A challenge in group preference / info aggregation is distinguishing between “preferences” and “bids.” For example, I might notice that a room is colder than I would like it to be; I might want to share that with the group (so that the decision-making process has this info that would otherwise be mostly private), but I also I’m ignorant of other people’s temperature preferences, and so don’t want to do something unilateralist (where I change the temperature myself) or stake social points on the temperature being changed (in that other people should be dissuaded from sharing their preferences unless they agree, or that others should feel a need to take care of me, or so on).
I’ve seen a lot of solutions to this that I don’t like very much, mostly because it feels like this is a short concept but most of the sentences for it are long. (In part because I think a lot of this negotiation happens implicitly, and so making any of it explicit feels like it necessarily involves ramping up the bid strength.)
This also comes up in Circling; there’s lots of times when you might want to express curiosity about something without it being interpreted as a demand to meet that curiosity. “I’m interested in this, but I don’t know if the group is interested in this.”
I think my current strategy to try is going to ‘jointly naming my individual desire and uncertainty about the aggregate’, but we’ll see how it goes.
A lot of this depends on cultural assumptions. If you’re in guess culture, it’s VERY HARD to get across that you don’t want people to infer intent. If you’re in more of a reveal culture, this should be quite easy.
A challenge in group preference / info aggregation is distinguishing between “preferences” and “bids.” For example, I might notice that a room is colder than I would like it to be; I might want to share that with the group (so that the decision-making process has this info that would otherwise be mostly private), but I also I’m ignorant of other people’s temperature preferences, and so don’t want to do something unilateralist (where I change the temperature myself) or stake social points on the temperature being changed (in that other people should be dissuaded from sharing their preferences unless they agree, or that others should feel a need to take care of me, or so on).
I’ve seen a lot of solutions to this that I don’t like very much, mostly because it feels like this is a short concept but most of the sentences for it are long. (In part because I think a lot of this negotiation happens implicitly, and so making any of it explicit feels like it necessarily involves ramping up the bid strength.)
This also comes up in Circling; there’s lots of times when you might want to express curiosity about something without it being interpreted as a demand to meet that curiosity. “I’m interested in this, but I don’t know if the group is interested in this.”
I think my current strategy to try is going to ‘jointly naming my individual desire and uncertainty about the aggregate’, but we’ll see how it goes.
A lot of this depends on cultural assumptions. If you’re in guess culture, it’s VERY HARD to get across that you don’t want people to infer intent. If you’re in more of a reveal culture, this should be quite easy.