As noted elsethread, there are some distinctions between
my “culture-as-it-is” vs my “culture-as-it-aspires-to-be”
my “personal-culture” vs the “culture-I-am-and-want-to-be-part-of”
i. Common Knowledge and Robust Agency
In my culture (both the culture-that-is and culture I aspire to), we attend to what is common knowledge and what is not. My culture includes (by necessity, not necessarily choice) people who are coming and going all the time. The walls are not secure enough to ensure that everyone inside has common knowledge of all the most important things, and basically can’t be.
Sometimes, something is important (and tractable!) enough that we spend a bunch of coordinating effort to make sure there is common knowledge of it’s importance and that everyone is in fact reliably working towards it (with some punishment for defection, and buy-in for enforcing said punishment). Most of the time we don’t bother, and instead make little work-groups with higher standards when higher standards are necessary.
Meanwhile, we model what is common knowledge (within my-culture-at-large, and within whatever conversation is going on)
Also meanwhile, we are aspiring to be robust agents together – we are each trying to adopt policies that will work at different levels of scale, with different levels of understanding and skill on the parts of the people participating. And we help each other to do so. [Edit: Because of the aforementioned insecure walls, the policies must also be robust against occasional, actively adversarial behavior].
...
ii. Emotions-as-object
In my culture-as-it-is, if I say something and someone says “that makes me sad and/or angry”, I generally do expect some combination of punishment, or a bid for me to change my behavior. Having this not be the case takes work on the part of the person, and on anyone else in the conversation – I need to trust that they have emotional skills necessary to not hold a grudge, that the people listening will not over update (either against me, or possibly against the person who made the claim, in a way that creates more work for me.)
There are cultures where it is more taken-as-default that people are building the skills to take-emotions-as-object, enough so that one either can trust that they have that skill, or that they’re earnestly building the skill and it’s okay to take emotional risks in the service of helping everyone build the skill.
I think the skill is important. In my culture (my aspiring culture), we definitely spend at least some time building the skills necessary to have tricky conversations that take charged-emotions as object. But, because in my aspiring culture, there is still a mix of people with different skills working together, this is not taken as default. Every time that it is not common knowledge that everyone has the requisite skills, the default assumption is that we can’t rely on people having them.
So if you want to talk about tricky emotionally charged things you need to put in extra work that scales with the number of people you’re having a conversation with.
...
iii. Distributed Teamwork vs Specialization/Systems
I’ve changed my beliefs somewhat (although they are still in flux) over the past year. My culture used to take as obvious that the way to get things done was to get a critical mass of people who were paying attention to each other’s needs and to the surrounding environment and working together to improve them, to fix obvious failures, and to attend to each other’s emotional needs.
I still think that is all quite good, I still aesthetically prefer a world where that is how a lot of stuff gets done. But I know have more awareness of
a) sometimes specialization is just better
b) sometimes you can just eliminate a task completely, and it’s often better to look for solutions that don’t require everyone to continuously spend attention on a thing.
So in my culture we try to check early and often for how to resolve a thing without coordination.
(an uncertainty of mine is that I think you often will suddenly need the skills of how to do things via distributed teamwork and coordination, esp. when you’re starting a new house or organization, so it’s important to build the critical mass of that skill even if you try to resolve any given thing without it)
...
iv. Improving our ability to think clearly
In my culture, we have a responsibility to improve our ability to think—both to avoid bias, and to generate useful/creative thoughts.
You also have some responsibility to do your thinking in a way that helps others around you improve their thinking. This, in part, means, thinking transparently so that others can both inspect your thinking and learn from it.
[edit: It also means not doing too much of other people’s thinking for them. Try to give people space to think, and sometimes optimize asking questions or answering questions in a way that’s optimized for helping other people to learn to figure out the answer on their own, instead of solving it for them]
...
v. in my culture, we type “nod.”
(I recently was texting with both rationalist friends and non-rationalist family in NY, and there were brief, jarring moments where they said “wait, did you just type the word ‘nod?’ Is that a thing you do now?” and I said “I… suppose I do?”)
Put a slash in front, and it’s a character emote, very recognizable by old-school MUDders and MMORPG players. /nod is unremarkable in some groups. Also documented in “the jargon file” as common hacker culture as early as the 1970s: http://catb.org/jargon/html/inarticulations.html
As noted elsethread, there are some distinctions between
my “culture-as-it-is” vs my “culture-as-it-aspires-to-be”
my “personal-culture” vs the “culture-I-am-and-want-to-be-part-of”
i. Common Knowledge and Robust Agency
In my culture (both the culture-that-is and culture I aspire to), we attend to what is common knowledge and what is not. My culture includes (by necessity, not necessarily choice) people who are coming and going all the time. The walls are not secure enough to ensure that everyone inside has common knowledge of all the most important things, and basically can’t be.
Sometimes, something is important (and tractable!) enough that we spend a bunch of coordinating effort to make sure there is common knowledge of it’s importance and that everyone is in fact reliably working towards it (with some punishment for defection, and buy-in for enforcing said punishment). Most of the time we don’t bother, and instead make little work-groups with higher standards when higher standards are necessary.
Meanwhile, we model what is common knowledge (within my-culture-at-large, and within whatever conversation is going on)
Also meanwhile, we are aspiring to be robust agents together – we are each trying to adopt policies that will work at different levels of scale, with different levels of understanding and skill on the parts of the people participating. And we help each other to do so. [Edit: Because of the aforementioned insecure walls, the policies must also be robust against occasional, actively adversarial behavior].
...
ii. Emotions-as-object
In my culture-as-it-is, if I say something and someone says “that makes me sad and/or angry”, I generally do expect some combination of punishment, or a bid for me to change my behavior. Having this not be the case takes work on the part of the person, and on anyone else in the conversation – I need to trust that they have emotional skills necessary to not hold a grudge, that the people listening will not over update (either against me, or possibly against the person who made the claim, in a way that creates more work for me.)
There are cultures where it is more taken-as-default that people are building the skills to take-emotions-as-object, enough so that one either can trust that they have that skill, or that they’re earnestly building the skill and it’s okay to take emotional risks in the service of helping everyone build the skill.
I think the skill is important. In my culture (my aspiring culture), we definitely spend at least some time building the skills necessary to have tricky conversations that take charged-emotions as object. But, because in my aspiring culture, there is still a mix of people with different skills working together, this is not taken as default. Every time that it is not common knowledge that everyone has the requisite skills, the default assumption is that we can’t rely on people having them.
So if you want to talk about tricky emotionally charged things you need to put in extra work that scales with the number of people you’re having a conversation with.
...
iii. Distributed Teamwork vs Specialization/Systems
I’ve changed my beliefs somewhat (although they are still in flux) over the past year. My culture used to take as obvious that the way to get things done was to get a critical mass of people who were paying attention to each other’s needs and to the surrounding environment and working together to improve them, to fix obvious failures, and to attend to each other’s emotional needs.
I still think that is all quite good, I still aesthetically prefer a world where that is how a lot of stuff gets done. But I know have more awareness of
a) sometimes specialization is just better
b) sometimes you can just eliminate a task completely, and it’s often better to look for solutions that don’t require everyone to continuously spend attention on a thing.
So in my culture we try to check early and often for how to resolve a thing without coordination.
(an uncertainty of mine is that I think you often will suddenly need the skills of how to do things via distributed teamwork and coordination, esp. when you’re starting a new house or organization, so it’s important to build the critical mass of that skill even if you try to resolve any given thing without it)
...
iv. Improving our ability to think clearly
In my culture, we have a responsibility to improve our ability to think—both to avoid bias, and to generate useful/creative thoughts.
You also have some responsibility to do your thinking in a way that helps others around you improve their thinking. This, in part, means, thinking transparently so that others can both inspect your thinking and learn from it.
[edit: It also means not doing too much of other people’s thinking for them. Try to give people space to think, and sometimes optimize asking questions or answering questions in a way that’s optimized for helping other people to learn to figure out the answer on their own, instead of solving it for them]
...
v. in my culture, we type “nod.”
(I recently was texting with both rationalist friends and non-rationalist family in NY, and there were brief, jarring moments where they said “wait, did you just type the word ‘nod?’ Is that a thing you do now?” and I said “I… suppose I do?”)
Put a slash in front, and it’s a character emote, very recognizable by old-school MUDders and MMORPG players. /nod is unremarkable in some groups. Also documented in “the jargon file” as common hacker culture as early as the 1970s: http://catb.org/jargon/html/inarticulations.html
nod.