. . . Oh.

Reading part 3 gave me the blindingly obvious in hindsight realization that Guess-culture Georg would actually have to do non-insignificant amounts of cognitive work to move from implicit to explicit. I participate in guess-culture since it's the norm in my social circles, but I would estimate it takes closer to 80% of my cognitive load and I've just been assuming that everyone else was more naturally able to model other people and so they were explicitly doing ~10% or whatever, and were unable to articulate the shortcuts. This suddenly makes so much more sense.

I've enjoyed much of your 30 days of posts, but it is entirely possible that this is the realization that's going to stick with me.

The idea that comes to mind is "fail safe". Failure is inevitable so make sure it fails in a safe way. The tool used to evaluate this is called an FMEA.

This is technically beside your point and doesn't take away from your larger thesis, but I think you misunderstand the primary value of guess culture in the guess/ask/tell divide you reference. In fact, your description of guess culture seems at odds with what it is like to work well within it.

It's to some extent true that guess culture relies on "subsystems" to automatically notice and respond to patterns in subconscious and reflexive ways and in this way largely does not make a bid for deliberative thought except when an anomaly is detected (you might say you mostly do it with S1 unless you aren't sure what to do and then need S2 whereas the other cultures more ignore S1 in favor of S2), but what is primarily of value in guess culture is ambiguity. If anything guess culture is not a request to shift burden but a request for more burden in order to increase ambiguity (and politeness and maybe other things but certainly not to reduce "burden" other than maybe something like the "burden" of risk of offence).

Aether variables are also very relevant to the arguments over flavors of utilitarianism. Also, shunting costs invisibly is like, one of the main things humans are even trying to *do*. I don't think asking them to stop does much, though giving those dumped on language for expressing themselves is one useful step. If nothing else it allows them to send up a flag such that they can *maybe* go sideways and do their own thing together. Making more available best practices for keeping entryists out of their spaces is probably also good. Mozi is one of my heroes for realizing the meta principle of costs of offense vs costs of defense in friggin Warring States era and risking his life going around teaching seige resistance techniques to tip things in favor of defense (and thus wealth creation).

This is a great post. In addition to the main points, your example around Guess-/Ask-/Tell-Cultures was useful for perspective taking in a way that somehow feels like it generalizes beyond the specific example for me.