I think that guess/ask/tell culture differences are definitely tangled up in this somewhere, but I don’t know if that’s the full explanation.
The pattern would be that you don’t push people into pools if you don’t know them and push only those people who you know that like it into pools
That’s close but not quite. I think if you require “knowledge” in a strict sense, then some precious opportunity has already been missed. Put another way, what I’m saying is that the surprise and discovery are part of the puzzle somehow?
I don’t push people into pools if I don’t know them well enough to be pretty sure that they will like it. But I don’t think certainty is the bar to meet. I think “pretty sure, plus confident that it won’t be disastrously traumatic if I’m wrong” is closer.
Or maybe the difference is that if you live through a decision you can just react and discover what you do which is relatively effortless but thinking about it before hand is a kind of work and requires self-knowledge?
This feels like an important piece, yeah. Doing all of the calculation up front seems to be a pretty heavy burden, and the empirical result is that a lot of people just clam up or get frozen out or end up isolated and anxious because they can never be sure that it’ll go well. In the culture I want to participate in, there’s more slack and more support, such that people can explore more because they don’t fear extremely disastrous consequences of genuine well-meant exploration.
I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always:
“No, I don’t like that.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. I won’t go there again.”
“Okay, good. No worries, then.”
re: participating without knowing, that’s the part that signals trust. More precisely, you can’t have it in a context that lacks trust, so if you have it, this is strong evidence that trust is present.
I could imagine that one of the ways for the fallout not to be disastrously traumatic is if one accepts whatever “judgement” is to come ie guanteed pleadingly quilty with no/little resistance. Say that pushing people into pool unhappily means you get side-eyed for 30 minutes. If one knows the fallout beforehand there is no chance of an undefinite downward spiral. The way that a traumatic fallout occurs if the people disagree on how to proceed (ie no punishment vs punishment).
I am kind of linking this in my mind to the “try catch” programming pattern. Some might have a style preference that correctly working code should not deal with errors too much (ie representing “not found” as “return −1” or “raise NoSuchElementException”). I tried to search for previous usage of that that and indeed The Magnitude of His Own Folly is structured as a story about how a exception that was caught in a bad way was made uncaught and allowed to escalate. Curious that also explictly deals with trust.
In a problematic situation a party might have no choice but to trust. In a hostile work environment you can have the choice of working or not working. Deducing from peope choosing work (and thus “implicit trust”) that there is a good environment is not the most reliable of logics. Assholes can be “recklessly clueless” and that counts against them rather than for them.
Yeah, trusting the overall system of punishment/consequence to be at least approximately fair, and that everyone involved has enough spare resources to survive/absorb occasional small miscarriages of justice, is a crucial part of this.
I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always: [...]
How many strangers does an average person interact with each day? If many, then the example dialog would not help much, because the next time it would be a different person who doesn’t know.
I think that guess/ask/tell culture differences are definitely tangled up in this somewhere, but I don’t know if that’s the full explanation.
That’s close but not quite. I think if you require “knowledge” in a strict sense, then some precious opportunity has already been missed. Put another way, what I’m saying is that the surprise and discovery are part of the puzzle somehow?
I don’t push people into pools if I don’t know them well enough to be pretty sure that they will like it. But I don’t think certainty is the bar to meet. I think “pretty sure, plus confident that it won’t be disastrously traumatic if I’m wrong” is closer.
This feels like an important piece, yeah. Doing all of the calculation up front seems to be a pretty heavy burden, and the empirical result is that a lot of people just clam up or get frozen out or end up isolated and anxious because they can never be sure that it’ll go well. In the culture I want to participate in, there’s more slack and more support, such that people can explore more because they don’t fear extremely disastrous consequences of genuine well-meant exploration.
I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always:
“No, I don’t like that.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. I won’t go there again.”
“Okay, good. No worries, then.”
re: participating without knowing, that’s the part that signals trust. More precisely, you can’t have it in a context that lacks trust, so if you have it, this is strong evidence that trust is present.
I could imagine that one of the ways for the fallout not to be disastrously traumatic is if one accepts whatever “judgement” is to come ie guanteed pleadingly quilty with no/little resistance. Say that pushing people into pool unhappily means you get side-eyed for 30 minutes. If one knows the fallout beforehand there is no chance of an undefinite downward spiral. The way that a traumatic fallout occurs if the people disagree on how to proceed (ie no punishment vs punishment).
I am kind of linking this in my mind to the “try catch” programming pattern. Some might have a style preference that correctly working code should not deal with errors too much (ie representing “not found” as “return −1” or “raise NoSuchElementException”). I tried to search for previous usage of that that and indeed The Magnitude of His Own Folly is structured as a story about how a exception that was caught in a bad way was made uncaught and allowed to escalate. Curious that also explictly deals with trust.
In a problematic situation a party might have no choice but to trust. In a hostile work environment you can have the choice of working or not working. Deducing from peope choosing work (and thus “implicit trust”) that there is a good environment is not the most reliable of logics. Assholes can be “recklessly clueless” and that counts against them rather than for them.
Yeah, trusting the overall system of punishment/consequence to be at least approximately fair, and that everyone involved has enough spare resources to survive/absorb occasional small miscarriages of justice, is a crucial part of this.
How many strangers does an average person interact with each day? If many, then the example dialog would not help much, because the next time it would be a different person who doesn’t know.