Interesting. Am curious to hear more at some point about what differences are salient to you. (I get that it’s carving up the landscape in a different way. It seemed to me it carved up the same landscape in a way that felt more directly useful to me, since I in fact don’t really want either a nurture or a combat culture)
This got elaborated on in the much less acclaimed sequel, but the key point that I settled upon after thinking and writing about the topic wasn’t <here’s the list of the different cultures> but the fact that a key part of any culture is how it interprets various statements/actions/expressions.
Nurture and Combat are just examples of cultures that apply a set of consistent interpretations based on a set of consistent priors.
Nevermind what the cultures are though, what’s important to remember is that the same action, e.g. “bluntly disagreeing with someone you said” will be interpreted differently in different cultures. What is hostile and demeaning in one is friendly and respectful in another.
[And then a heap of stuff will be downstream of this. To the extent that culture-specific interpretations are automatic, reflexive, and deeply ingrained, you’ll face hard cross-cultural conflicts. If you want to shift the culture, effectively you are trying to coordinate everyone to assign new meaning to old actions/statements/expressions, etc.]
Interesting. Am curious to hear more at some point about what differences are salient to you. (I get that it’s carving up the landscape in a different way. It seemed to me it carved up the same landscape in a way that felt more directly useful to me, since I in fact don’t really want either a nurture or a combat culture)
This got elaborated on in the much less acclaimed sequel, but the key point that I settled upon after thinking and writing about the topic wasn’t <here’s the list of the different cultures> but the fact that a key part of any culture is how it interprets various statements/actions/expressions.
Nurture and Combat are just examples of cultures that apply a set of consistent interpretations based on a set of consistent priors.
Nevermind what the cultures are though, what’s important to remember is that the same action, e.g. “bluntly disagreeing with someone you said” will be interpreted differently in different cultures. What is hostile and demeaning in one is friendly and respectful in another.
[And then a heap of stuff will be downstream of this. To the extent that culture-specific interpretations are automatic, reflexive, and deeply ingrained, you’ll face hard cross-cultural conflicts. If you want to shift the culture, effectively you are trying to coordinate everyone to assign new meaning to old actions/statements/expressions, etc.]
Nod. I felt like I got that from this essay too, but I agree it’s not front-and-centered as much, or explored as much.