attack each other in ways that can often make people feel defensive, but in a field where everyone has shown their competence (e.g. PhDs) we have common knowledge of respect for one another - we don't expect it to actually hurt us to be totally wrong on this issue. It won't mean I lose social standing, or stop being invited to conferences, or get fired. I mean, obviously it needs to correlate, but never does any single sentence matter or single disagreement decide something that strong. Generally the worst that will happen to you is that you just end up a median scientist/researcher, and don't get to give the big conference talks. There's a basic level of trust as we tend to go about our work, that means combative culture is not a real problem.

I think this is good. It's hard to admit you're wrong, but if we have common knowledge of respect, then this makes the fear smaller, and I can overcome it.

I think one of the key motivations for nurturing culture is that we don't have common knowledge that everything will be okay in many part of our lives, and in the most important decisions in our lives way more is at stake than in academia. Some example decisions where being wrong about them has far worse consequences for your life than being wrong about whether Fermat's Last Theorem is true or false:

• Will my husband/wife and I want the same things in the next 50 years?
• Will my best friends help me keep the up the standard of personal virtue I care about in myself, or will they not notice if I (say) lie to myself more and more?
• I'm half way through med school. Is being a doctor actually hitting the heavy tails of impact I could have with my life?

These questions have much more at stake. I know for myself, when addressing them, I feel emotions like fear, anger, and disgust.

Changing my mind on the important decisions in my life, especially those that affect my social standing amongst my friends and community, is really far harder than changing my life about an abstract topic where the results don't have much direct impact on my life.

Not that computer science or chemistry or math aren't incredibly hard, it's just that to do good work in these fields does not require the particular skill of believing things even when they'll lower your social standing.

I think if you imagine the scientists above turning combative culture to their normal lives (e.g. whether they feel aligned with their husband/wife for the next 50 years), and really trying to do it hard, they'd immediately go through an incredible amount of emotional pain until it was too much to bear and then they'd stop.

If you want someone to be open to radically changing their job, lifestyle, close relationships, etc, some useful things can be:

• Have regular conversations with norms such that the person will not be immediately judged if they say something mistaken, or if they consider a hypothesis that you believe to be wrong.
• If you're discussing with them an especially significant belief and whether to change it, keep a track of their emotional state, and help them carefully walk through emotionally difficult steps of reasoning.

If you don't, they'll put a lot of effort into finding any other way of shooting themselves in the foot that's available, rather than realise that something incredibly painful is about to happen to them (and has been happening for many years).

I think that trying to follow this goal to it's natural conclusions will lead you to a lot of the conversational norms that we're calling 'nurturing'.

I think Qiaochu once said something like "If you don't regularly feel like your soul is being torn apart, you're not doing rationality right." Those weren't his specific words, but I remember the idea being something like that.

There's a subtle difference in focus between nurture culture as described here, and what I'd call "collaborative truthseeking." Nurture brings to mind helping people to grow. Collaborative brings to mind more like "we're on a team", which doesn't just mean we're on the same side, but that we each have some responsibilities to bring to the table.

Wow, I really love that this has been updated and appendix'd. It's really nice to see how this has grown with community feedback and gotten polished this from a rough concept.

Creating common knowledge on how 'cultures' of communication can differ seems really valuable for a community focused on cooperatively finding truth.

Promoted to curated: I think this post is quite exceptionally clear in pointing at an important distinction, and I've already referenced it a few times in the last two weeks, which is a good sign. I don't think this post necessarily says anything massively new, but I don't remember any write-up of similar clarity, and so I do think it adds a bunch to the intellectual commons.

Addressing ...
... "The tradeoffs between the two cultures" and the advantages of one or the other and ...
... examining these takeoffs is for purposes of evaluating  Combat vs. Caring as truth-seeking tools —

We must bear in mind that when applying Caring norms, the claims made by a sufficiently emotionally brittle and/or exquisitely sensitive interlocutor can become unquestionable and unassailable by the truth-seeking process.

Any any attempt to invoke Caring norms needs to remain clearly cognizant that reality does not care about your feelings.

 

I’ve referred back to this multiple times and it has helped (e.g. at work) to get people to understand each other better.

This post highlighted one of the two main disagreements I see about LW conversationsal culture (the other being contextualizing vs. decoupling). Having a handle to refer to this thing is quite handy for common knowledge.

mod note: this post probably shouldn't have been included in the 2020 review. It was behaving a bit weirdly because it had appeared in a previous review, and it'd be a fair amount of coding work to get it to seamlessly display the correct number of reviews. It's similar to a post of mine [LW · GW] in that it was edited substantially for the 2018 review and re-published in 2020, which updated it's postedAt date which resulted in it bypassing the intended filters of 'must have been published in 2020'

I had previously changed the postedAt date on my post to be pre-2020 so that it wouldn't appear here, and just did the same for this one.

I found the ideas behind Radical Candor to be quite useful. I think they're similar to ones here. Link

I've won practically every interaction I've ever had. I've become so good at winning that most people won't actually interact with me anymore.

This reminds me of the distinction between debate and dialectic. Both can be means to truth seeking, both have their own failure modes (debate can become about winning instead of the truth; dialectic can become confused without adequate experience with synthesis), and different people can have a preference for one over the other. Thinking in terms of a culture though is perhaps better suited to what's going on than talking about preference for a particular technique because it gets at something deeper fueling that preference for particular methods.

Also, for what it's worth, I found this post useful enough at describing what I want to moderate towards that I've linked it now from my LW moderation guidelines to indicate I want people to prefer nurture to combat culture in the comments on my posts. I think a failure to have this well explained helps explain why things went in a direction I didn't like in a recent contentious post I made [LW · GW].

I propose these amendment to the essay at top:
1)  "Nurture Culture makes a lot of sense in a world where criticism and disagreement are often [or are perceived to be] an attack or threat."

2)  I question the reasonability of describing intellectual "criticism and disagreement" as "an attack or threat".  I propose that this change "an attack or threat" -> "a threat to the ego of the target of the criticism or rebuttal".

My waving a knife can be reasonably inferred to be "an attack or threat"  My statement that "your logic is faulty because ..." is not.  Claiming that one is being subjected to "an attack or threat" often seems  to be used as a rhetorical technique to chill comments that cannot be rebutted using reason, facts, and logic.