I feel like I recently was in a similar head space, struggling with trying to be “appropriately” (or even “ideally”) cooperative. Something that personally helped me a lot was the idea/mantra of, essentially, I am a more benign entity in the world than I tend to fear.
What I’ve found over time is just that people are exceptionally caught up in their own narratives/life circumstances—they are, after all, human beings with their own lives and priorities—but as part of that, they’re accepting that things are sometimes inconvenient for them, sometimes they miss important discussions, etc. I used to get caught up worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes, but I ended up, essentially, exhausting their mental resources asking for permission and preferences on every little thing, and they’d be too polite to tell me that.
If you are planning a large scale, sudden, and/or violent change with far-reaching consequences (like, say, the overthrow of your government), then only having discussions in private will be very problematic because people will have little to no recourse for addressing grievances. If you’re trying to advance your field of research, then informal discussions on specific issues (especially with context well understood by those parties) is just faster. It’s so hard to just get anything into motion that if someone wants to stop your plans later on they’ll likely have a ton of opportunities to do so—if you even get that far! The apathy issue you talked about activists observing is very real, and it’s true among collaborators as well—even ourselves.
The biggest thing I realized as part of this line of thinking, though, was that I was trying to get other people to confirm my beliefs about what would work for me, and that wasn’t fair to them or respectful of their time. I would plan speculative discussions or meetings and be sad when people didn’t come, but really what I was sad about was that I had to do things on my own and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to handle that. If I think about my life and experiences with full honesty, the strong unintended consequences of my decisions have always been ones that hurt me personally, not anyone else. I was trying to clear everything “pre-flight” just so I wouldn’t look dumb.
Our current society is essentially set up so that everyone explores the earliest things on their own, and slowly we build momentum by getting others excited about the progress we’ve made on an issue alone, and then in a small group, and then in a medium sized group, etc. That maximizes our exploratory surface area while still giving us that critical mass for execution. I wanted to skip ahead in that process to the point where we were all fully in sync right away, but that’s just not really feasible because we just have different places where we all want to start. There was an early IETF motto along these lines that I think still holds up here: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” It’s not an idyllic system all the time, but it has (generally) worked for many things and gotten us to where we are today.
I am a more benign entity in the world than I tend to fear, and everyone else has more agency and resilience than I give them credit for when I take those fears to heart.
Just spotted this comment is being put at the bottom by the magical sorting algorithm despite its high karma—maybe an artefact of having been marked as spam?
I feel like I recently was in a similar head space, struggling with trying to be “appropriately” (or even “ideally”) cooperative. Something that personally helped me a lot was the idea/mantra of, essentially, I am a more benign entity in the world than I tend to fear.
What I’ve found over time is just that people are exceptionally caught up in their own narratives/life circumstances—they are, after all, human beings with their own lives and priorities—but as part of that, they’re accepting that things are sometimes inconvenient for them, sometimes they miss important discussions, etc. I used to get caught up worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes, but I ended up, essentially, exhausting their mental resources asking for permission and preferences on every little thing, and they’d be too polite to tell me that.
If you are planning a large scale, sudden, and/or violent change with far-reaching consequences (like, say, the overthrow of your government), then only having discussions in private will be very problematic because people will have little to no recourse for addressing grievances. If you’re trying to advance your field of research, then informal discussions on specific issues (especially with context well understood by those parties) is just faster. It’s so hard to just get anything into motion that if someone wants to stop your plans later on they’ll likely have a ton of opportunities to do so—if you even get that far! The apathy issue you talked about activists observing is very real, and it’s true among collaborators as well—even ourselves.
The biggest thing I realized as part of this line of thinking, though, was that I was trying to get other people to confirm my beliefs about what would work for me, and that wasn’t fair to them or respectful of their time. I would plan speculative discussions or meetings and be sad when people didn’t come, but really what I was sad about was that I had to do things on my own and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to handle that. If I think about my life and experiences with full honesty, the strong unintended consequences of my decisions have always been ones that hurt me personally, not anyone else. I was trying to clear everything “pre-flight” just so I wouldn’t look dumb.
Our current society is essentially set up so that everyone explores the earliest things on their own, and slowly we build momentum by getting others excited about the progress we’ve made on an issue alone, and then in a small group, and then in a medium sized group, etc. That maximizes our exploratory surface area while still giving us that critical mass for execution. I wanted to skip ahead in that process to the point where we were all fully in sync right away, but that’s just not really feasible because we just have different places where we all want to start. There was an early IETF motto along these lines that I think still holds up here: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” It’s not an idyllic system all the time, but it has (generally) worked for many things and gotten us to where we are today.
I am a more benign entity in the world than I tend to fear, and everyone else has more agency and resilience than I give them credit for when I take those fears to heart.
(Sorry, the new spam detection seems to have been overly aggressive and marked this as spam. I undeleted it, and apologize for the inconvenience)
Just spotted this comment is being put at the bottom by the magical sorting algorithm despite its high karma—maybe an artefact of having been marked as spam?
Yep we also noticed that yesterday and it’s on the Todo list to fix.
Haha I was kinda scared I’d done or said something very wrong, thanks for the reversal!