I think the troll obliquely raised on good point with their criticism of the example for Rule 6:
For example, a Dragon who has been having trouble getting to sleep but has never informed the other Dragons that their actions are keeping them awake will agree that their anger and frustration, while valid internally, may not fairly be vented on those other Dragons, who were never given a chance to correct their behavior
Let me pose a question to the reader of my comment: would you rather live in a house where you have to constantly verbally ask the other residents to stop doing things that they could have reasonably foreseen would bother you, or would you rather live in a house where people actually used reasonable expectations of what other people want to guide their behavior and therefore acted in a way that preempted causing other people irritation?
Treating something like your sleep disturbances as your responsibility is fine if e.g. you (like me) have lots of trouble falling asleep and something like people whispering 15 metres from your room is keeping you from falling asleep. In that case, those people are doing everything right and really don’t know that they’re hurting you. It is unreasonable to get angry at them if you haven’t explained to them why their behaviour is bad for you.
Sometimes it’s less clear though. I sometimes use the microwave after midnight. I know that the microwave can be heard in my room and in my room mate’s room. When I use the microwave and think he might be asleep, I stop it before the timer finishes and it beeps loudly. There’s not much excuse to wait for my room mate to specifically request that I do this; I’m more than capable of figuring out a) the microwave beeping at the end is loud and the sort of thing that can disrupt sleep and b) there’s a way I can stop that from happening. It does show some failure of consideration if I were to shrug off the potential inconvenience that the microwave could present for my room mate for the slight benefit of not having to watch the microwave.
This points to one of the failure modes of Tell Culture, where people use it as an excuse to stop doing any thinking about how their actions can affect other people. This actually suggests that one potential house experimental norm could be something like “before making an action that might effect another Dragon, pause and consider how it might effective them and if the effect will be a net positive.”
What this all comes down to for me is that it seems unfair to ask people to assume goodwill without also asking them to always attempt to act with goodwill.
Agreed. I have a bunch of social anxiety and dislike it when a certain degree of social smoothness is treated as necessary to be sorted into to the category of “good person”.
My specific criticism is of people (and I don’t just mean other people; I’ve failed here before) who could (with ease, not with Herculean effort) intuit preferences but use Tell Culture or direct communication norms to completely avoid doing so. This is especially maddening if you have social anxiety, because you’re left anxious about bringing the thing up, especially to someone who seems so otherwise socially competent.
Thanks for the chance to clarify my views here!