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.
One might even say that all functioning communities are alike; each dysfunctional community is dysfunctional in its own way. “For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”
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.
One might even say that all functioning communities are alike; each dysfunctional community is dysfunctional in its own way. “For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”