The initial version of this post was written quickly on a whim, but given the value people have gotten from this post (as evidenced by the 2018 Review nomination and reviews), I think it warrants a significant update which I plan to write in time for possibly publication in a book, and ideally the Review voting stage.
It’s easy to round-off the cultures to something simpler than I intended, and I want to ward against that. For example, the healthy Combat Culture I advocate requires a a basis of trust between participants. Absent that, you don’t have the culture I was pointing at.
Relatedly, an updated post should incorporate some of the ideas I mentioned in the sequel about the conditions that give rise to different cultures.
A concept which crystallized for me since writing the post is that of “the significance of a speech act” and how this crucially differs between cultures.
The tradeoffs between the two cultures can be addressed more explicitly.
Overall, I think my original post did something valuable in pointing clearly at two distinct regions in conversation-culture space and giving them sufficiently good labels which enabled people to talk about them and better notice them in practice. The fact that they’ve gotten traction has surprised me a bit since it pointed out perhaps a hole in our communal vocab.
Crisply pointing at these two centroids in the large space necessarily meant sacrificing the nuance and detail from the multiple dimensions in the space. I think the ideal treatment of the topic both provides easy-to-use handles for discussion as well as more thorough theory of conversational-cultures. In truth, probably a sequence of posts is warranted rather than just a single behemoth post or something.
A point interesting to me is that the post differs somewhat in style from my other posts. With my other posts, I usually try to be very technically precise (and end up sounding a bit like a textbook or academic paper). This post’s style was meant to be more engaging, more entertaining, more emotional, and I’m guessing that was part of its appeal. I’m not sure if it’s entirely a good thing, since I think trying to write in the evocative way is in tension with writing in the most technically precise, model-rich, theoretically-accurate way.
In updating the post, I expect to move it to the latter style more and make it relatively “more boring read” even as I make it more accurate. I could imagine the ideal for authors to be is to have one highly-engaging, evocative post for a topic that draws people in and another with the same models in their full technical glory.
Lastly I mention that I think there’s so much detail in this domain that alternative takes, e.g. Abram Demski’s Combat vs Nurture & Meta-Contrarianism, feel like they’re describing real and true things, yet somehow different things than what I addressed. I don’t have a meta-theory yet that manage to unify all the models in this space, though that would be nice.
[Update: the new version is now live!!]
[Author writing here.]
The initial version of this post was written quickly on a whim, but given the value people have gotten from this post (as evidenced by the 2018 Review nomination and reviews), I think it warrants a significant update which I plan to write in time for possibly publication in a book, and ideally the Review voting stage.
Things I plan to include in the update:
Although dichotomies (X vs. Y) are easy to remember and talk about, different conversational cultures differ on multiple dimensions, and that ought to be addressed explicitly.
It’s easy to round-off the cultures to something simpler than I intended, and I want to ward against that. For example, the healthy Combat Culture I advocate requires a a basis of trust between participants. Absent that, you don’t have the culture I was pointing at.
Relatedly, an updated post should incorporate some of the ideas I mentioned in the sequel about the conditions that give rise to different cultures.
A concept which crystallized for me since writing the post is that of “the significance of a speech act” and how this crucially differs between cultures.
The tradeoffs between the two cultures can be addressed more explicitly.
Overall, I think my original post did something valuable in pointing clearly at two distinct regions in conversation-culture space and giving them sufficiently good labels which enabled people to talk about them and better notice them in practice. The fact that they’ve gotten traction has surprised me a bit since it pointed out perhaps a hole in our communal vocab.
Crisply pointing at these two centroids in the large space necessarily meant sacrificing the nuance and detail from the multiple dimensions in the space. I think the ideal treatment of the topic both provides easy-to-use handles for discussion as well as more thorough theory of conversational-cultures. In truth, probably a sequence of posts is warranted rather than just a single behemoth post or something.
A point interesting to me is that the post differs somewhat in style from my other posts. With my other posts, I usually try to be very technically precise (and end up sounding a bit like a textbook or academic paper). This post’s style was meant to be more engaging, more entertaining, more emotional, and I’m guessing that was part of its appeal. I’m not sure if it’s entirely a good thing, since I think trying to write in the evocative way is in tension with writing in the most technically precise, model-rich, theoretically-accurate way.
In updating the post, I expect to move it to the latter style more and make it relatively “more boring read” even as I make it more accurate. I could imagine the ideal for authors to be is to have one highly-engaging, evocative post for a topic that draws people in and another with the same models in their full technical glory.
Lastly I mention that I think there’s so much detail in this domain that alternative takes, e.g. Abram Demski’s Combat vs Nurture & Meta-Contrarianism, feel like they’re describing real and true things, yet somehow different things than what I addressed. I don’t have a meta-theory yet that manage to unify all the models in this space, though that would be nice.