Choice of mode/aesthetics for conveying a message also conveys contextual information that often is useful. Who is this person, what is my relationship to them, what is their background, what do those things tell me about the likely assumptions and lenses through which they will be interpreting the things I say?
In most cases verbal language is not sufficient to convey the entirety of a message, and even when it is, successful communication requires that the receiver is using the right tools for interpretation.
Yes, in practice this can be (and is) used to hide corruption, enforce class and status hierarchies, and so on, in addition to the use case of caring about how the message affects the recipients emotional state.
It can also be used to point at information that is taboo, in scenarios where two individuals are not close enough to have common knowledge of each others beliefs.
Or in social situations (which is all of them when we’re communicating at all, the difference is one of degree) it can be used to test someone’s intelligence and personality, seeing how adroit they are at perceiving and sending signals and messages.
Filter also through a lens of the fact that humans very often have to talk to, work with, and have lasting relationships with people they don’t like, don’t know very well outside a narrow context, and don’t trust much. Norms that obscure information that isn’t supposed to be relevant, without making it impossible to convey such information, are useful, because it is not my goal, or my responsibility, to communicate those things. Politeness norms can thus help the speaker by ensuring they don’t accidentally (and unnecessarily, and unambiguously) convey information they didn’t mean to, which doesn’t pertain to the matter at hand, and which the other party has no right to obtain. And they can help the listener by enabling them to ignore ambiguous information that is none of their business.
In the context of Feynman and Bohr, remember that in addition to the immediate discussion, in such scenarios it is also often the case that one party has a lot of power over the other. Bohr seems to be saying he’s someone who has no interest in abusing such power, but Feynman doesn’t know that, and the group doesn’t have common knowledge of it, and you can’t assume this in general. So the default is politeness to avoid giving anyone a pretense that the powerful can use against the weak. Overcoming that default takes dedicated effort over time.
Choice of mode/aesthetics for conveying a message also conveys contextual information that often is useful. Who is this person, what is my relationship to them, what is their background, what do those things tell me about the likely assumptions and lenses through which they will be interpreting the things I say?
In most cases verbal language is not sufficient to convey the entirety of a message, and even when it is, successful communication requires that the receiver is using the right tools for interpretation.
Yes, in practice this can be (and is) used to hide corruption, enforce class and status hierarchies, and so on, in addition to the use case of caring about how the message affects the recipients emotional state.
It can also be used to point at information that is taboo, in scenarios where two individuals are not close enough to have common knowledge of each others beliefs.
Or in social situations (which is all of them when we’re communicating at all, the difference is one of degree) it can be used to test someone’s intelligence and personality, seeing how adroit they are at perceiving and sending signals and messages.
See also this SSC post, if you haven’t yet.
Filter also through a lens of the fact that humans very often have to talk to, work with, and have lasting relationships with people they don’t like, don’t know very well outside a narrow context, and don’t trust much. Norms that obscure information that isn’t supposed to be relevant, without making it impossible to convey such information, are useful, because it is not my goal, or my responsibility, to communicate those things. Politeness norms can thus help the speaker by ensuring they don’t accidentally (and unnecessarily, and unambiguously) convey information they didn’t mean to, which doesn’t pertain to the matter at hand, and which the other party has no right to obtain. And they can help the listener by enabling them to ignore ambiguous information that is none of their business.
In the context of Feynman and Bohr, remember that in addition to the immediate discussion, in such scenarios it is also often the case that one party has a lot of power over the other. Bohr seems to be saying he’s someone who has no interest in abusing such power, but Feynman doesn’t know that, and the group doesn’t have common knowledge of it, and you can’t assume this in general. So the default is politeness to avoid giving anyone a pretense that the powerful can use against the weak. Overcoming that default takes dedicated effort over time.