Two years later, the concept of decoupled vs contextualizing has remained an important piece of my vocabulary.
I’m glad both for this distillation of Nerst’s work (removing some of the original political context that might make it more distracting to link to in the middle of an argument), and in particular for the jargon-optimization that followed (“contextualized” is much more intuitive than “low-decoupling.”)
This post has been object-level useful, for navigating particular disagreements. (I think in those cases I haven’t brought it up directly myself, but I’ve benefited from a sometimes-heated-discussion having access to the concepts).
I think it’s also been useful at a more meta-level, as one of the concepts in my toolkit that enable me to think higher level thoughts in the domain of group norms and frame disagreements. A recent facebook discussion was delving into a complicated set of differences in norms/expectations, where decoupled/contextualizing seemed to be one of the ingredients but not the entirety. Having the handy shorthand and common referent allowed it to only take up a single working-memory slot while still being able to think about the other complexities at play.
This post has been object-level useful, for navigating particular disagreements.
Can you give specific examples? I’ve basically only seen “contextualizing norms” used as a stonewalling tactic, but you’ve probably seen discussions I haven’t.
The most recent example was this facebook thread. I’m hoping over the next week to find some other concrete examples to add to the list, although I think the most of the use cases here were in hard-to-find-after-the-fact-facebook-threads.
Note that much of the value add here is being able to succinctly talk about the problem, sometimes saying “hey, this is a high-decoupling conversation/space, read this blogpost if you don’t know what that means”.
I don’t think I’ve run into people citing “contextualizing norms” as a reason not to talk about things, although I’ve definitely run into people operating under contextualizing norms in stonewally-ways without having a particular name for it. I’d expect that to change as the jargon becomes more common though, and if you have examples of that happening already that’d be good to know.
(Hmm – Okay I guess it’d make sense if you saw some of our past debates as something like me directly advocating for contextualizing, in a way that seemed harmful to you. I hadn’t been thinking there through the decoupled/contextualized lens, not quite sure if the lens fits, but might make sense upon reflection)
It still seems like having the language here is a clear net benefit though.
Two years later, the concept of decoupled vs contextualizing has remained an important piece of my vocabulary.
I’m glad both for this distillation of Nerst’s work (removing some of the original political context that might make it more distracting to link to in the middle of an argument), and in particular for the jargon-optimization that followed (“contextualized” is much more intuitive than “low-decoupling.”)
This post has been object-level useful, for navigating particular disagreements. (I think in those cases I haven’t brought it up directly myself, but I’ve benefited from a sometimes-heated-discussion having access to the concepts).
I think it’s also been useful at a more meta-level, as one of the concepts in my toolkit that enable me to think higher level thoughts in the domain of group norms and frame disagreements. A recent facebook discussion was delving into a complicated set of differences in norms/expectations, where decoupled/contextualizing seemed to be one of the ingredients but not the entirety. Having the handy shorthand and common referent allowed it to only take up a single working-memory slot while still being able to think about the other complexities at play.
Can you give specific examples? I’ve basically only seen “contextualizing norms” used as a stonewalling tactic, but you’ve probably seen discussions I haven’t.
The most recent example was this facebook thread. I’m hoping over the next week to find some other concrete examples to add to the list, although I think the most of the use cases here were in hard-to-find-after-the-fact-facebook-threads.
Note that much of the value add here is being able to succinctly talk about the problem, sometimes saying “hey, this is a high-decoupling conversation/space, read this blogpost if you don’t know what that means”.
I don’t think I’ve run into people citing “contextualizing norms” as a reason not to talk about things, although I’ve definitely run into people operating under contextualizing norms in stonewally-ways without having a particular name for it. I’d expect that to change as the jargon becomes more common though, and if you have examples of that happening already that’d be good to know.
(Hmm – Okay I guess it’d make sense if you saw some of our past debates as something like me directly advocating for contextualizing, in a way that seemed harmful to you. I hadn’t been thinking there through the decoupled/contextualized lens, not quite sure if the lens fits, but might make sense upon reflection)
It still seems like having the language here is a clear net benefit though.
If the jargon becomes more common. (The Review Phase hasn’t even started yet!) I wrote a reply explaining in more detail why I don’t like this post.
Cool! I found your new post pretty helpful. Will probably have more thoughts later.