Reading this again several months later, after having developed related thoughts more, and seeing Viliam’s comment below, caused a strong negative reaction that the line “If we’re fighting over the mindshare of which types of norms are winning out, we’re already lost.”
I have the instinctive sense that when people say “We can’t be fighting over this” it’s often because they are fighting over it and don’t want the other side fighting BACK, and are using the implicit argument that they’ve already pre-committed to fighting so if you fight back we’re gonna have to fight for real, so why not simply let me win? I’m already winning. We’re actively trying to recruit your people and promote our message over your message. We can’t afford to then have you try to recruit our people and have you trying to promote your message over ours. What we do is good and right, what you do is causing conflict.
Thus, you have a project about moving more into the human/impact, arguing that it deserves larger mind share. Fair enough! There’s certainly a case to be made there, but making that case while also arguing we can’t afford to be arguing over various cases sets off my alarm bells. Especially since ‘arguing over what should get more attention’ is itself a truth-seeking mindshare activity, and there are human/impact activities that can be negative to truth-seeking rather than simply neutral, and that we have to do to some extent.
So I’d be more in a ‘you can’t afford not to’ camp rather than a ‘you can’t afford to’ camp, and I think that if we view such an activity as fighting and negative rather than a positive thing, that’s itself a sign of further problems.
Reading this again several months later, after having developed related thoughts more, and seeing Viliam’s comment below, caused a strong negative reaction that the line “If we’re fighting over the mindshare of which types of norms are winning out, we’re already lost.”
I have the instinctive sense that when people say “We can’t be fighting over this” it’s often because they are fighting over it and don’t want the other side fighting BACK, and are using the implicit argument that they’ve already pre-committed to fighting so if you fight back we’re gonna have to fight for real, so why not simply let me win? I’m already winning. We’re actively trying to recruit your people and promote our message over your message. We can’t afford to then have you try to recruit our people and have you trying to promote your message over ours. What we do is good and right, what you do is causing conflict.
Thus, you have a project about moving more into the human/impact, arguing that it deserves larger mind share. Fair enough! There’s certainly a case to be made there, but making that case while also arguing we can’t afford to be arguing over various cases sets off my alarm bells. Especially since ‘arguing over what should get more attention’ is itself a truth-seeking mindshare activity, and there are human/impact activities that can be negative to truth-seeking rather than simply neutral, and that we have to do to some extent.
So I’d be more in a ‘you can’t afford not to’ camp rather than a ‘you can’t afford to’ camp, and I think that if we view such an activity as fighting and negative rather than a positive thing, that’s itself a sign of further problems.