In academia, for instance, I think there are plenty of conversations in which two researchers (a) disagree a ton, (b) think the other person’s work is hopeless or confused in deep ways, (c) honestly express the nature of their disagreement, but (d) do so in a way where people generally feel respected/valued when talking to them.
My model says that this requires them to still be hopeful about local communication progress, and happens when they disagree but already share a lot of frames and concepts and background knowledge. I, at least, find it much harder when I don’t expect the communciation attempt to make progress, or have positive effect.
(“Then why have the conversation at all?” I mostly don’t! But sometimes I mispredict how much hope I’ll have, or try out some new idea that doesn’t work, or get badgered into it.)
Some specific norms that I think Nate might not be adhering to:
Engaging with people in ways such that they often feel heard/seen/understood
Engaging with people in ways such that they rarely feel dismissed/disrespected
Something fuzzy that lots of people would call “kindness” or “typical levels of warmth”
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
On my model, communciation norms are much lover-level than this. Basics of rationalist discourse seem closer; archaic politeness norms (“always refuse food thrice before accepting”) are an example of even lower-level stuff.
My model, speaking roughly and summarizing a bunch, says that the lowest-level stuff (atop a background of liberal-ish internet culture and basic rationalist discourse) isn’t pinned down on account of cultural diversity, so we substitute with meta-norms, which (as best I understand them) include things like “if your convo-partner requests a particular conversation-style, either try it out or voice objections or suggest alternatives” and “if things aren’t working, retreat to a protected meta discussion and build a shared understanding of the issue and cooperatively address it”.
I acknowledge that this can be pretty difficult to do on the fly, especially if emotions are riding high. (And I think we have cultural diversity around whether emotions are ever supposed to ride high, and if so, under what circumstances.) On my model of local norms, this sort of thing gets filed under “yep, communicating in the modern world can be rocky; if something goes wrong then you go meta and try to figure out the causes and do something differently next time”. (Which often doesn’t work! In which case you iterate, while also shifting your conversational attention elsewhere.)
To be clear, I buy a claim of the form “gosh, you (Nate) seem to run on a relatively rarer native emotional protocol, for this neck of the woods”. My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
And for the record, I’m pretty happy to litigate specific interactions. When it comes to low-level norms, I think there are a bunch of conversational moves that others think are benign that I see as jabs (and which I often endorse jabbing back against, depending on the ongoing conversation style), and a bunch of conversational moves that I see as benign that others take as jabs, and I’m both (a) happy to explicate the things that felt to me like jabs; (b) happy to learn what other people took as jabs; and (c) happy to try alternative communication styles where we’re jabbing each other less. Where this openness-to-meta-and-trying-alternative-things seems like the key local meta-norm, at least in my understanding of local culture.
My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
It seems to me that in theory it should be possible to have very unusual norms and make it work, but that in practice you and your organization horribly underestimate how difficult it is to communicate such things clearly (more than once, because people forget or don’t realize the full implications at the first time). You assume that the local norms were made perfectly clear, but they were not (expecting short inferential distances, doubleillusion of transparency, etc.).
Did you expect KurtB to have this kind of reaction, to post this kind of comment, and to get upvoted? If the answer is no, it means your model is wrong somewhere.
(If the answer is yes, maybe you should print that comment, and give a copy to all new employees. That might dramatically reduce a possibility of misunderstanding.)
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
My original comment is not talking about communication norms. It’s talking about “social norms” and “communication protocols” within those norms. I mentioned “basic respectfulness and professionalism.”
My model says that this requires them to still be hopeful about local communication progress, and happens when they disagree but already share a lot of frames and concepts and background knowledge. I, at least, find it much harder when I don’t expect the communciation attempt to make progress, or have positive effect.
(“Then why have the conversation at all?” I mostly don’t! But sometimes I mispredict how much hope I’ll have, or try out some new idea that doesn’t work, or get badgered into it.)
These sound more to me like personality traits (that members of the local culture generally consider virtuous) than communication norms.
On my model, communciation norms are much lover-level than this. Basics of rationalist discourse seem closer; archaic politeness norms (“always refuse food thrice before accepting”) are an example of even lower-level stuff.
My model, speaking roughly and summarizing a bunch, says that the lowest-level stuff (atop a background of liberal-ish internet culture and basic rationalist discourse) isn’t pinned down on account of cultural diversity, so we substitute with meta-norms, which (as best I understand them) include things like “if your convo-partner requests a particular conversation-style, either try it out or voice objections or suggest alternatives” and “if things aren’t working, retreat to a protected meta discussion and build a shared understanding of the issue and cooperatively address it”.
I acknowledge that this can be pretty difficult to do on the fly, especially if emotions are riding high. (And I think we have cultural diversity around whether emotions are ever supposed to ride high, and if so, under what circumstances.) On my model of local norms, this sort of thing gets filed under “yep, communicating in the modern world can be rocky; if something goes wrong then you go meta and try to figure out the causes and do something differently next time”. (Which often doesn’t work! In which case you iterate, while also shifting your conversational attention elsewhere.)
To be clear, I buy a claim of the form “gosh, you (Nate) seem to run on a relatively rarer native emotional protocol, for this neck of the woods”. My model is that local norms are sufficiently flexible to continue “and we resolve that by experimentation and occasional meta”.
And for the record, I’m pretty happy to litigate specific interactions. When it comes to low-level norms, I think there are a bunch of conversational moves that others think are benign that I see as jabs (and which I often endorse jabbing back against, depending on the ongoing conversation style), and a bunch of conversational moves that I see as benign that others take as jabs, and I’m both (a) happy to explicate the things that felt to me like jabs; (b) happy to learn what other people took as jabs; and (c) happy to try alternative communication styles where we’re jabbing each other less. Where this openness-to-meta-and-trying-alternative-things seems like the key local meta-norm, at least in my understanding of local culture.
It seems to me that in theory it should be possible to have very unusual norms and make it work, but that in practice you and your organization horribly underestimate how difficult it is to communicate such things clearly (more than once, because people forget or don’t realize the full implications at the first time). You assume that the local norms were made perfectly clear, but they were not (expecting short inferential distances, double illusion of transparency, etc.).
Did you expect KurtB to have this kind of reaction, to post this kind of comment, and to get upvoted? If the answer is no, it means your model is wrong somewhere.
(If the answer is yes, maybe you should print that comment, and give a copy to all new employees. That might dramatically reduce a possibility of misunderstanding.)
My original comment is not talking about communication norms. It’s talking about “social norms” and “communication protocols” within those norms. I mentioned “basic respectfulness and professionalism.”