Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on “Guess”, with maybe a touch of “Ask” in the more overbearing ones. A common modification to “Guess” is “Offer”, where the mere mention of a possible opportunity to help out is treated as creating almost a positive obligation to notice the need and make a spontaneous offer.
From where I sit, that’s pretty strong evidence that “Guess” or maybe “Offer” is more suited to collective human nature. There’s a pretty heavy burden of proof on any “rationalist” who wants to change it.
It’s also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your “developing trust” tactic with me, I’d probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.
It’s evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It’s a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.
Ya know, after thousands of years [...] every culture on Earth settles on “Guess”,
As far as my knowledge of cultures goes I’d guess that this is indeed the optimum for “settled” cultures where there are lots of rules and customes everybody knows from early on (precisely the conditions I gave in my earlier comment).
But that just means that it is applicable to ‘normal’ situations. Not under stress. Not for fast societal change. And maybe not for rationalists dealing with each other.
Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on “Guess”, with maybe a touch of “Ask” in the more overbearing ones.
That’s a strong claim. Is it really true? I’ll grant that it certainly seems like the overall culture would be at least leaning towards Guess almost everywhere. But I don’t think that the original Metafilter post and various other posts that were inspired by it would have been so broadly linked and discussed if there weren’t also strong enough strains of Ask culture that lots and lots of people intuitively recognized the existence of both. I seem to recall seeing people talking about how they grew up in an Ask or Guess family and how that led to conflicts when they ran into people raised differently, etc. That makes it sound like the two cultures are very much co-existing.
I don’t have sociological statistics on that, and will have to retract “almost every culture” as a statement of fact.
My general impression is that the US and Western Europe are about as “Ask” as it gets, and in a lot of other cultures you’re pretty unlikely to find any “Ask families” at all. I do know that “Offer” exists.
My impression is that Russia (and I would assume that much of Eastern Europe would be similar) is Askier than Western Europe. I may be wrong here, though, and my experiences could be a consequence of individual variation.
One might note in this context is that some of this might be reflected in conventionalized linguistic politeness strategies. For example, Russian constructions used for polite requests are very Asky, and would be incredibly rude if translated literally into English or German. Of course, this is only very weak evidence that present-day Russia has more of an Ask culture than the West.
For example, Russian constructions used for polite requests are very Asky, and would be incredibly rude if translated literally into English or German.
Could you give some examples? (I speak Russian and English.)
I was specifically thinking of “будь(те) добр(а/ы)” + Imperative is a very “Asky” way of phrasing a request, which is pretty direct and intrusive in English. If you add “я тебя очень прошу”, the translation becomes plainly absurd. And as far as I know—I might be miscalibrated, so correct me if I’m wrong—simple Imperative + “пожалуйста” is also more polite than the English translation would be.
I must admit that can do something similar to the “будь добр” construction in my variety of German, but it’s slightly less polite than the Russian counterpart, I think. In general, (my variety of) German loves indirection, like English, which Russian doesn’t really have. Cf. also the simple “ты не закроешь окно?”, whose translations are very rude. (I’m told that “ты не будешь закрыть окно?” works like “won’t you close the window?”, but my experience with Russian is to scarce to know that first-hand.)
I would render this into English as “would you be so kind as to …”, which doesn’t seem rude.
“я тебя очень прошу”
This has no analogue in English that I know of; you’re right, a literal translation would sound rather absurd (something like “I’m asking you, please”… no, that’s not quite right, but yes, I agree.
simple Imperative + “пожалуйста”
“Please do X”… seems reasonably polite, for a direct request. I’m not sure I see the difference.
indirection, like English
Hm? Example please?
“ты не закроешь окно?”
Actually, this is more direct and less polite than what seems to be the direct English translation: “won’t you close the window?” Admittedly, if instead you render this as “will you not close the window?”, it becomes less polite. Perhaps the contraction makes it a “standard polite asking phrase”, rendering it less direct? I’m not sure.
“ты не будешь закрыть окно?”
This is ungrammatical. I’m not sure what you were going for with this one, but it’s not a thing people say.
I guess the question is, how do you normally ask people to do things in English? What are some examples of things you might ask people to do, or ask people for; and what are rude or polite ways of phrasing those things? We might compare them with their Russian versions, then.
I would render this into English as “would you be so kind as to …”, which doesn’t seem rude.
But that is not remotely a literal translation, which is my point.
This is ungrammatical.
Yeah, that was a performance error. It should, of course, have read “ты не будешь закрывать окно”.
Default strategies for making requests in English, which are very indirect: “Would you mind doing X?” and “Could you (please) do X?” I feel that “please” + imperative is extremely blunt to the point that I would never use it. I suppose “do X, will you?” is a possibility in English, but only in very informal contexts. For “won’t you do X”, see below.
Actually, this is more direct and less polite than what seems to be the direct English translation: “won’t you close the window?” Admittedly, if instead you render this as “will you not close the window?”, it becomes less polite. Perhaps the contraction makes it a “standard polite asking phrase”, rendering it less direct? I’m not sure.
Wait, what? In my experience, “won’t you close the window” is a politer version of “you’re supposed to close the window, so do it already”.
[“будь(те) добр(а/ы)” → “would you be so kind as to …”]
But that is not remotely a literal translation, which is my point.
Uh, what? I struggle to imagine how you would get a more literal rendering without breaking English syntactical rules. Hm, perhaps removing the “would you” — “Be so kind as to …” — would make it absolutely literal. Is that really a large change in effect, though?
“ты не будешь закрывать окно”.
That makes grammatical sense, but it’s somewhat weird to phrase a request like this. Like, “hey, will you be doing X?” — that seems like a question. It could be a request… but only in Guess culture. I’ve almost never heard someone say this and just mean it as a request on its own; sometimes that sort of construction is followed by a request...
Wait, what? In my experience, “won’t you close the window” is a politer version of “you’re supposed to close the window, so do it already”.
Huh??
We seem to be running into some serious differences in experience here...
Default strategies for making requests in English, which are very indirect: “Would you mind doing X?” and “Could you (please) do X?”
In Russian, you could say (and people often do): “Не мог бы ты закрыть окно?” — which by direct translation becomes “Could you close the window?” — but the Russian phrase is quite polite-sounding, whereas the English phrase is less so.
Of course, we’ve been using the informal “you” (“ты”) in these phrases, but using the formal/polite “you” (“вы”) makes any of these phrases even more polite: “Не могли бы вы закрыть окно?”
Plus, in conversation, I’ve usually experienced such a phrase following a sort of “warning of request”, like so:
“У меня к вам такая просьба… ” (interlocutor says “Да?” or “Я вас слушаю?”) “Не могли бы вы закрыть окно?”
Which, rendered in English, looks like this:
“I have the following request for you [formal/polite]...” (“Yes?” or “I’m listening?”) “Could you [formal/polite] close the window?”
I don’t know… that seems “Asky” to the extent that you are asking someone for something, rather than making them guess, but I don’t see it as any more direct, per se, than the English equivalents.
Uh, what? I struggle to imagine how you would get a more literal rendering without breaking English syntactical rules. Hm, perhaps removing the “would you” — “Be so kind as to …” — would make it absolutely literal. Is that really a large change in effect, though?
How about “Be kind/nice, do X”? It’s grammatical—of course, it’s a weird thing to say, but the entire point was that the literal translations are weird and/or pushy. “would you be so kind as to” is indirect in virtue of being a question and not containing an imperative; of course, it’s the correct translation, but it’s really a very different construction.
That makes grammatical sense, but it’s somewhat weird to phrase a request like this. Like, “hey, will you be doing X?” — that seems like a question. It could be a request… but only in Guess culture. I’ve almost never heard someone say this and just mean it as a request on its own; sometimes that sort of construction is followed by a request...
Good to know. I once read that it has something of “you were supposed to do it, so are you gonna do it or what?” about it, but as I said, I have no personal experience with it.
In Russian, you could say (and people often do): “Не мог бы ты закрыть окно?” — which by direct translation becomes “Could you close the window?” — but the Russian phrase is quite polite-sounding, whereas the English phrase is less so.
Yes, I agree. I would guess that the counterpart of “could you hold that for a minute?” would perhaps be “подержи, пожалуйста, на минутку”—but “hold that for a minute, please” strikes me as really very rude in English.
I don’t know… that seems “Asky” to the extent that you are asking someone for something, rather than making them guess, but I don’t see it as any more direct, per se, than the English equivalents.
Well, for one thing, I feel it’s weird to say “I have a request for you” in English. You’d normally say “could I ask you for something/a favor”. In that, the Russian formulation is already more direct.
Of course, as I said, all that is not exactly strong evidence in favor of Russia actually having more of an ask culture, only very mildly suggestive. You can behave in an Ask or Guess culture way in either language, it’s just that the conventionalized politeness strategies of English make a lot of use of indirection (questions, and usually moralized, virtually never imperatives), whereas in Russian, when saying something that is equivalent in politeness to a certain English construction, you mention the request somewhat more directly (although, as you point out, there is the more indirect “могли бы вы” strategy).
By the way, do you live in Russian or another Russian-speaking country? Because I’ve seen a study that showed that heritage speakers of Russian (i.e. speakers who live in a different linguistic community but learned the language from a parent) adopt more English-like politeness strategies. The reference is here.
How about “Be kind/nice, do X”? It’s grammatical—of course, it’s a weird thing to say, but the entire point was that the literal translations are weird and/or pushy. “would you be so kind as to” is indirect in virtue of being a question and not containing an imperative; of course, it’s the correct translation, but it’s really a very different construction.
Ah, yes, I see your point.
I think I agree with what you’re saying sufficiently that anything further would be nitpicking. I do think it would be interesting to study this in more detail, although (not having any formal training in linguistics) I am unsure how linguists approach quantifying e.g. politeness, etc.
By the way, do you live in Russian or another Russian-speaking country? Because I’ve seen a study that showed that heritage speakers of Russian (i.e. speakers who live in a different linguistic community but learned the language from a parent) adopt more English-like politeness strategies. The reference is here.
I live in the United States, having been born in Russia and learned Russian in the usual way. (Interesting citation, though.)
Oh, I just saw that I linked the abstract when I wanted to link to the actual slides! Which also give you a picture of how this kind of thing is studied by people who do that. Here they are.
If I’m understanding your comment correctly, I strongly disagree with this way of framing such suggestions. It seems anathema to the rationalist enterprise. Many rationalist simplifications of or modifications to (social) interaction, or other not-strictly-rationalist approaches that are regardless endorsed by us, are hit by your argument. E.g. requesting tabooing words, requesting predictions of differing anticipated experiences, Crocker’s rules, confessing noticing confusion, etc. etc. on through the Sequences et al.
A core of the rationalist ideal is to take approaches that promote the discovery, recognition, and sharing of truth except where there are situational reasons to hold off on doing so in those specific cases. For example, I agree with warnings that have been raised in the comments on this post about trying Telling without a cooperating or rationalist receiver. But that’s in the same way that asking a Muggle to taboo their words can be a not-so-great idea.
I suspect that high-profile Bay Area (and possibly New York?) rationalists would bear this out. As a specific example, as far as I can tell, Alicorn seems to be the rationalist master of Telling and generally avoiding beating about the bush when she wants something, and wins because of it. More generally, from what I gather as a spectator, there seem to be a lot of techniques or behaviours on instrumental, emotional, and interpersonal fronts that are making the Bay Area awesome and an ever-stronger attractor to rationalists around the world, but which the broader rationalist/LW community does not necessarily hear about.
The success of the Bay Area subcommunity’s approach seems somewhat unknown. And I think that means that when someone comes along from there and says to the broader community, ‘Hey, we should try Telling more,’ there is a lot of cultural context (of the Bay Area generally, and all the interrelations with communication systems, openness, etc.), experience, and success underlying that suggestion that is not visible. I think if enough commenters adopted this approach, it would becomes recognised, not be misinterpreted, and work. Now Brienne’s posted this, possibly even people can link to this post to try to prevent being misinterpreted when they are Telling on LW.
A lot of the Bay Area’s success seems to come from people taking simplifying approaches to communication seriously and cooperating. When you say
It’s also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your “developing trust” tactic with me, I’d probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.
that pretty much feels like the complete opposite, i.e. writing off the suggestion and anyone who takes it seriously. I’m not sure if I’d call it defection, but it has a similar feel. On a collective level, both the receptive and the skeptical attitudes are self-fulfilling, because these kinds of things really do seem to work when enough people take them seriously, and will certainly fail if everyone scorns them. (E.g. look at how many memes from the Sequences are pretty much unanimously taken seriously.)
(I acknowledge that I might have completely misread your comment.)
So, as long as we’re Telling, I’m going to talk about my own internal state. I think at least some aspects of my reactions may be shared by other people, including people whom readers of this thread may be interested in influencing or interacting with. Anybody who’s not interested in this should definitely stop reading. I promise I won’t be offended. :-)
Although I still think I had a point, if I look back at why I really wrote my response, I think that point was mostly “cover” for a less acceptable motivation. I think I really wrote it mostly out of irritation with the way the word “rationalist” was used in the original posting. And I find myself feeling the same way in response to some of your reply.
My first reaction is to see it as an ugly form of appropriation to take the word “rationalist” to mean “person identified with the Less Wrong community or associated communities, especially if said member uses jargon A, B, and C, and subscribes to only-tangentially-rational norms X, Y, and Z”. Especially when it’s coupled with signals of group superiority like “don’t try this with Muggles” (used to be “mundanes”). It provokes an immediate “screw you” reaction.
I expressed my irritation only as hopefully-veiled but still obnoxious snark(for which I am sorry), but it was there.
The Bay Area, and presumably New York and the world, contain people who are committed to rationality by almost any definition, yet who’ve never read the Sequences, probably wouldn’t want to, and probably have no great interest in the community I think you mean. Some of them have pretty high profiles, too. Making a land grab for the word “rationalist” probably doesn’t make most of those people want into the club, and neither does name calling. Both seem more likely to make them think the club is composed of jerks.
On another, but perhaps related, front...
By my last paragraph’s description of my reaction, I didn’t mean to write off the “Tell” suggestion completely as a suggestion about what social norms should be, whether in a subculture or in The Wider Culture(TM). I’m pretty skeptical about the idea, but I wasn’t trying to be completely dismissive there.
In that part, I was, perhaps amid more snark, trying to warn about a possibly inobvious reaction. What I was trying to describe was how I, as an individual, actually envision myself reacting to the stated tactic for introducing the “Tell” approach.
I used to spend a fair amount of time, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, with communities that overlap with, and/or could be seen as antecedents of, the Less Wrong/CFAR/MIRI “rationalists”. In those communities, I met a lot of people who had unconventional approaches to interacting with others. I often found some of those people annoying and aversive. That’s true even though I’m no grandmaster of “normal” social approaches myself, and even though I suspect that I am far less sensitive to deviations from them than the average bear.
What I would truly expect to go through my mind would be something like “Oh, no, yet another one of those people who think removing all filters will improve society, and want me to be part of the grand experiment”… or possibly “Oh, no, yet another one of those people who don’t realize that filters are expected at all”, or, worse “Oh, no, one of those people who think they can use some kind of philosophical gobbledygook to justify inconsiderate passive-aggressive pushiness”. Because I’ve met all of those more than once.
That would cause discomfort, and in the future I’d tend to avoid the source of that discomfort. I was trying to point out was that the strategy might appear to work, but still backfire, because the immediate feedback from the interlocutor wouldn’t necessarily be honest.
Maybe I’d get over it, but maybe I wouldn’t, too.
For the record on your first paragraph, I’m really, really skeptical of Crocker’s rules working over the long term, but I admit I’ve never tried them. I don’t think the rest of the things you mention are similar.
I don’t know of any common social norm against, say, tabooing words, or asking about anticipated experiences. I think you can use those sorts of methods with more or less anybody. You may run into resistance or anger if somebody thinks you’re trying to pull a nasty rhetorical trick, but you can defuse that if you take the time to cross the inferential distance gently, and starting on the project before you’re in the middle of a heated conflict where the other person will reject absolutely anything you suggest.
For that matter, you can often just quietly stop using a word without saying anything at all about “tabooing” it.
Likewise, I don’t think most people mind “I’m confused”… unless it’s obviously dishonest and meant to provide plausibly deniable cover to some following snark.
On the other hand, I do see lots of social norms around what tactics are and are not OK for getting somebody else to do something for you, and also around how much of your internal state you share at what stages of intimacy. So I think this is different in kind.
And of course I may also have completely misread your comment...
[On edit, cleaned up a couple of proofreading errors]
Thanks for elaborating on your motivations and experience.
I would be somewhat surprised if there is really appropriation of ‘rationalist’ taking place; I think moreso the motivation is simply convenience, and I don’t think I’ve ever been confused as to whether someone was referring to x-rationalists or some other group with the word. I at least would not use the term ‘rationalist’ in this way to a broader audience for the reason you mentioned, but your comment makes me think that avoiding ambiguity and not appropriating is not enough and perhaps even using it among ourselves is to be avoided, e.g. for the benefit of those ‘looking in from the outside’ who might be preemptively alienated.
I do think that ‘Muggle’ makes a useful distinction (something like a distinction for those receptive to LW-school ideas and techniques?) in quickly conveying the referrent’s mindset. I do remember that the first time I saw Eliezer use the term in that way, I was not entirely convinced it was a ‘savoury’ word to use, and your reaction is enough evidence for me to put a moratorium on it in my own usage at least until I have a chance to think about it more, because it does indeed seem like it might foster a counterproductive resentful or oppositional mindset.
I anticipated and agree that Crocker’s rules are by far the most risky of the things I mentioned.
I agree that there are possibly-significant (I’d have to think about it more) differences between Telling and some of the Sequences examples I gave. Perhaps more accurate would’ve been for me to say that your original argument could have been applied to the LW-rationality approach generally, or to the bias-correcting approach based on the heuristics and biases literature. I certainly have a friend who dislikes Eliezer’s take on heuristics and biases and seems to have sort of become a bias denialist, although that’s obfuscated by the possibility they just got thrown by Eliezer hitting them where it hurts (the English Literature).
My intuition won’t let me update as much as one might expect on you mentioning people being obnoxious in using nonconventional approaches to communication, and is asking for specific examples. I reserve some fair probability that there were clear differences in type between the obnoxious attempts and the successful ones, such that your experiences would not be very strong reference class evidence for e.g. Telling. But I’m also suspicious of that hesitation because it feels a bit like experience-denial.
I also retain the possibility that your reaction to the approaches you disliked was overblown, though my credence for that is far lower now than it was, based on your comment and your claim to be less fazed than average by nonconventional approaches. I am uncomfortable with this hesitation on my part too because it pattern-matches to something like what one might call victim-blaming. But sometimes people really are just Scrooge! :3
Obviously it might not be practical for you to give specific examples, for various reasons.
Have you also accounted for the potential for the negative communication approaches to stick in your mind more than ones you accepted or adopted?
Bonus questions (again, I can see why you might not answer these, though feel free to PM me or I can PM you my e-mail address):
This may be getting into private-message territory. I haven’t paid enough attention to the norms to be sure. But it’s easy to not read these...
your comment makes me think that avoiding ambiguity and not appropriating is not enough and perhaps even using it among ourselves is to be avoided, e.g. for the benefit of those ‘looking in from the outside’ who might be preemptively alienated.
I am, perhaps, “looking in from the outside”. I have a lot of history and context with the ideas here, and with the canonical texts, and even with a few of the people, but I’m an extreme “non-joiner”. In fact, I tend toward suspicion and distaste for the whole idea of investing my identity in a community, especially one with a label and a relatively clear boundary. I have only a partial model of where that attitude comes from, but I do know that I seem to retain an “outsider” reaction for a lot longer than other people might.
I may be hypersensitive. But I think it’s more likely that I’m a not-horrible model of how a completely naive outsider might react to some of these things, even though I can express it in a Less-Wrongish vocabulary.
And of course these posts are indeed visible to people who are only vaguely exploring, or only thinking about “joining”, for whatever value of “joining”. This is still outreach, right?
Perhaps more accurate would’ve been for me to say that your original argument could have been applied to the LW-rationality approach generally, or to the bias-correcting approach based on the heuristics and biases literature.
I agree that there are a ton of things that people do all the time that don’t seem very useful. If I’m not going to accept all of them, I’d better have a good reason to think this particular social-interaction issue is different.
My reason is that I don’t think that epistemic rationality, or even extreme instrumental rationality, has been a critical survival skill for people until very recently (and maybe it still isn’t). It’s useful, but it doesn’t overwhelm everything else, and indeed it seems very likely that the heuristics and biases themselves have clear advantages in many historical contexts.
On the other hand, social cooperation, and especially avoiding constant overt conflict with members of one’s own society, are pretty crucial if you want to survive as a human. So I tend to expect institutions and adaptations in that area to be pretty fine-tuned and effective. I don’t like a lot of the ways people behave socially, but they seem to work.
Not that strong, I know, but then I haven’t seen anything that strong on any side of this.
I reserve some fair probability that there were clear differences in type between the obnoxious attempts and the successful ones, such that your experiences would not be very strong reference class evidence for e.g. Telling.
I don’t think I can provide detailed descriptions, but it is definitely true that there are meaningful differences, even major differences, between most of the experiences I’ve had and the example approach.
The thing is that, if presented with the example approach in real life, I don’t think I’d notice those differences. I think I would react heuristically to the unexpected disclosure of internal state, and provisionally put the person into the “annoying/broken” bucket before I got that far.
Then, if I weren’t being very, very careful (which I can’t necessarily be in all circumstances), the promise that “everything will be OK if you say no” wouldn’t be believed, and might even be interpreted as confirmation that the person was going into passive-aggressive mode, and was indeed annoying/broken.
And in the particular example given, I’m being asked to have this presumptively-broken person stay in my house overnight, which is going to make me more wary.
If I were in perfect form and not distracted, I might catch other cues and escape the heuristic, but I think it would be my likely reaction most of the time.
YMMV if, for example, I have prior information that the person is an honest Teller, rather than somebody who incorrectly believes themselves to be a Teller or is just outright dishonest.
I don’t have as much discipline in not applying heuristics, or in turning them off at will, as many people here. On the other hand, I have more such discipline than a lot of people… probably including some people here, and definitely including people I suspect one might wish to avoid putting off of the community, should they come exploring.
I also retain the possibility that your reaction to the approaches you disliked was overblown, though my credence for that is far lower now than it was, based on your comment and your claim to be less fazed than average by nonconventional approaches.
I could also be wrong about being less fazed. I know that many nonconventional approaches don’t bother me even though they seem to bother others. That doesn’t mean that I’m not unknowingly hypersensitive to these nonconventional approaches. I haven’t calibrated myself systematically or overtly on them, and they do tickle personal boundary issues where I’m especially likely to be more sensitive than normal.
Have you also accounted for the potential for the negative communication approaches to stick in your mind more than ones you accepted or adopted?
Sure. That’s one reason I believe I’d react negatively to the example approach. I haven’t been talking about the right way to react. I’ve been predicting how I likely would react (and saying that I think others might react the same way).
It rings true to me in a lot of ways. I usually say that I miss the Bay Area’s “geekosphere”. I miss what is cheesily called the “sense of possibility”. I miss the easy availability of tools and resources. I miss the critical mass of people who really want to do cool, new things, whether they want to change the world, or make something beautiful, or even just make a bunch of money they’re not sure how to spend. I miss the number of people who really are willing to look hard at how things work, and then change them… in the large if need be. Now that I have a kid, I really miss the wide availability of approaches to education that don’t feel so much like “shove ‘em in the box and make ’em like it”.
On the other hand, that description sounds a little starry-eyed. I’ve had a bit too much contact with the “hippies” to think they’re really always about peace and love, too much contact with the programmers to believe they’re nearly as smart as they think they are, and too much contact with the entrepreneurs for “competent” to be the first description that comes to mind. I’ve also seen some people use “abandoning hangups”, or “social efficiency”, or whatever, as an excuse to treat others callously. You get a lot of that in the poly community, for example.
I might have missed those issues, or ignored them, 20 or 30 years ago. I might have said things about “wacky leftism” back then, too, things I wouldn’t say nearly so strongly now that I know a bit more about how all the parts fit together. It’s not that the leftism isn’t wacky, it’s that the capitalism is wacky, too.
I have not had direct contact with the “cooked” LW-rationalist community, so I can’t speak to that. I was in only-somewhat-related circles, I was never very, very social, and I left the area almost 7 years ago after largely “disappearing” from those circles a year or two before that. So I can’t confirm or deny what it says about that particular community.
(2) Why do you no longer spend much time in some of the communities you used to? And if you moved away from California, why?
The usual stuff: life intervened. I got busy with other stuff. I went back to work… in the Bay Area or in tech, that can be pretty consuming, and it turns out that it’s harder to take the “changing the world” jobs when you’re supporting other people. I got divorced. I got depressed. I had personal and romantic ties in Montreal, so I moved… and then I built a life here, with its own rewards and its own obligations and its own web of connections to people who also have reasons to be here. Moving back would be hard now.
I am really very pleasantly surprised with how this comment tree turned out and these are useful warnings. The level of internal insight was higher than I would have expected even if our first two comments hadn’t been vaguely confrontational. Thank you!
I’m coming to this party rather late, but I’d like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people’s emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.
I recognise your concern acutely—I’ve had the same “one of those people who has poor social skills and yet wants me to behave more like them”—and I think stressing the “whenever you suspect you’d both benefit from them knowing” part of rule one much more seems like it would help a lot in that direction.
As a specific example, as far as I can tell, Alicorn seems to be the rationalist master of Telling and generally avoiding beating about the bush when she wants something, and wins because of it.
I am terribly flattered and completely unable to connect your screen name to a human to determine what evidence you are using!
It’s also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change.
I think there are plenty of subcultures that use methods like that to operate under different norms. Getting a local Lesswrong group to switch to a different norm seems pretty doable.
Ya know, after thousands of years of trying it out in all kinds of environments, it seems as though almost every culture on Earth settles on “Guess”, with maybe a touch of “Ask” in the more overbearing ones. A common modification to “Guess” is “Offer”, where the mere mention of a possible opportunity to help out is treated as creating almost a positive obligation to notice the need and make a spontaneous offer.
From where I sit, that’s pretty strong evidence that “Guess” or maybe “Offer” is more suited to collective human nature. There’s a pretty heavy burden of proof on any “rationalist” who wants to change it.
It’s also not so obvious that you can effectively change conventions like these by just starting in and asking others to change. If you tried your “developing trust” tactic with me, I’d probably play along to avoid conflict on one occasion, and avoid YOU after that.
It’s evidence that Guess is the Nash equilibrium that human cultures find. Consider that the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with known fixed length) is both defect. It’s a common theme in game theory that the Nash equilibrium is not always the best place to be.
As far as my knowledge of cultures goes I’d guess that this is indeed the optimum for “settled” cultures where there are lots of rules and customes everybody knows from early on (precisely the conditions I gave in my earlier comment).
But that just means that it is applicable to ‘normal’ situations. Not under stress. Not for fast societal change. And maybe not for rationalists dealing with each other.
That’s a strong claim. Is it really true? I’ll grant that it certainly seems like the overall culture would be at least leaning towards Guess almost everywhere. But I don’t think that the original Metafilter post and various other posts that were inspired by it would have been so broadly linked and discussed if there weren’t also strong enough strains of Ask culture that lots and lots of people intuitively recognized the existence of both. I seem to recall seeing people talking about how they grew up in an Ask or Guess family and how that led to conflicts when they ran into people raised differently, etc. That makes it sound like the two cultures are very much co-existing.
I don’t have sociological statistics on that, and will have to retract “almost every culture” as a statement of fact.
My general impression is that the US and Western Europe are about as “Ask” as it gets, and in a lot of other cultures you’re pretty unlikely to find any “Ask families” at all. I do know that “Offer” exists.
My impression is that Russia (and I would assume that much of Eastern Europe would be similar) is Askier than Western Europe. I may be wrong here, though, and my experiences could be a consequence of individual variation.
One might note in this context is that some of this might be reflected in conventionalized linguistic politeness strategies. For example, Russian constructions used for polite requests are very Asky, and would be incredibly rude if translated literally into English or German. Of course, this is only very weak evidence that present-day Russia has more of an Ask culture than the West.
Could you give some examples? (I speak Russian and English.)
I was specifically thinking of “будь(те) добр(а/ы)” + Imperative is a very “Asky” way of phrasing a request, which is pretty direct and intrusive in English. If you add “я тебя очень прошу”, the translation becomes plainly absurd. And as far as I know—I might be miscalibrated, so correct me if I’m wrong—simple Imperative + “пожалуйста” is also more polite than the English translation would be.
I must admit that can do something similar to the “будь добр” construction in my variety of German, but it’s slightly less polite than the Russian counterpart, I think. In general, (my variety of) German loves indirection, like English, which Russian doesn’t really have. Cf. also the simple “ты не закроешь окно?”, whose translations are very rude. (I’m told that “ты не будешь закрыть окно?” works like “won’t you close the window?”, but my experience with Russian is to scarce to know that first-hand.)
Hmm.
I would render this into English as “would you be so kind as to …”, which doesn’t seem rude.
This has no analogue in English that I know of; you’re right, a literal translation would sound rather absurd (something like “I’m asking you, please”… no, that’s not quite right, but yes, I agree.
“Please do X”… seems reasonably polite, for a direct request. I’m not sure I see the difference.
Hm? Example please?
Actually, this is more direct and less polite than what seems to be the direct English translation: “won’t you close the window?” Admittedly, if instead you render this as “will you not close the window?”, it becomes less polite. Perhaps the contraction makes it a “standard polite asking phrase”, rendering it less direct? I’m not sure.
This is ungrammatical. I’m not sure what you were going for with this one, but it’s not a thing people say.
I guess the question is, how do you normally ask people to do things in English? What are some examples of things you might ask people to do, or ask people for; and what are rude or polite ways of phrasing those things? We might compare them with their Russian versions, then.
But that is not remotely a literal translation, which is my point.
Yeah, that was a performance error. It should, of course, have read “ты не будешь закрывать окно”.
Default strategies for making requests in English, which are very indirect: “Would you mind doing X?” and “Could you (please) do X?” I feel that “please” + imperative is extremely blunt to the point that I would never use it. I suppose “do X, will you?” is a possibility in English, but only in very informal contexts. For “won’t you do X”, see below.
Wait, what? In my experience, “won’t you close the window” is a politer version of “you’re supposed to close the window, so do it already”.
[“будь(те) добр(а/ы)” → “would you be so kind as to …”]
Uh, what? I struggle to imagine how you would get a more literal rendering without breaking English syntactical rules. Hm, perhaps removing the “would you” — “Be so kind as to …” — would make it absolutely literal. Is that really a large change in effect, though?
That makes grammatical sense, but it’s somewhat weird to phrase a request like this. Like, “hey, will you be doing X?” — that seems like a question. It could be a request… but only in Guess culture. I’ve almost never heard someone say this and just mean it as a request on its own; sometimes that sort of construction is followed by a request...
Huh??
We seem to be running into some serious differences in experience here...
In Russian, you could say (and people often do): “Не мог бы ты закрыть окно?” — which by direct translation becomes “Could you close the window?” — but the Russian phrase is quite polite-sounding, whereas the English phrase is less so.
Of course, we’ve been using the informal “you” (“ты”) in these phrases, but using the formal/polite “you” (“вы”) makes any of these phrases even more polite: “Не могли бы вы закрыть окно?”
Plus, in conversation, I’ve usually experienced such a phrase following a sort of “warning of request”, like so:
“У меня к вам такая просьба… ” (interlocutor says “Да?” or “Я вас слушаю?”) “Не могли бы вы закрыть окно?”
Which, rendered in English, looks like this:
“I have the following request for you [formal/polite]...” (“Yes?” or “I’m listening?”) “Could you [formal/polite] close the window?”
I don’t know… that seems “Asky” to the extent that you are asking someone for something, rather than making them guess, but I don’t see it as any more direct, per se, than the English equivalents.
How about “Be kind/nice, do X”? It’s grammatical—of course, it’s a weird thing to say, but the entire point was that the literal translations are weird and/or pushy. “would you be so kind as to” is indirect in virtue of being a question and not containing an imperative; of course, it’s the correct translation, but it’s really a very different construction.
Good to know. I once read that it has something of “you were supposed to do it, so are you gonna do it or what?” about it, but as I said, I have no personal experience with it.
Yes, I agree. I would guess that the counterpart of “could you hold that for a minute?” would perhaps be “подержи, пожалуйста, на минутку”—but “hold that for a minute, please” strikes me as really very rude in English.
Well, for one thing, I feel it’s weird to say “I have a request for you” in English. You’d normally say “could I ask you for something/a favor”. In that, the Russian formulation is already more direct.
Of course, as I said, all that is not exactly strong evidence in favor of Russia actually having more of an ask culture, only very mildly suggestive. You can behave in an Ask or Guess culture way in either language, it’s just that the conventionalized politeness strategies of English make a lot of use of indirection (questions, and usually moralized, virtually never imperatives), whereas in Russian, when saying something that is equivalent in politeness to a certain English construction, you mention the request somewhat more directly (although, as you point out, there is the more indirect “могли бы вы” strategy).
By the way, do you live in Russian or another Russian-speaking country? Because I’ve seen a study that showed that heritage speakers of Russian (i.e. speakers who live in a different linguistic community but learned the language from a parent) adopt more English-like politeness strategies. The reference is here.
Ah, yes, I see your point.
I think I agree with what you’re saying sufficiently that anything further would be nitpicking. I do think it would be interesting to study this in more detail, although (not having any formal training in linguistics) I am unsure how linguists approach quantifying e.g. politeness, etc.
I live in the United States, having been born in Russia and learned Russian in the usual way. (Interesting citation, though.)
Oh, I just saw that I linked the abstract when I wanted to link to the actual slides! Which also give you a picture of how this kind of thing is studied by people who do that. Here they are.
Hmm, I seem to be having trouble opening the .ppt file… are you able to view it? I get an error from PowerPoint.
Opened fine for me in LibreOffice (4.1.3) just now.
If I’m understanding your comment correctly, I strongly disagree with this way of framing such suggestions. It seems anathema to the rationalist enterprise. Many rationalist simplifications of or modifications to (social) interaction, or other not-strictly-rationalist approaches that are regardless endorsed by us, are hit by your argument. E.g. requesting tabooing words, requesting predictions of differing anticipated experiences, Crocker’s rules, confessing noticing confusion, etc. etc. on through the Sequences et al.
A core of the rationalist ideal is to take approaches that promote the discovery, recognition, and sharing of truth except where there are situational reasons to hold off on doing so in those specific cases. For example, I agree with warnings that have been raised in the comments on this post about trying Telling without a cooperating or rationalist receiver. But that’s in the same way that asking a Muggle to taboo their words can be a not-so-great idea.
I suspect that high-profile Bay Area (and possibly New York?) rationalists would bear this out. As a specific example, as far as I can tell, Alicorn seems to be the rationalist master of Telling and generally avoiding beating about the bush when she wants something, and wins because of it. More generally, from what I gather as a spectator, there seem to be a lot of techniques or behaviours on instrumental, emotional, and interpersonal fronts that are making the Bay Area awesome and an ever-stronger attractor to rationalists around the world, but which the broader rationalist/LW community does not necessarily hear about.
The success of the Bay Area subcommunity’s approach seems somewhat unknown. And I think that means that when someone comes along from there and says to the broader community, ‘Hey, we should try Telling more,’ there is a lot of cultural context (of the Bay Area generally, and all the interrelations with communication systems, openness, etc.), experience, and success underlying that suggestion that is not visible. I think if enough commenters adopted this approach, it would becomes recognised, not be misinterpreted, and work. Now Brienne’s posted this, possibly even people can link to this post to try to prevent being misinterpreted when they are Telling on LW.
A lot of the Bay Area’s success seems to come from people taking simplifying approaches to communication seriously and cooperating. When you say
that pretty much feels like the complete opposite, i.e. writing off the suggestion and anyone who takes it seriously. I’m not sure if I’d call it defection, but it has a similar feel. On a collective level, both the receptive and the skeptical attitudes are self-fulfilling, because these kinds of things really do seem to work when enough people take them seriously, and will certainly fail if everyone scorns them. (E.g. look at how many memes from the Sequences are pretty much unanimously taken seriously.)
(I acknowledge that I might have completely misread your comment.)
So, as long as we’re Telling, I’m going to talk about my own internal state. I think at least some aspects of my reactions may be shared by other people, including people whom readers of this thread may be interested in influencing or interacting with. Anybody who’s not interested in this should definitely stop reading. I promise I won’t be offended. :-)
Although I still think I had a point, if I look back at why I really wrote my response, I think that point was mostly “cover” for a less acceptable motivation. I think I really wrote it mostly out of irritation with the way the word “rationalist” was used in the original posting. And I find myself feeling the same way in response to some of your reply.
My first reaction is to see it as an ugly form of appropriation to take the word “rationalist” to mean “person identified with the Less Wrong community or associated communities, especially if said member uses jargon A, B, and C, and subscribes to only-tangentially-rational norms X, Y, and Z”. Especially when it’s coupled with signals of group superiority like “don’t try this with Muggles” (used to be “mundanes”). It provokes an immediate “screw you” reaction.
I expressed my irritation only as hopefully-veiled but still obnoxious snark(for which I am sorry), but it was there.
The Bay Area, and presumably New York and the world, contain people who are committed to rationality by almost any definition, yet who’ve never read the Sequences, probably wouldn’t want to, and probably have no great interest in the community I think you mean. Some of them have pretty high profiles, too. Making a land grab for the word “rationalist” probably doesn’t make most of those people want into the club, and neither does name calling. Both seem more likely to make them think the club is composed of jerks.
On another, but perhaps related, front...
By my last paragraph’s description of my reaction, I didn’t mean to write off the “Tell” suggestion completely as a suggestion about what social norms should be, whether in a subculture or in The Wider Culture(TM). I’m pretty skeptical about the idea, but I wasn’t trying to be completely dismissive there.
In that part, I was, perhaps amid more snark, trying to warn about a possibly inobvious reaction. What I was trying to describe was how I, as an individual, actually envision myself reacting to the stated tactic for introducing the “Tell” approach.
I used to spend a fair amount of time, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, with communities that overlap with, and/or could be seen as antecedents of, the Less Wrong/CFAR/MIRI “rationalists”. In those communities, I met a lot of people who had unconventional approaches to interacting with others. I often found some of those people annoying and aversive. That’s true even though I’m no grandmaster of “normal” social approaches myself, and even though I suspect that I am far less sensitive to deviations from them than the average bear.
What I would truly expect to go through my mind would be something like “Oh, no, yet another one of those people who think removing all filters will improve society, and want me to be part of the grand experiment”… or possibly “Oh, no, yet another one of those people who don’t realize that filters are expected at all”, or, worse “Oh, no, one of those people who think they can use some kind of philosophical gobbledygook to justify inconsiderate passive-aggressive pushiness”. Because I’ve met all of those more than once.
That would cause discomfort, and in the future I’d tend to avoid the source of that discomfort. I was trying to point out was that the strategy might appear to work, but still backfire, because the immediate feedback from the interlocutor wouldn’t necessarily be honest.
Maybe I’d get over it, but maybe I wouldn’t, too.
For the record on your first paragraph, I’m really, really skeptical of Crocker’s rules working over the long term, but I admit I’ve never tried them. I don’t think the rest of the things you mention are similar.
I don’t know of any common social norm against, say, tabooing words, or asking about anticipated experiences. I think you can use those sorts of methods with more or less anybody. You may run into resistance or anger if somebody thinks you’re trying to pull a nasty rhetorical trick, but you can defuse that if you take the time to cross the inferential distance gently, and starting on the project before you’re in the middle of a heated conflict where the other person will reject absolutely anything you suggest.
For that matter, you can often just quietly stop using a word without saying anything at all about “tabooing” it.
Likewise, I don’t think most people mind “I’m confused”… unless it’s obviously dishonest and meant to provide plausibly deniable cover to some following snark.
On the other hand, I do see lots of social norms around what tactics are and are not OK for getting somebody else to do something for you, and also around how much of your internal state you share at what stages of intimacy. So I think this is different in kind.
And of course I may also have completely misread your comment...
[On edit, cleaned up a couple of proofreading errors]
Thanks for elaborating on your motivations and experience.
I would be somewhat surprised if there is really appropriation of ‘rationalist’ taking place; I think moreso the motivation is simply convenience, and I don’t think I’ve ever been confused as to whether someone was referring to x-rationalists or some other group with the word. I at least would not use the term ‘rationalist’ in this way to a broader audience for the reason you mentioned, but your comment makes me think that avoiding ambiguity and not appropriating is not enough and perhaps even using it among ourselves is to be avoided, e.g. for the benefit of those ‘looking in from the outside’ who might be preemptively alienated.
I do think that ‘Muggle’ makes a useful distinction (something like a distinction for those receptive to LW-school ideas and techniques?) in quickly conveying the referrent’s mindset. I do remember that the first time I saw Eliezer use the term in that way, I was not entirely convinced it was a ‘savoury’ word to use, and your reaction is enough evidence for me to put a moratorium on it in my own usage at least until I have a chance to think about it more, because it does indeed seem like it might foster a counterproductive resentful or oppositional mindset.
I anticipated and agree that Crocker’s rules are by far the most risky of the things I mentioned.
I agree that there are possibly-significant (I’d have to think about it more) differences between Telling and some of the Sequences examples I gave. Perhaps more accurate would’ve been for me to say that your original argument could have been applied to the LW-rationality approach generally, or to the bias-correcting approach based on the heuristics and biases literature. I certainly have a friend who dislikes Eliezer’s take on heuristics and biases and seems to have sort of become a bias denialist, although that’s obfuscated by the possibility they just got thrown by Eliezer hitting them where it hurts (the English Literature).
My intuition won’t let me update as much as one might expect on you mentioning people being obnoxious in using nonconventional approaches to communication, and is asking for specific examples. I reserve some fair probability that there were clear differences in type between the obnoxious attempts and the successful ones, such that your experiences would not be very strong reference class evidence for e.g. Telling. But I’m also suspicious of that hesitation because it feels a bit like experience-denial.
I also retain the possibility that your reaction to the approaches you disliked was overblown, though my credence for that is far lower now than it was, based on your comment and your claim to be less fazed than average by nonconventional approaches. I am uncomfortable with this hesitation on my part too because it pattern-matches to something like what one might call victim-blaming. But sometimes people really are just Scrooge! :3
Obviously it might not be practical for you to give specific examples, for various reasons.
Have you also accounted for the potential for the negative communication approaches to stick in your mind more than ones you accepted or adopted?
Bonus questions (again, I can see why you might not answer these, though feel free to PM me or I can PM you my e-mail address):
(1) What’s your general take on the picture painted by http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/24/going-from-california-with-an-aching-in-my-heart/
(2) Why do you no longer spend much time in some of the communities you used to? And if you moved away from California, why?
This may be getting into private-message territory. I haven’t paid enough attention to the norms to be sure. But it’s easy to not read these...
I am, perhaps, “looking in from the outside”. I have a lot of history and context with the ideas here, and with the canonical texts, and even with a few of the people, but I’m an extreme “non-joiner”. In fact, I tend toward suspicion and distaste for the whole idea of investing my identity in a community, especially one with a label and a relatively clear boundary. I have only a partial model of where that attitude comes from, but I do know that I seem to retain an “outsider” reaction for a lot longer than other people might.
I may be hypersensitive. But I think it’s more likely that I’m a not-horrible model of how a completely naive outsider might react to some of these things, even though I can express it in a Less-Wrongish vocabulary.
And of course these posts are indeed visible to people who are only vaguely exploring, or only thinking about “joining”, for whatever value of “joining”. This is still outreach, right?
I agree that there are a ton of things that people do all the time that don’t seem very useful. If I’m not going to accept all of them, I’d better have a good reason to think this particular social-interaction issue is different.
My reason is that I don’t think that epistemic rationality, or even extreme instrumental rationality, has been a critical survival skill for people until very recently (and maybe it still isn’t). It’s useful, but it doesn’t overwhelm everything else, and indeed it seems very likely that the heuristics and biases themselves have clear advantages in many historical contexts.
On the other hand, social cooperation, and especially avoiding constant overt conflict with members of one’s own society, are pretty crucial if you want to survive as a human. So I tend to expect institutions and adaptations in that area to be pretty fine-tuned and effective. I don’t like a lot of the ways people behave socially, but they seem to work.
Not that strong, I know, but then I haven’t seen anything that strong on any side of this.
I don’t think I can provide detailed descriptions, but it is definitely true that there are meaningful differences, even major differences, between most of the experiences I’ve had and the example approach.
The thing is that, if presented with the example approach in real life, I don’t think I’d notice those differences. I think I would react heuristically to the unexpected disclosure of internal state, and provisionally put the person into the “annoying/broken” bucket before I got that far.
Then, if I weren’t being very, very careful (which I can’t necessarily be in all circumstances), the promise that “everything will be OK if you say no” wouldn’t be believed, and might even be interpreted as confirmation that the person was going into passive-aggressive mode, and was indeed annoying/broken.
And in the particular example given, I’m being asked to have this presumptively-broken person stay in my house overnight, which is going to make me more wary.
If I were in perfect form and not distracted, I might catch other cues and escape the heuristic, but I think it would be my likely reaction most of the time.
YMMV if, for example, I have prior information that the person is an honest Teller, rather than somebody who incorrectly believes themselves to be a Teller or is just outright dishonest.
I don’t have as much discipline in not applying heuristics, or in turning them off at will, as many people here. On the other hand, I have more such discipline than a lot of people… probably including some people here, and definitely including people I suspect one might wish to avoid putting off of the community, should they come exploring.
I could also be wrong about being less fazed. I know that many nonconventional approaches don’t bother me even though they seem to bother others. That doesn’t mean that I’m not unknowingly hypersensitive to these nonconventional approaches. I haven’t calibrated myself systematically or overtly on them, and they do tickle personal boundary issues where I’m especially likely to be more sensitive than normal.
Sure. That’s one reason I believe I’d react negatively to the example approach. I haven’t been talking about the right way to react. I’ve been predicting how I likely would react (and saying that I think others might react the same way).
It rings true to me in a lot of ways. I usually say that I miss the Bay Area’s “geekosphere”. I miss what is cheesily called the “sense of possibility”. I miss the easy availability of tools and resources. I miss the critical mass of people who really want to do cool, new things, whether they want to change the world, or make something beautiful, or even just make a bunch of money they’re not sure how to spend. I miss the number of people who really are willing to look hard at how things work, and then change them… in the large if need be. Now that I have a kid, I really miss the wide availability of approaches to education that don’t feel so much like “shove ‘em in the box and make ’em like it”.
On the other hand, that description sounds a little starry-eyed. I’ve had a bit too much contact with the “hippies” to think they’re really always about peace and love, too much contact with the programmers to believe they’re nearly as smart as they think they are, and too much contact with the entrepreneurs for “competent” to be the first description that comes to mind. I’ve also seen some people use “abandoning hangups”, or “social efficiency”, or whatever, as an excuse to treat others callously. You get a lot of that in the poly community, for example.
I might have missed those issues, or ignored them, 20 or 30 years ago. I might have said things about “wacky leftism” back then, too, things I wouldn’t say nearly so strongly now that I know a bit more about how all the parts fit together. It’s not that the leftism isn’t wacky, it’s that the capitalism is wacky, too.
I have not had direct contact with the “cooked” LW-rationalist community, so I can’t speak to that. I was in only-somewhat-related circles, I was never very, very social, and I left the area almost 7 years ago after largely “disappearing” from those circles a year or two before that. So I can’t confirm or deny what it says about that particular community.
The usual stuff: life intervened. I got busy with other stuff. I went back to work… in the Bay Area or in tech, that can be pretty consuming, and it turns out that it’s harder to take the “changing the world” jobs when you’re supporting other people. I got divorced. I got depressed. I had personal and romantic ties in Montreal, so I moved… and then I built a life here, with its own rewards and its own obligations and its own web of connections to people who also have reasons to be here. Moving back would be hard now.
But I do still miss it a lot.
I am really very pleasantly surprised with how this comment tree turned out and these are useful warnings. The level of internal insight was higher than I would have expected even if our first two comments hadn’t been vaguely confrontational. Thank you!
I’m coming to this party rather late, but I’d like to acknowledge that I appreciated this exchange more than just by upvoting it. Seeing in depth explanations of other people’s emotions seems like the only way to counter Typical Mind Fallacy, but is also really hard to come by. So thanks for a very levelheaded discussion.
I recognise your concern acutely—I’ve had the same “one of those people who has poor social skills and yet wants me to behave more like them”—and I think stressing the “whenever you suspect you’d both benefit from them knowing” part of rule one much more seems like it would help a lot in that direction.
I am terribly flattered and completely unable to connect your screen name to a human to determine what evidence you are using!
I’m not someone you know of; that’s just based off what I’ve gleaned from yours and others’ comments.
I think there are plenty of subcultures that use methods like that to operate under different norms. Getting a local Lesswrong group to switch to a different norm seems pretty doable.