European Community Weekend 2014 retrospective

OMG, that's an interesting project! And I originally wanted to spend this day without too much web reading.

Some of the comments are... educational.

The very fact that you think it's acceptable to ask ... disturbs me greatly. The very fact that you think it's reasonable to want ... strikes me as a symptom of ... at its worst.

The request constitutes ... just as much as the actual ... does.

There are many people in this world ... who would never walk up to a stranger and ask ... We are taught from an early age not to do this, to exercise what is typically called societal restraint. It's impolite to do this to strangers, we are taught. You are proposing a system to make the question permissible.

This illustrates that the so-called conflict between Guess culture and Ask culture cannot be solved by merely saying "here we have a opt-in subgroup which uses different communication rules". Some things are merely difficult to guess correctly, and that can be fixed by improving the communication system. But some things are genuinely taboo... so creating a better communication system about them would cause an outrage.

At the first sight, they may both seem the same to an outsider or a clueless insider, because both are something that is simply never talked about. Therefore, as the first step, we have to find out whether X is "generally okay, just difficult to coordinate" or "forbidden". If something is considered intrinsically wrong, creating a more reliable and more consensual communication system is solving the wrong problem. (It would also be necessary to make the system secret, or at least plausibly deniable. But that makes coordination even more difficult.) And we should actually be thankful to people who openly admit they believe it is intrinsically wrong, as opposed to e.g. rationalizing about imperfections in the communication system, etc.

(I am not sure how to feel about an argument that there ain't no such thing as consent, because people can always be pressured into consent e.g. by ostracism; and therefore, if it is morally wrong to do X against someone's will, then it is wrong to allow X even among consenting people. It has a point; but applied consistently it would mean you shouldn't interact with anyone, ever. Which I guess means that the only practical way to apply this is to have a social consensus about when to use it and when to ignore it, which will be decided by the high-status people. And by the way, merely saying that there should be a way to do X, implies that X is good, which already creates a pressure on people to do X. -- Another interesting generalizable argument was that allowing consensual X is wrong, because some people would get more consent and some wouldn't get any, and they would feel horrible; therefore it is better to keep it a general taboo, so no one feels personally rejected. -- Also, people have a right not to know that your subculture exists. = I should probably use all these to create a random activity-criticism generator. Or even a complete flamewar generator, because there are also predictable responses.)

If there is a culture with a taboo against hugging, where people who want to hug others are perceived as morally depraved and dangerous, providing "hugs" tags for people would be risky.

By the way, the system mentioned in the article used two clearly explicit steps (some commenters may have misunderstood this, or may have reacted to the early stages before the protocol was established). The protocol was: (1) opt in by wearing a tag; (2) ask people with the tag whether it is okay to do X; (3) do X. Which means that under this protocol no one should even be asked without consenting to be asked first. -- This two-step consent is probably a good idea for controversial topics, although I would like to also have a one-step alternative. For example "it is okay to ask if you can hug me" and "it is okay to hug me even without asking first".

(I wanted to stay meta, but here is an object-level note: It would have been better to call it "Open Source Touching Project"; because other body parts were also allowed, but many people in discussions objected to the title. Also, there is a valid objection that doing some things in public may be illegal, so it is wrong to do such things at a convention without explicit permission of the organizers.)

That was one of the cases where my preferences were too nuanced for the keywords/stickers. I was fine with hugs from everyone, but would have preferred to be asked for cuddles first. And the long hug you gave me was, from my point of view, cuddling. It prompted thoughts like "Why is he the cuddling right away? Is he trying to initiate more than just friendly conversation? Should I get some distance between us to signal that I'm not interested?" and that made me uncomfortable though system II agreed that there wasn't any way you could have told that I would have preferred you to ask (before reading my physical reaction). Talking about it fixed that system I feeling of "needing to get some distance", so it's good that we did that. :)

Did you consider asking me whether your impression (that I was uncomfortable with the cuddling) was true, before I gave you that feedback?

(For clarity, where you say "Hugging is at the rand of my comfort zone" you mean "... at the edge of my comfort zone". It might not be obvious to non-German readers, so I'm pointing it out.)

There still the possibility to have to much contact and walking around with the heuristic that you treat people based on their tags, reduces the amount one reacts to body language of other people.

I believe this happens, the question is (a) how much, and (b) whether it is a net improvement or not.

Generally, any situation of "not having to worry about X as much as before" makes people spend less energy on X, and more energy on something else. Historically, since people invented reading and writing, they didn't have to memorize everything, and they stopped memorizing a lot of things -- so these days most people can't recite long sagas from memory and don't remember ten generations of their ancestors. We lost something; but I believe we gained more than we lost. If we decided to spend a lot of time and energy to get this ability back, we probably could; but we prefer to spend that time and energy doing something else. As another example, I heard that some people who were abused have very high ability to read other people's body language; because for them it was a survival skill. (Not sure how reliable is this info, I remember only a fictional evidence.) I think it's not worth paying this price, if one has an option to avoid it.

But so is hugging strangers.

(And the “normal protocols” differ from place to place, so in an international meeting...)