I appreciate that this framing can have positive impact on individual interactions, and can be useful in expanding what kinds of cultural norms might be better than one’s current ones. It would be pretty valuable to me to be able to specify “no pressure, I prefer to interact this way”. Nevertheless, I would be pretty unhappy if personalization of culture became accepted as part of the broader culture, and I think one of my objections to it is generally applicable.
If everyone did this, it would impose large costs on people with bad memories (like myself), and even on people with normal memories. Despite the low-stakes phrasing, norm personalization is a bit like having a very long name—consistent failures to remember, or refusal to try to remember, provides more bits in the “I don’t really care about you” signal, but most people will not adjust the strength of signal based on how costly remembering is for the other party (I only have anecdata to support this claim). Even people who currently have a socially-sufficient memory could find themselves unpleasantly surprised by accidentally sending the signal “I don’t care about you” to conversational partners when hitting a previously non-limiting constraint. Diplomats can do this successfully with a single other culture, but even they might struggle to remember a different culture for everyone they know. One possible effect of this is a soft cap on the number of people you can successfully interact with based on your available memory—right now, this is bounded over long time scales by how many face+name pairs you can remember, and in the short term by how easy it is to memorize someone’s name while talking to them. As an example, I have a colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, and I think it reduces his success in interacting with people who have those names.
I think there’s a conflation here between “the internal experience of the emotion of caring” and “the act of caring, visible to external observers.”
I think you’re saying “I might take actions that look like not-caring, due to constraints like memory, and I don’t want this to be misconstrued as not having the internal experience of caring,” but I think that ultimately if one has … akrasiatic caring? … this doesn’t matter. I think that whether it’s down to unfortunate memory constraints or like deliberate callousness, what usually carries weight is “does this person take the actions that I need them to take, in order to be happy interacting?” and if the answer is “nope” then the reason doesn’t matter all that much to me.
Or to put it another way, “sufficiently advanced obliviousness is indistinguishable from malice” is a sentence pattern that has a lot of other versions, e.g. “sufficiently advanced inability to scrape together spoons, due to chronic illness, is indistinguishable from apathy.”
It’s not that an “I don’t care about you” signal was accidentally sent, it’s that the action of care, sufficient for the needs of the other person, wasn’t taken. It’s tragic when it wasn’t-taken due to reality constraints, as opposed to due to a free and unpressured choice, but what matters is whether the action is on the table.
Your colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, for instance … in my culture, it’s bad to excoriate that colleague if it’s a genuine constraint issue, but whether it’s inability or unwillingness isn’t pertinent if what matters is “can we say each other’s names, reliably?”
I appreciate that this framing can have positive impact on individual interactions, and can be useful in expanding what kinds of cultural norms might be better than one’s current ones. It would be pretty valuable to me to be able to specify “no pressure, I prefer to interact this way”. Nevertheless, I would be pretty unhappy if personalization of culture became accepted as part of the broader culture, and I think one of my objections to it is generally applicable.
If everyone did this, it would impose large costs on people with bad memories (like myself), and even on people with normal memories. Despite the low-stakes phrasing, norm personalization is a bit like having a very long name—consistent failures to remember, or refusal to try to remember, provides more bits in the “I don’t really care about you” signal, but most people will not adjust the strength of signal based on how costly remembering is for the other party (I only have anecdata to support this claim). Even people who currently have a socially-sufficient memory could find themselves unpleasantly surprised by accidentally sending the signal “I don’t care about you” to conversational partners when hitting a previously non-limiting constraint. Diplomats can do this successfully with a single other culture, but even they might struggle to remember a different culture for everyone they know. One possible effect of this is a soft cap on the number of people you can successfully interact with based on your available memory—right now, this is bounded over long time scales by how many face+name pairs you can remember, and in the short term by how easy it is to memorize someone’s name while talking to them. As an example, I have a colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, and I think it reduces his success in interacting with people who have those names.
I think there’s a conflation here between “the internal experience of the emotion of caring” and “the act of caring, visible to external observers.”
I think you’re saying “I might take actions that look like not-caring, due to constraints like memory, and I don’t want this to be misconstrued as not having the internal experience of caring,” but I think that ultimately if one has … akrasiatic caring? … this doesn’t matter. I think that whether it’s down to unfortunate memory constraints or like deliberate callousness, what usually carries weight is “does this person take the actions that I need them to take, in order to be happy interacting?” and if the answer is “nope” then the reason doesn’t matter all that much to me.
Or to put it another way, “sufficiently advanced obliviousness is indistinguishable from malice” is a sentence pattern that has a lot of other versions, e.g. “sufficiently advanced inability to scrape together spoons, due to chronic illness, is indistinguishable from apathy.”
It’s not that an “I don’t care about you” signal was accidentally sent, it’s that the action of care, sufficient for the needs of the other person, wasn’t taken. It’s tragic when it wasn’t-taken due to reality constraints, as opposed to due to a free and unpressured choice, but what matters is whether the action is on the table.
Your colleague who has trouble learning non-WASP names, for instance … in my culture, it’s bad to excoriate that colleague if it’s a genuine constraint issue, but whether it’s inability or unwillingness isn’t pertinent if what matters is “can we say each other’s names, reliably?”