This is a good post; thank you for writing it. I think this dichotomy, while perhaps not a perfect categorization, is pretty good, and clarifies some things.
My background and preference is what you call “Combat Culture”. “Nurture Culture” has always seemed obviously wrong and detrimental to me, and has seemed more wrong and more detrimental the more I’ve seen it in action. This, of course, is not news, and I mention it only to give context to what I have to say.
I have two substantive comments to make:
First, “It devolves into a status game.” is something that easily can, and often does, happen to “Nurture Culture” spaces also. What this looks like is that “you are not communicating in a [ nurturing | nonviolent | prosocial | etc. ] way” gets weaponized and used as a cudgel in status plays; meanwhile, participants of higher social status skirt the letter of whatever guidelines exist to enforce a “nurturing” atmosphere, while saying and doing things whose effects are to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage contrarian or opposing views. (And the more that “nurturing” communities attempt to pare down their “nurturing”-enforcement rules to the basics of “be nice”, the more the “tyranny of structurelessness” applies.)
Second, it has been my experience, in my personal relationships, that the more comfortable a person feels around another person or group, the more the first person is willing to be “combative”. A very “nurturing” type interaction style—where you don’t just tell a person they’re wrong, but “open-mindedly” and “curiously” inquire as to their reasons, and take care not to insult them, etc., etc., does indeed work well to avert misunderstandings or overt conflicts between near-strangers, casual acquaintances, etc. It also tends to be a near-perfect sign of a low-intimacy relationship; generally speaking, as people get to know each other, they tend to relax around each other, and drop down into a more “combative” orientation in discussions and debates with each other. They say what they think. (Of course, this could be a selection effect on my part. But then, this seems correct to me, and proper, and expected.)
I agree that Nurture Culture can be exploited for status too, perhaps equally so. When I was writing the post, I was thinking that Combat Culture more readily heads in that direction since in Combat Culture you are already permitted to act in ways which in other contexts would be outright power-plays, e.g. calling their ideas dumb. With Nurture Culture, it has to be more indirect, e.g. the whole “you are not conforming to the norm” thing. Thinking about it more, I’m not sure. It could be they’re on par for status exploitability.
An increase in combativeness alongside familiarity and comfort matches my observation too, but I don’t think it’s universal—possibly a selection effect for those more natively Combative. To offer a single counterexample, my wife describes herself as being sickeningly nurturing when together with one of her closest friends. Possibly nurturing is one way to show that you care and this causes it to become ramped up in some very close relationships. Possibly it’s that receiving nurturing creates warm feelings of safety, security, and comfort for some such that they provide this to each other to a higher extent in closer relationships. I’m not sure, I haven’t thought about this particular aspect in depth.
To offer a single counterexample, my wife describes herself as being sickeningly nurturing when together with one of her closest friends.
I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. My response in close relationships tends to be both extra combative and extra nurturing, depending on the context.
The extra combativeness comes from common knowledge of respect, as has already been discussed. The extra nurturing is more interesting, and there are multiple things going on.
Telling people when they’re being dumb and having them listen can be important. If those paths haven’t been carved yet, it can be important to say “this is dumb” and prove that you can be reliably right when you say things like that. Doing that productively isn’t trivial, and the fight to get your words respected at full value can get in the way of nurturing. In my close relationships where I can simply say “you’re being dumb” and have them stop and say “oops, what am I missing?” I sometimes do, but I’m also far more likely to be uninterested in saying that because they’ll figure it out soon enough and I actually am curious why they’re doing something seems so deeply mistaken to me. Just like how security in nurturing can allow combativeness, security in combativeness can allow nurturing.
Another thing is that when people gain trust in you to not shit on them when they’re vulnerable, they start opening up more in places in which nurture is the more appropriate response. In these cases it’s not that I’m being nurturing instead of being combative, it’s that I’m being nurturing instead of not having the interaction at all. Relative to the extreme care that’d need to be taken with someone less close in those areas, that high level of nurturing is still more combative.
...I still don’t get it why one needs to say “you’re being dumb”, when obviously the intended meaning is “you’re saying/doing something dumb”, in virtually all settings.
If people are that close, can’t they just growl at each other? Or use one of the wonderfully adaptable short words that communicate so much?..
The precise phrasing isn’t important, and often “growls” do work. The important part is in knowing that you can safely express your criticisms unfiltered and they’ll be taken for what they’re worth.
At the risk of tediously repeating what Mary Chernyshenko said, I don’t think a key point was really addressed:
If “the exact phrasing is not important” implies unbiased errors in phrasing, then it’s quite surprising that people tend to round off “your argument is bad” to “you’re dumb” so often.
If, as therefore seems probable, there is a motivated tendency to do that, then it’s clearly important for some purpose and we ought to be curious about what, when we’re trying to evaluate the relation of various conversational modes to truth-seeking vs other potentially competing goals.
An outright “You’re dumb” is a mistake, period, unless you actually meant to say that the person is in fact dumb. This rounding is a pure bad, and there’s no need of it. Adding ‘being’ or ‘playing’ or ‘doing something’ before the dumb is necessary.
Part of a good combative-type culture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the rounding off here is a serious problem even before the (important) feelings/status issue.
Your response here and Ruby’s both seem rude to me: you’re providing a (helpful) clarification, but doing that without either addressing the substantive issue directly or noting that you’re not doing that. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal, but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
[...]but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
FWIW, “jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point” is both uncharitable and untrue, and both “making uncharitable and untrue statements as if they were uncontested fact” and “stating that you find things obnoxious in cases where people might disagree about what is appropriate instead of offering an argument as to why it shouldn’t be done” stand out as far more obnoxious to me.
I normally would just ignore it (because again, I think saying “I think that’s obnoxious” is generally obnoxious and unhelpful) but given your comment you’ll probably either find the feedback helpful or else it’ll help you change your mind about whether it’s helpful to call out things one finds to be obnoxious :P
I emphatically agree with Zvi about the mistakeness of saying “you’re dumb.”
In my own words:
1) “You’re absolutely wrong” is strong language, but not unreasonable in a combative culture if that’s what you believe and you’re honestly reporting it.
2a) “You’re saying/doing something dumb” becomes a bit more personal than when making a statement about a particular view. Though I think it’s rare that one have need to say this, and it’s only appropriate when levels of trust and respect are very high.
2b) “You’re being dumb” is a little harsher than “saying/doing something dumb.” The two don’t register as much different to me, however, though they do to Mary Chernyshenko?
3) “You’re dumb” (introduced in this discussion by Benquo) is now making a general statement about someone else and is very problematic. It erodes the assumptions of respect which make combative-type cultures feasible in the first place. I’d say that conversations where people are calling others dumb to their faces are not situations I’d think of as healthy, good-faith, combative-type conversations.
[As an aside, even mild “that seems wrong to me”-type statements should be recognized as potentially combative. There are many contexts where any explicit disagreement registers as hostile or contrarian.]
(Not important, but my supervisor was a great man who tended to revel in combat settings and to say smth like “You’re being dumb” more often than other versions, & though everybody understood what he meant, it destroyed his team eventually. People found themselves better things to do, as, of course, people generally should. This is where I’m coming from.)
The exact phrasing isn’t important, but conveying the right message is. As Zvi and Ruby note, that “being”/”doing”/etc part is important. “You’re dumb” is not an acceptable alternative because it does not mean the same thing. “Your argument is bad” is also unacceptable because it also means something completely different.
“Your argument is bad” only means “your argument is bad”, and it is possible to go about things in a perfectly reasonable way and still have bad arguments sometimes. It is completely different than a situation where someone is failing to notice problems in their arguments which would be obvious to them if they weren’t engaging in motivated cognition and muddying their own thinking. An inability to think well is quite literally what “dumb” is, and “being dumb” is a literal description of what they’re doing, not a sloppy or motivated attempt to say or pretend to be saying something else.
As far as “then why does it always come out that way”, besides the fact that “you’re being dumb” is far quicker to say than the more neutral “you’re engaging in motivated cognition”, in my experience it doesn’t always or even usually come out that way — and in fact often doesn’t come out at all, which was kinda the point of my original comment.
When it does take that form, there are often good reasons which go beyond “¼ the syllables” and are completely above board, explicit, and agreed upon by both parties. Counter-signalling respect and affection is perhaps the clearest example.
There are examples of people doing it poorly or with hostile and dishonest intent, of course, but the answer to “why do those people do it that way” is a very different question than what was asked.
I’m in agreement with you, with the caveat that there’s a paradox of, “bring yourself”. Where people show courage in the face of potential pain for vulnerability and they feel stronger and better about the whole thing.
However this courage thing is complicated by the fact that emotions don’t bite in the same way as physical dogs bite. There is a lot more space to be in uncomfortable emotions and not die than is expected from the sense of discomfort that comes with them.
This is a good post; thank you for writing it. I think this dichotomy, while perhaps not a perfect categorization, is pretty good, and clarifies some things.
My background and preference is what you call “Combat Culture”. “Nurture Culture” has always seemed obviously wrong and detrimental to me, and has seemed more wrong and more detrimental the more I’ve seen it in action. This, of course, is not news, and I mention it only to give context to what I have to say.
I have two substantive comments to make:
First, “It devolves into a status game.” is something that easily can, and often does, happen to “Nurture Culture” spaces also. What this looks like is that “you are not communicating in a [ nurturing | nonviolent | prosocial | etc. ] way” gets weaponized and used as a cudgel in status plays; meanwhile, participants of higher social status skirt the letter of whatever guidelines exist to enforce a “nurturing” atmosphere, while saying and doing things whose effects are to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage contrarian or opposing views. (And the more that “nurturing” communities attempt to pare down their “nurturing”-enforcement rules to the basics of “be nice”, the more the “tyranny of structurelessness” applies.)
Second, it has been my experience, in my personal relationships, that the more comfortable a person feels around another person or group, the more the first person is willing to be “combative”. A very “nurturing” type interaction style—where you don’t just tell a person they’re wrong, but “open-mindedly” and “curiously” inquire as to their reasons, and take care not to insult them, etc., etc., does indeed work well to avert misunderstandings or overt conflicts between near-strangers, casual acquaintances, etc. It also tends to be a near-perfect sign of a low-intimacy relationship; generally speaking, as people get to know each other, they tend to relax around each other, and drop down into a more “combative” orientation in discussions and debates with each other. They say what they think. (Of course, this could be a selection effect on my part. But then, this seems correct to me, and proper, and expected.)
Thanks!
I agree that Nurture Culture can be exploited for status too, perhaps equally so. When I was writing the post, I was thinking that Combat Culture more readily heads in that direction since in Combat Culture you are already permitted to act in ways which in other contexts would be outright power-plays, e.g. calling their ideas dumb. With Nurture Culture, it has to be more indirect, e.g. the whole “you are not conforming to the norm” thing. Thinking about it more, I’m not sure. It could be they’re on par for status exploitability.
An increase in combativeness alongside familiarity and comfort matches my observation too, but I don’t think it’s universal—possibly a selection effect for those more natively Combative. To offer a single counterexample, my wife describes herself as being sickeningly nurturing when together with one of her closest friends. Possibly nurturing is one way to show that you care and this causes it to become ramped up in some very close relationships. Possibly it’s that receiving nurturing creates warm feelings of safety, security, and comfort for some such that they provide this to each other to a higher extent in closer relationships. I’m not sure, I haven’t thought about this particular aspect in depth.
I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. My response in close relationships tends to be both extra combative and extra nurturing, depending on the context.
The extra combativeness comes from common knowledge of respect, as has already been discussed. The extra nurturing is more interesting, and there are multiple things going on.
Telling people when they’re being dumb and having them listen can be important. If those paths haven’t been carved yet, it can be important to say “this is dumb” and prove that you can be reliably right when you say things like that. Doing that productively isn’t trivial, and the fight to get your words respected at full value can get in the way of nurturing. In my close relationships where I can simply say “you’re being dumb” and have them stop and say “oops, what am I missing?” I sometimes do, but I’m also far more likely to be uninterested in saying that because they’ll figure it out soon enough and I actually am curious why they’re doing something seems so deeply mistaken to me. Just like how security in nurturing can allow combativeness, security in combativeness can allow nurturing.
Another thing is that when people gain trust in you to not shit on them when they’re vulnerable, they start opening up more in places in which nurture is the more appropriate response. In these cases it’s not that I’m being nurturing instead of being combative, it’s that I’m being nurturing instead of not having the interaction at all. Relative to the extreme care that’d need to be taken with someone less close in those areas, that high level of nurturing is still more combative.
...I still don’t get it why one needs to say “you’re being dumb”, when obviously the intended meaning is “you’re saying/doing something dumb”, in virtually all settings.
If people are that close, can’t they just growl at each other? Or use one of the wonderfully adaptable short words that communicate so much?..
The precise phrasing isn’t important, and often “growls” do work. The important part is in knowing that you can safely express your criticisms unfiltered and they’ll be taken for what they’re worth.
At the risk of tediously repeating what Mary Chernyshenko said, I don’t think a key point was really addressed:
If “the exact phrasing is not important” implies unbiased errors in phrasing, then it’s quite surprising that people tend to round off “your argument is bad” to “you’re dumb” so often.
If, as therefore seems probable, there is a motivated tendency to do that, then it’s clearly important for some purpose and we ought to be curious about what, when we’re trying to evaluate the relation of various conversational modes to truth-seeking vs other potentially competing goals.
An outright “You’re dumb” is a mistake, period, unless you actually meant to say that the person is in fact dumb. This rounding is a pure bad, and there’s no need of it. Adding ‘being’ or ‘playing’ or ‘doing something’ before the dumb is necessary.
Part of a good combative-type culture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the rounding off here is a serious problem even before the (important) feelings/status issue.
Your response here and Ruby’s both seem rude to me: you’re providing a (helpful) clarification, but doing that without either addressing the substantive issue directly or noting that you’re not doing that. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal, but when the whole point of my comment was that jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point I think it’s obnoxious to then ignore my substantive point about Mary’s substantive point being ignored.
FWIW, “jimmy ignored Mary’s substantive point” is both uncharitable and untrue, and both “making uncharitable and untrue statements as if they were uncontested fact” and “stating that you find things obnoxious in cases where people might disagree about what is appropriate instead of offering an argument as to why it shouldn’t be done” stand out as far more obnoxious to me.
I normally would just ignore it (because again, I think saying “I think that’s obnoxious” is generally obnoxious and unhelpful) but given your comment you’ll probably either find the feedback helpful or else it’ll help you change your mind about whether it’s helpful to call out things one finds to be obnoxious :P
I emphatically agree with Zvi about the mistakeness of saying “you’re dumb.”
In my own words:
1) “You’re absolutely wrong” is strong language, but not unreasonable in a combative culture if that’s what you believe and you’re honestly reporting it.
2a) “You’re saying/doing something dumb” becomes a bit more personal than when making a statement about a particular view. Though I think it’s rare that one have need to say this, and it’s only appropriate when levels of trust and respect are very high.
2b) “You’re being dumb” is a little harsher than “saying/doing something dumb.” The two don’t register as much different to me, however, though they do to Mary Chernyshenko?
3) “You’re dumb” (introduced in this discussion by Benquo) is now making a general statement about someone else and is very problematic. It erodes the assumptions of respect which make combative-type cultures feasible in the first place. I’d say that conversations where people are calling others dumb to their faces are not situations I’d think of as healthy, good-faith, combative-type conversations.
[As an aside, even mild “that seems wrong to me”-type statements should be recognized as potentially combative. There are many contexts where any explicit disagreement registers as hostile or contrarian.]
(Not important, but my supervisor was a great man who tended to revel in combat settings and to say smth like “You’re being dumb” more often than other versions, & though everybody understood what he meant, it destroyed his team eventually. People found themselves better things to do, as, of course, people generally should. This is where I’m coming from.)
The exact phrasing isn’t important, but conveying the right message is. As Zvi and Ruby note, that “being”/”doing”/etc part is important. “You’re dumb” is not an acceptable alternative because it does not mean the same thing. “Your argument is bad” is also unacceptable because it also means something completely different.
“Your argument is bad” only means “your argument is bad”, and it is possible to go about things in a perfectly reasonable way and still have bad arguments sometimes. It is completely different than a situation where someone is failing to notice problems in their arguments which would be obvious to them if they weren’t engaging in motivated cognition and muddying their own thinking. An inability to think well is quite literally what “dumb” is, and “being dumb” is a literal description of what they’re doing, not a sloppy or motivated attempt to say or pretend to be saying something else.
As far as “then why does it always come out that way”, besides the fact that “you’re being dumb” is far quicker to say than the more neutral “you’re engaging in motivated cognition”, in my experience it doesn’t always or even usually come out that way — and in fact often doesn’t come out at all, which was kinda the point of my original comment.
When it does take that form, there are often good reasons which go beyond “¼ the syllables” and are completely above board, explicit, and agreed upon by both parties. Counter-signalling respect and affection is perhaps the clearest example.
There are examples of people doing it poorly or with hostile and dishonest intent, of course, but the answer to “why do those people do it that way” is a very different question than what was asked.
yeah, it’s not important, it just keeps happening that way, doesn’t it.
I’m in agreement with you, with the caveat that there’s a paradox of, “bring yourself”. Where people show courage in the face of potential pain for vulnerability and they feel stronger and better about the whole thing.
However this courage thing is complicated by the fact that emotions don’t bite in the same way as physical dogs bite. There is a lot more space to be in uncomfortable emotions and not die than is expected from the sense of discomfort that comes with them.