Benign Boundary Violations

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Recently, my friend Eric asked me what sorts of things I wanted to have happen at my bachelor party.

I said (among other things) that I’d really enjoy some benign boundary violations.

Eric went ????

Subsequently: an essay.

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We use the word “boundary” to mean at least two things, when we’re discussing people’s personal boundaries.

The first is their actual self-defined boundary—the line that they would draw, if they had perfect introspective access, which marks the transition point from “this is okay” to “this is no longer okay.”

Different people have different boundaries:

There are all sorts of different domains in which we have those different boundaries. If the above were a representation of people’s feelings about personal space, then the person on the left would probably be big into hugs and slaps-on-the-shoulder, while the one on the right might not be comfortable sharing an elevator with more than one other person (if that).

If the above were a representation of, say, people’s openness to criticism, then the person on the left probably wouldn’t mind if you told them their presentation sucked, in front of an audience of their friends, colleagues, and potential romantic partners. Meanwhile, the person on the right would probably prefer that you send a private message checking to see whether they were even interested in critical feedback at this time.

Obviously, a diagram like the one above leaves out a lot of important nuance. For instance, a given person often has different boundaries within the same domain, depending on context—you may be very comfortable with intimate touch with your spouse and three closest friends, but very uncomfortable receiving hugs from strangers. And you may be quite comfortable receiving touches on the shoulder from just about anyone, but very uncomfortable receiving touches on the thigh.

The above also doesn’t do a great job of showing uncertainty in one’s boundaries, which is often substantial. The “grey area” between okay and not okay might be quite small, in some cases (you have a clear, unambiguous “line” that you do not want crossed) and quite wide in others where you’re not sure how you feel, and you might not know exactly where that gradient begins and ends.

But for any given domain, and any given context, most people could at least a little bit describe where their boundaries lie. They’re okay with the a-word, but not with the f-word. They’re okay with friends borrowing $50, but they’re not okay with family members asking for co-signers on a loan. They’re okay with somebody crumpling up a post-it note and playfully throwing it at them, but they’re not okay being hit in the face with a water balloon.

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There’s a different thing altogether that people mean when they talk about boundaries, and that’s something like what society tells us is okay.

This, too, is context-dependent; different subcultures have different expectations and norms between those subcultures can vary a lot. What’s in-bounds on LW is different from what’s in-bounds on FB, and what’s in-bounds on 4chan is different still.

But for any given subculture, it seems to me that society tries to set the boundaries at something like “ninety percent of the present/​relevant/​participating people will not have their personal boundaries violated.”

In other words, the boundary given by social convention is set in approximately the same place as the personal boundary of the 90th-percentile sensitive person.

(Others may disagree with me about the number, and may think that it’s set at seventy percent or ninety-five percent or whatever, and certainly this number, too, varies depending on all sorts of factors, e.g. groups are more likely to be conservative in domains that feel more fraught or dangerous.)

What this means is that most people have a delta between what is okay for them personally, and what’s deemed okay by society-at-large. This delta can go either way—relatively sensitive or disadvantaged people are often told that their reaction to a personal boundary violation is “their fault,” or “overreacting,” or “unfortunate, but that’s just something you’re going to have to get used to, if you’re going to make it around here,” because the action taken was on the right side of the normative boundary, which was not set via a process which validates their needs.

But in most cases, most people’s boundaries lie within the limit set by the social norm—often well within.

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It’s interesting to consider the role that the social boundary plays.

Violations of it—whether we’re talking about personal space, or noise pollution, or probing, intimate questions, or whatever—are super common. They’re common in the same way that violations of the speed limit are common, and (I think) for similar reasons.

A relevant anecdote:

I once co-signed a lease on a rental property in Berkeley, CA. The property manager offered us a contract that was full of outlandish terms, such as “no visitors for more than two nights without paying an additional $80/​night to the landlord.”

The property manager freely admitted that these terms were absurd, and that he did not expect us to abide by them in the slightest. They were there, he said, so that if we turned out to be assholes, he would have a way to pry us out of the house. Berkeley, CA is extremely friendly to tenants, relative to landlords, so having a contract in which we were unambiguously in breach from day 1 would prove useful.

(Or so the property manager thought, anyway; I don’t know how that would actually play out in court).

This reminded me at the time of traffic law. Approximately everyone is in violation of traffic law at approximately all times. This is usually ignored because it is, in fact, usually fine to go 51mph instead of 45mph.

But the nominal speed limit provides an unambiguous standard to refer to in the event that something else goes wrong. A highway safety patroller may not always be able to make their intuitions about a dangerous traffic situation legible or convincing, but they can say to a judge “the person in question was going nine miles per hour over the limit.”

(Here I will not get into questions about the use or abuse of such a power structure, only note that it exists.)

Social boundaries are similarly flexible and permeable. They provide something like a retroactively defensible position.

Take an action which is generically off-limits—say, an open hand placed on someone’s upper arm. This is not the sort of thing one does with strangers in most of America, and in most workplaces this is not the sort of thing one does with colleagues.

It’s also the sort of thing that many people would not, in fact, mind or be threatened by. But the boundary is there in case, because that is in fact scary or disruptive for a non-negligible number of people. If you are in the office and a colleague places their open hand on your arm and you knock their hand away and say “don’t touch me,” the fact that “don’t touch your coworkers” is a common-knowledge boundary provides you with something like ready-made social support. You can be reasonably confident that other people will agree that this is not okay, even if those same people might not have gone so far as to object independently, on their own initiative.

(In the ideal, anyway. Harassment still seems rampant; this may be an overly optimistic example and I’m sure there are people reading who can attest to not being supported in just such an objection. I was tempted to make the example more extreme, but when I imagined doing so it was still easy to imagine readers going “nope, lol, I was literally groped and they still told me it was my fault.” I don’t have anything useful to say, except to apologize on behalf of the species Homo Sapiens.)

Another way to say this is that the social boundary is something like a hint, as to what other people will help you prosecute. It’s not a perfect hint, and there’s often imperfect coordination on it, but it’s more like “if X happens and you don’t like it, we will back you up” than it is like “we will object every time X happens.”

This is because X is (usually) a somewhat broad and conservative boundary, like the speed limit. Which means that, for most people, most of the time, there is room to cross it, without actually infringing on the individual’s personal boundary:

A few caveats:

1. As intimated above, in any given domain, there will be some people for whom that in-between space literally does not exist. If society’s boundaries are set such that they’re already inside of your own personal boundaries, then people behaving “normally” according to the rules of the group are already doing things that are not-okay for you, on the regular, as a matter of course. While this essay is not going to focus on that subset of people, I wanted to pause to acknowledge that a) that subset exists, b) it contains a lot of people, in an absolute sense, and c) what’s happening to those people is unpleasant and in many cases morally bad. It’s not that this mismatch isn’t worth an essay—it is. It’s just not the subject of this essay.

2. I suspect some people’s minds will have leapt straight to the (true!) point that many actions which penetrate into that in-between space are something like grooming or testing-the-waters—that they are a prelude to, or a harbinger of, some future not-okay action. This seems straightforwardly correct, to me. Again, I want to focus my attention elsewhere, without denying that this is a thing. It is a thing! But I’m not particularly interested in discussing that thing here, nor in getting into the nitty-gritty of how to tell it apart from the other thing, which is not sinister, and not a prelude to anything Bad. Both categories definitely exist, and I’m interested in focusing only on the subset of actions which the individual in question would stably rate as benign. Speaking of which...

3. For the purposes of my usage here, “benign” is not a label that can be applied to [a violation of the social boundary] absent a specific individual in a specific context. A phrase like “having a pie smushed in your face is a benign boundary violation” is non-valid. The only way to tell that a given social boundary violation is benign is to find out, from the individual, whether it in fact failed to violate their personal boundary. Without an individual to ask, the question “is this benign?” can’t be answered.
   
   Another way to say this is that benign-ness is a property that’s determined by how a given action actually lands, not by how it is intended. And the only person qualified to make that evaluation is the recipient.
   
   Yet another way is to say that if it did, in fact, cross your personal boundary, then it was by definition not benign in the sense intended here.

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That, then, is the category I’m hoping to talk about: actions which, by the individual’s own self-report, non-pressured and endorsed across time, would be considered benign, despite the fact that they cross one of the lines drawn by society-at-large. I think this category exists, and is not small—I don’t know whether we’re in a world that looks more like Possibility 1 below, or more like Possibility 2, but I don’t think the green circle is tiny or non-existent.

Continuing the caveat a little bit:

I predict that nonzero readers will be something-like offended, or perhaps alarmed, that I’m trying to crystallize a concept like “benign boundary violation” at all, since it could e.g. be abused to give cover to those other, worse things.

(Actually, not even “could.” More like “absolutely will be, at a population level.” If the phrase “benign boundary violation” were commonplace, it would definitely be used as a cover, in exactly the same way that “relax, man, it’s just a joke” is used as a cover.)

So why talk about it anyway?

Mainly, because I think that benign boundary violations are super duper important.

(As are jokes! The solution to people abusing the joke-label is not to abolish jokes-as-a-category. People can call something benign when it is not, and often will, for nefarious reasons, but that doesn’t mean that things which are benign don’t exist.)

In my own personal experience, benign boundary violations are a crucial part of me feeling safe, and accepted, and part-of-the-group. They are an essential ingredient of my version of close friendship. There is a very strong correlation between:

[periods of my life in which benign boundary violations were absent]

and

[periods of my life in which I was depressed and anxious and lonesome and alienated].

This also seems to me to be true for many other people that I know (more men/​male-ish folk than women/​female-ish, though also many women in an absolute sense; I would be curious to hear from people in the comments whether others’ impressions differ).

And in my own personal experience, they are an endangered species. They are scarcer now than they were ten years ago, and they were scarcer ten years ago than they were in my childhood (especially in the bluer and lefter parts of our society).

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Here is a short list of some benign boundary violations in my own experience (remember, the fact that they are benign for me does not imply they are generally so):

• Being punched when a Volkswagen Beetle drives by

• Being called “faggot,” affectionately, by my partners, in private

• Being pushed into the pool by my fiancé Logan while all my clothes are on (but not my wallet or phone; they surreptitiously checked)

• Being pelted with water balloons or suddenly assaulted with pillows or Nerf darts

• Having ice dropped down the back of my shirt

• Someone jumping out and yelling “BOO!” at me as I emerge from the bathroom

• Someone taking and using my objects (desk, exercise equipment, toys, Magic decks, books, clothes) without asking

• Someone taking and using small amounts of my money (“I took a $20 from your desk drawer to pay the pizza guy; he couldn’t take a card.”) without asking

• Someone coming up behind me and scratching my back or squeezing my shoulders or tousling my hair

• Being fed a prank food or made to smell a prank horrible smell

• Having an embarrassing story from my past told in front of someone I have a crush on, for the purposes of making me blush in front of that person

• Banter/​countersignaling (being insulted, rejected, and mocked by and in front of friends)

• Being knocked over on a trampoline and then repeatedly bounced such that I can’t find my feet again and keep flailing and floundering on my back

...these are all things which, if someone were to express distress over experiencing, I expect would generally be met with sympathy, solidarity, and support. e.g. if I were to tell a friend that I did not like how my housemate took money out of my desk, it’s quite likely that friend would validate my discomfort, become some level of outraged on my behalf, and say sentences like “yeah, that’s called ‘theft’” or “you don’t have to put up with that crap.”

In other words, while many of the items on the list above are still something-like-inside-the-Overton-window and wouldn’t necessarily generate active pushback by default, they’re definitely the sort of things that are Officially Off Limits, in the same way as driving 74mph in a 65 zone. If you just joined my team at our white-collar workplace three days ago and I push you into the pool with all your clothes on, you will likely not have a hard time making the label “hostile work environment” stick, should you choose to try.

So they are indeed past the social boundary. But they didn’t violate my boundaries.

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As far as I can tell, there are at least three major ways in which the actions above fed my immortal soul:

1. They showed that I was known. By attempting an anticipated-to-be-benign boundary violation (remember, the giver can’t declare it benign, they can only hope), the person who took my money or pushed me into a pool or teasingly insulted me was, at least a little bit, demonstrating that they knew me distinct from their Generic Undifferentiated Cardboard Cutout of a Fellow Society Member. They were making a bet that my line was in a different place than the party line, trying things that they would not try with an unknown human.

2. They showed that I was trusted. By attempting an anticipated-to-be-benign boundary violation, they implicitly demonstrated that, if it turned out not to be benign, they figured we would be able to handle it, and that our relationship would be able to survive it. There’s a combination of “Duncan isn’t made of glass” and “Duncan will not be vindictive or malicious in response, even if this lands poorly” in their estimation of the risk as small-enough-to-be-worth-it.

3. They gave me actual experiences that I want. Experiences that are disapproved-of by the society at large, experiences which I enjoy and miss. I like banter. I like pranks. I like various things which are not appropriate for the 95th-percentile-vulnerable member of our society, but which are appropriate for me because I am not that person. When the social boundary becomes too broad and its enforcement too strong, what you get is something like “no sports allowed, because some people have glass bones,” and sports are good for people who don’t have glass bones.
   
   (Spicy food is good for people who don’t have sensitive palates or irritable bowels; loud music is good for people who don’t have sensory processing disorders; Reese’s cups are good for people who don’t have peanut allergies; etc.)

The problem, of course, is how to get the goods to the people who want and can handle them, without exposing the vulnerable to damage (and, on the meta level, whether to err on the side of caution or incaution, and on the meta-meta level, by how much).

Currently, we seem to be trending both toward wider social boundaries and toward harsher and more explosive intermittent enforcement of those boundaries, which has had the obvious chilling effect on well-intentioned flouting of the nominal rules.

I see various proposals for solving problems like widespread touch deprivation downstream of our personal space boundaries expanding, but they all seem to dismiss a set of costs as not-being-costs, rather than properly weighing and accounting for them.

For example: “Why don’t people just ask you if you’re chill with being hit with water balloons, and then ever after they can hit you with water balloons?”

This is … kind of a solution. It’s plausible that it will end up being the correct tradeoff, vis-a-vis protecting the vulnerable (make everything explicitly opt-in, rather than having the option to opt out).

But it runs afoul of either 1 or 2 above, depending on the details. If a friend sees that I need a hug, and goes in for one, and then suddenly hesitates, and then asks in mouthwords whether I want to be hugged (at which point I, in the middle of my emotional crisis, have to pause to assemble some kind of verbal response)—

I don’t know. It’s … not as good. It’s not as good, because suddenly it has turned from “this is a gift” to “do you want this?” and the latter feels much more like Spending Points or Making An Active Decision. It’s not as good because suddenly it has turned from “I know you, and am confident and secure in the nature of our relationship” to “I do not know you, and am underconfident and insecure.”

Even in the best of cases, where the would-be hugger is not anxious or afraid or worried that I’ll punish them, and is instead motivated purely by a warmhearted desire to not make my day any worse, it’s still an update in the direction of diminished intimacy.

(Not to mention that a) there are a lot of domains in which just asking is punished anyway, and b) a lot of people are not particularly good at expressing themselves verbally, especially in confusing or stressful or high-uncertainty states, which means that as more of the Required Moves become verbal, more people are simply drummed out of the space.)

And I can summon shoulder advisors who are wailing “why can’t we just ask? Why is it so terrible to just ask?” and all I can say is, I’m not saying the cost isn’t worth paying, I’d just like for it to be acknowledged as being a cost, so we can actually try doing the math. We haven’t banned Reese’s from all public spaces, even though this is a hardship for people with peanut allergies, because it saves too few at too high a cost.

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I noticed that the above veered well into defending the category of benign boundary violations, when really I mostly set out to describe it. So, shifting gears.

When I, personally, attempt what I hope will be a benign boundary violation, what I am doing is leaning on my knowledge of the other person as a unique individual, trusting our relationship to be sufficiently-deeply-rooted in good faith to survive a misstep if I make one, and trying to feed them a nutrient that our society specifically does not offer.

(e.g. our society offers martial arts classes, which you can pay for and put into your weekly schedule. It does not offer friendly surprise attacks.)

And I really, really like it when other people do this with me, as well. When they demonstrate that they know me, when they demonstrate that they trust me, and when they offer me something that is increasingly hard to come by.

That’s three love languages in a single insult. Which is a pretty good rate, and that’s pretty much the thesis I wanted to convey.

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This is the part where I would like to have suggestions or recommendations or next actions, but I largely don’t. I didn’t anticipate this essay being nearly as fraught as it felt, when I first set out to write it. I thought that I would just say “sometimes it’s nice to be pushed into the pool,” and explain my three reasons why, and that would be that.

But my shoulder advisors kept getting really nervous, and so here we are, a million hedges and caveats later. It’s possible I’m wrong, and the other version of this essay would’ve been fine, but it’s interesting to me that I felt scared.

In lieu of “what now?” I’d like to say a little more about one of the obstacles that seems to lie between us and (what seems to me to be) a better world. I don’t have a full model of it, but I can at least gesture in its direction.

I once ran an experimental group house that involved some hierarchical structure, such that we would sometimes e.g. levy $5 fines on one another, for small infractions of agreed-upon rules.

However, the $5 fine was approximately the only consequence that we had in the toolkit. If we were to need something larger, there was a vast, empty lack-of-options until we got all the way up to “I guess you can be kicked out of the experiment?”

And, correspondingly, out of your house. Which was of course far too extreme of a response for any of the situations which actually came up, including several which were Too Big For A Symbolic Five-Dollar Fine.

I sense in this something that rhymes with a known problem among victims of abuse, namely that they are often forced to choose between “get no justice whatsoever” and “throw your partner/​parent/​pastor into the meat grinder; destroy their life entirely.”

Faced with this choice, many victims of abuse say nothing, and suffer in silence. They would benefit from something a little more in-between—something short of turning their abuser into an absolute pariah, yet more consequential than a stern look.

In my culture, we are also struggling with questions like “how do we strengthen protections for those who are still receiving malignant boundary violations?” and “what do we do for people whose personal boundaries lie outside the current social boundary, such that they are damaged by behavior that the society more or less explicitly permits?”

However, in my culture, we are not attempting to solve those problems by … hmm … I do not have a less clumsy metaphor, but … “pretending nobody speeds”?

Pretending nobody speeds, but also massively increasing the social penalty for people who are unambiguously caught speeding, such that if you are caught speeding a tenth of the population will all start loudly condemning you for going 74 in a 65, how dare you put the very fabric of our society at risk, you should never be hired by any company that uses cars ever again, et cetera.

(And meanwhile the ten percent of people who pop up to defend you do so by saying stuff like “we should drive EVERY car at ONE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR ALL THE TIME and anyone who doesn’t like it is WEAK and probably a PEDOPHILE and DESERVES WHAT THEY GET” which is not support that most of us want.)

When it comes to boundary violations in particular, it seems to me that the middle ground is evaporating, as social media becomes an ever-more important part of our lives and our careers and approximately everybody weighs in on approximately everything that catches our collective attention and the zeitgeist lurches from one scandal to the next (while still ignoring 99.999% of all scandals).

There’s often no response, in other words, until all of a sudden there is a very LARGE response.

In my culture, there are things which should pretty obviously never be done, which are the metaphorical equivalent of going seventy in a school zone. No one thinks they are okay^[1] and most people would not have an easy time just shrugging them off. Those things get strong punishment with no warnings, just like they do here.

But in my culture, if you do the metaphorical equivalent of going nine over on the highway—

—which is a thing that a supermajority of people have done at some point or other, and which a substantial fraction of people are actively doing at any given time, and which most people will acknowledge is a little sketchy but basically fine, as long as it’s not compounded by bad weather or tailgating or weaving in and out of traffic or whatever—

—if you engage in common, everyday behavior which is genuinely hit-or-miss, and it comes out miss, you get the equivalent of a warning or a small fine, not a 99% chance of nothing and a 1% chance of being fired, canceled, and made a pariah. It certainly goes on your record, such that abusers can’t accumulate warnings with impunity, but it’s not responded-to with the same weapons that we use to respond to someone going seventy in a school zone.

And as a result, people are a little less creeping and terrified.

(Or, to be more accurate, good and ordinary people are less creeping and terrified, and thus the set of people occasionally going nine over isn’t only populated by [ideological nutjobs] and [sociopaths with no impulse control] who weren’t deterred in the first place.)

It’s the difference between someone ruffling your hair in an unwanted fashion and someone, I don’t know, caressing your stomach. There are genuinely a lot of people out there who would enjoy having their hair spontaneously ruffled, and there are a lot more people who at least wouldn’t mind it. Stomach caresses, not so much.

(And in my culture, it is absolutely the case that if someone ruffles your hair and you say “Do not do that; I do not like that” and they do it again, down comes the hammer. Because at that point, they have committed the much more serious offense of acting in direct contradiction of your expressly stated wishes about your bodily autonomy, which is a bright line in the same fashion as ignoring a “no” or a “stop” during sex.)

But if someone is not a serial abuser on their third strike, they don’t have to worry super much about things like “what if I spontaneously ruffle my coworker’s hair and they take it 99th-percentile badly?” They do not have to worry about potentially losing their entire career over it, because someone successfully bailey-and-motte’d it into sexual assault and it blew up on twitter and your company has more important things to spend its social capital on than defending you so they quietly throw you under the bus.

In my culture. Not in this one. In this one, we don’t seem to have very many medium-sized responses left. We have some responses which average out to medium-sized, in that they’re sometimes huge and usually nothing, but that’s not the same thing.

And so sensible people are risking fewer probably-benign violations of the common-knowledge social boundaries, and thus an ever-greater percentage of the violations that do occur are decidedly not benign, and there’s an accelerating feedback loop and as a result I hardly ever get pushed into swimming pools anymore without signing a waiver first.

(And there are also, I suspect, a lot of people with legitimate medium-sized grievances who are going without justice because the only tools they have at their disposal are frowny-face stickers and hand grenades, and the former doesn’t suffice and the latter feels like overkill.)

To be clear: yes, a lack of getting pushed into swimming pools is a fairly small thing, compared to actual serious boundary violations. It’s a price worth paying, if it’s genuinely helping—I happily wore a mask during the pandemic because I do indeed believe that small inconveniences are sometimes worth it to protect other people from Very Bad Things.

But I’m not convinced that it is helping. I’m not convinced that the drying-up of benign boundary violations is actually a side-effect of a real and ongoing improvement in outcomes for the most vulnerable among us, or a real and ongoing reduction in the amount of predatory behavior taking place. I’m not sure those things are even happening, and if they are, I’m not sure that this is part of why.

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Other conversations which are not quite this one, but which are certainly related, and are welcomed in discussion below:

• Okay but how do we strengthen protections for those who are still receiving malignant boundary violations all the time?

• What do we do for people whose personal boundaries lie outside the current social boundary, such that they are constantly being violated by behavior that the society does not object to or prevent?

• Is it actually possible to build a culture of supported opting-out, such that people could afford to be less intense about first transgressions?

• How do you actually distinguish genuinely meant attempts at benign boundary violations from grooming or testing-the-waters or other nefarious things? Can it actually reliably be done, in practice? Can the latter be prevented without necessarily curtailing or extinguishing the former?

• Can the goods of benign boundary violations be goal factored and got some other way?

• etc.

1. ^

   Which means that something like 4% of people will declare them to be okay; we round that to zero.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I think this post was good as something like a first pass.

There’s a large and multi-armed dynamic in modern Western liberal society that is a kind of freezing-in-place, as more and more moral weight gets attached to whether or not one is consciously avoiding harm in more and more ways.

For the most part, this is a positive process (and it’s at the very least well-intentioned). But it’s not as strategic as it could be, and substantially less baby could be thrown out with the bathwater.

This was an attempt to gesture at some baby that, I think, is being thrown out with the bathwater. I think it succeeded, in that a lot of people were like “huh! Wow! Never realized that someone might like X, and I agree that if you like X it would be good if there were ways for you to get it, so long as those who don’t like X can continue avoiding X.”

But I don’t think that it did much more than make some people go “huh.” I don’t see many other people talking more about which socially-frowned-upon things are actually okay for them personally, and thus normalizing them, and thus setting up a counterpressure against boundary creep. I don’t see many people acknowledging, or doing anything with, the insight that (metaphorically) we shouldn’t ban sports just because some people have glass bones.

In particular, I would have liked to see, and hope to someday see in the future:

• Theorizing as to how a society could have smarter boundaries, rather than simply making the boundaries wider and wider each time it realizes that some people are still being harmed

• Direct phenomenological reports from people doing things like CoZE and exploring what happens when they tread near social boundaries vs. near personal boundaries

• More concrete suggestions from the people whose personal boundaries are already being violated under social norms (or just more reports from those people in general; the ones who spoke up below all got strong upvotes from me).

I think the essay small-f failed in that it was so reasonable that it maybe didn’t spark enough controversy? Or not controversy per-se, that’s not a thing to Goodhart on. But I think it didn’t leave enough of a sense of open dangling conversation to cause people to continue talking about it and write their own nearby posts, etc.

Which maybe they wouldn’t’ve anyway; maybe this just isn’t that interesting of a problem to most people. But I suspect that this is actually quite a large problem for quite a large number of people, and what’s actually going on is that I failed to connect these thoughts to [the thing that’s draining half of the light from their lives]. Among other things, this is an essay about the epidemic of touch-starvation that is rampant in our culture, and it didn’t manage to recruit any of the people who care about that, for instance.

I’m very glad I wrote it, I just wish it were … more.

[Linda Linsefors]

I’m on both sides of this issue. In some domanes my persoal boundary is way inside the soicially accepted one, and if I don’t get “benign boundary violations” I get low level depressed. But in other domanes my personal boundary is way outside the socially accepted one. There have been many occcations where I’ve told people that they crossed my boudary and they have refused to adjust or even not belived me at all.

My personally prefered social norm solution to this would be:

• Forgive first violations, but also make sure they learn form thier msistake. If they seem uninteressted in learning, maybe be less forgiving.

• Severly punich people who don’t back off when told to.

• Convice everyone that there exist peopel who are radicall diffrent from them, or something. I’m so fed up with not beeing belive when I explain how I’m diffrent. (This is not a problem amoing LWers.)

I can survive boundary violation if I can trust that people back off when I tell them to. In the current culture, if somone violates my boundary I often start to panic, or just run off, becaus I don’t know if I will be respected or even belived if I tell them to stop. More often than not, telling people to stop just escalates the situation.

(If you run into me in reall live and worry about crossing my boudaries, just let me know that you can respect a “no” and I’ll be fine.)

---

Another thing that bothers me about our current consent culture is that there is so much focus on verbal concent, and almost no acknolagement of other ways to comunicate consent. Verbal consent is a powerfull tool, but it is also very inprecise. If you ask if you can ask me a personal question, how personal are we talking here? If I ask for a hug, what level of intimacy are we talking about? We could spend 15 minutes discussing exact what kind of hug, but most likely we would get nowhere.

On the other hand. I have danced contact improvisation for may years. This dance involves a lot of touch. And becasue the dance is compleetly imrpovised (we sometims role around on the floor, inclugin roling over other people) there is no naural boundaries in the dance format. Also, usually we don’t talk on the dance floor. You don’t even ask peopel to dance with you. Instead you just find others on the dance floor and from there everything is comunicated non verbally.

Not verbal consent is acctually not very hard, even with people you don’t know. You might already instinctivly know how to do it. For conversation it works like this: You start by asking a “small talk” level question. If the other person engages in your conversation (i.e. gives more than the most minimal answer) this is consent to keep talking. After that you slowly up the level of personall-ness of the conversation, while paying attention to the other person. As long as they match or go above your level you can keep going. If they start to avoid your questions, then you hit the boundary, this means you should back off a bit.

For touch you start with some light touch (maybe you need to get the blunt verbal consent for this). If they respond to your touch (e.g. squese back, or in other ways lean into your touch) then this is concent to continue this level of touch. Now you can increase the level of touch slowly while paying attention to consent.

If a person give no response at all to your toch (netiher avoiding or leaning into your touch) then this is not concent. This is no information. Maybe they are super unconfortable and froze. Maybe they didn’t notice your touch. Maybe they did notice and even liked it but don’t know how to respond. In this situation you should either back of or ask verbally.

Noticing other peoples boundaries is a skill that you can train. But I think just knowing that this is a thing you can do, helps a lot. I definatly met people who don’t seem to know that they are supposed to pay attention to this.

If you are att all unccertan at you skills of noticing non verbal consent: Make sure you are not allways the one increasing the level of intimacy. Ever now an then you should puse at the curent level and let the other person take the next step. And if they don’t you shoul’d either. Another test you can do is to lower the level of intimacy and see if the other person raises it back up.

---

Meeting people who are skilled at non-verbal consent i great. It’s provides a similar safety to hanging out with somoene who knows me well.

When I toch someone who is experienced in contact impov (or have similar skils from elswhere) I can feel that I am safe. I can feel that they notice me and I know that they will not cross my phyical boundaries.

I have had a similar experience when talking to someone trained in circling or other authentic relating. I know I don’t have to tell them where my conversational boundaries are. I can notice them noticing me and adjusting to me from moment to moment.

[johnswentworth]

Convince everyone that there exist people who are radically different from them, or something. I’m so fed up with not being believed when I explain how I’m different.

I’d note that there is a big difference between deeply believing that other people are radically different from me, versus believing people when they tell me how specifically they’re different. The former was hammered into me by experience from a pretty age—my mind is a pretty-obviously-poor-model of other peoples’ minds, so I definitely expect on a gut level that other people are radically different from me.

But most people are pretty delusional about themselves in general, and the ways-in-which-they-are-unusual are included in that. We have more evidence than others about our own peculiarities, but also much more severe biases in perceiving our own peculiarities. So if someone tells me that they’re unusual in some particular way, that’s not necessarily strong evidence. It mostly depends on priors about how common it is for people to think they’re unusual in that way, and how much that correlates with the actual trait.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I agree that it’s not necessarily strong evidence, but it should in most cases focus your attention pretty heavily on a narrow subset of [hypotheses which would tend to produce that claim], one of which is usually [that claim being true].

You probably already agree with that, but I wanted to spell it out.

[johnswentworth]

Yeah, it’s a really good example of getting just enough bits to privilege the hypothesis.

[Linda Linsefors]

I was mostly thinking of situations where someone thinks that if something is not a problem for them, it can’t possibly be a problem for anyone else.

If everyone have an above zero prior on “this other person might be very diffrent from me”, that would be a great improvment.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Strong upvote because:

• Forgive first violations, but also make sure they learn from their mistake. If they seem uninterested in learning, maybe be less forgiving.

• Severely punish people who don’t back off when told to.

• Convince everyone that there exist people who are radically different from them, or something. I’m so fed up with not being believed when I explain how I’m different. (This is not a problem among LWers.)

is almost exactly the Duncan-culture solution as well.

[Linda Linsefors]

From what I’ve read of your facebook posts, I think I would be happy living in Duncan culture.

[johnswentworth]

For example: “Why don’t people just ask you if you’re chill with being hit with water balloons, and then ever after they can hit you with water balloons?”

My college had an Official Solution to this which worked pretty well in practice: the No-Prank List. Someone who generally didn’t want to be pranked (or included in various other traditions, like being thrown into a fountain on one’s birthday) would put their name on the No-Prank List. This avoids people who generally want to avoid such things being hit with water balloons, without spoiling the surprise for those who do.

One interesting implication of the empirical success of the no-prank list: in practice, peoples’ boundaries are pretty well-captured by ~one dimension. (People were allowed to put arbitrary freeform conditions on the No Prank List, but IIRC these rarely mattered in practice, and could be pretty well summarized as “pranks yes” or “pranks no”.)

[Linda Linsefors]

The one LW community weekend I attended had stickers you could put on your name-tag one for people who welcomed hugs and another one for people who welcomed unsolicited feedback. It was great!

[Caperu_Wesperizzon]

That’s an interesting perspective.

At this point, I’d concluded all violations are mainly challenges. Since most people are socially skilled enough to smell weakness from a mile away, they know when they can assert their status by conspicuously disregarding your presumable boundaries, thus advertising, to you and to any bystanders, that you have no credible means to defend yourself and are therefore entirely at their mercy. What I’ve found the hardest to learn is that merely asking someone to respect your boundaries may well be itself a violation of their boundaries (“Noöne replies to me like that!”), which they most assuredly will defend, by escalating the abuse to prove the point that you’re no match for them and have no choice but to yield, unconditionally, forever. Calling abusers abusers offends them.

That’s part of the fight. Bullying works by normalizing the idea that there’s nothing morally wrong with harming the victim. After all, they deserve it for being a victim, rather than a survivor, don’t they?

[MSRayne]

This is how I intuitively perceive it as well. I feel like to some extent this is a masculine versus feminine kind of difference. Masculine people tend to see boundary violations as potentially benign (perhaps due to not feeling as unsafe generally?) whereas I think feminine people tend to see them as basically malign most of the time. I possibly overuse the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine”—maybe I’m really talking about “bold” versus “cautious,” though honestly I am not sure there’s a big difference, given gender norms across history and culture—but I intuitively associate these patterns with them.

Taking the “this has to do with masculinity” view: boundary violations like this can be both challenges and intimacy-building—between men. If you fail to respond adequately you decrease the respect of your comrades (because you can’t take it like a man or whatever) and thus by proxy decrease intimacy. If you succeed in the challenge, you become accepted more as part of the gang. It’s hazing, essentially.

When women, or males who are not initiated in the culture of manhood, are involved, it no longer has the positive, intimacy-building aspect—instead it’s just threatening and dangerous. This is probably part of where concepts like “toxic masculinity” come from—an inability of people on opposite sides of this divide between “boundary violations are often benign” and “boundary violations are rarely benign” to understand or appropriately respect one another.

[ambigram]

If you fail to respond adequately you decrease the respect of your comrades (because you can’t take it like a man or whatever) and thus by proxy decrease intimacy.

Hmm if you lose respect for responding wrongly then it doesn’t really seem like a benign boundary violation anymore? The way I see it, a boundary violation can be considered benign only if you are capable of saying no, and the other person is genuinely capable of accepting and respecting a no. Otherwise, it’s more like coercion. (And the violation shouldn’t have very negative consequences for the person, based on what can be anticipated. )

If your friend takes your things without asking and you tell them to stop doing it because you don’t like it, and they apologise and stop doing it, then that was a benign boundary violation. If they stop but then go around telling others that you are selfish, or they stop and then complain about how they always have to give in to your demands, or they ignore you and tell you that best friends share everything, then that’s not benign at all. You can’t really tell from the boundary violating action though, only from their response when you say no.

People who are more powerful (e.g. physically stronger, higher social status) are more capable of saying no because the consequences of saying no are less severe for them. In that sense, things that seem like benign boundary violations are more likely to be benign for them, so they tend to see it as benign (and may not realise that this is not the case for others). I don’t think it’s benign just for the masculine though, because it works the other way around as well. If the person who is violating the boundaries is responsible about it (e.g. sensitive to potential power imbalances), it can also work. Also, boundary violations don’t have to be aggressive (?). Here are some examples that are milder/​more feminine that I think also count as benign boundary violations (if done properly):

• affectionate nicknames (For a female version of the faggot example, I had a schoolmate who called people “bitch” only if she considered them a friend, e.g. greeting them with “Hey bitch!”)

• playing with/​braiding someone’s hair without asking

• adjusting someone’s collar when you see the tag sticking out

• giving someone very sour candy without telling them that beforehand

• untying someone’s shoelaces (making sure they notice it before standing up so they don’t accidentally trip)

• asking “Can I borrow your pen pretty pretty please? Just 5 seconds! Thanks!” and taking it before you hear them say yes

• asking sensitive questions like salary or asking a woman for her age

• playful emotional manipulation like making puppy eyes at someone to persuade them to share their snack with you (only works if the other person is capable of saying no if they genuinely don’t want to do it, and you are capable of truly accepting the rejection, and both parties understand that it’s play)

[MSRayne]

Most of those examples sound fundamentally aggressive to me. I think that I just don’t believe any boundary violation is benign. And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up. These violations are tests of your willingness to risk resentment in order to protect your boundaries, and thus of your strength /​ lack of need for people to not resent you, disguised as “benign” or friendly behaviors. So yeah, maybe it’s more about power dynamics, and the reason I associate it with masculinity is that in most cultures in most contexts, men are likely (and expected) to have more power than women.

[ambigram]

Oh I think I see what you mean. If there’s always a cost to saying no, then all boundary violations are basically threats and hence aggressive.

And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up.

I recognize this, or at least something like it—it’s like when people ask for your opinions. People say that there is no wrong answer and that you should say what you really think, but I always felt that that wasn’t true. There are wrong answers, and you will know that they are wrong because people will respond negatively to them (e.g. they like you less afterwards because your opinion differed from theirs). People don’t really want to hear what you have to say; they just want validation.

To avoid saying the wrong thing, I ended up trying to figure out what people were hoping to hear (e.g. based on how they phrase their questions), so that I could tell them what they wanted me to say. I didn’t even notice that habit until one day when someone asked me a question and I couldn’t tell what they wanted—they were completely blank to me. I ended up giving an answer truer to myself, and was expecting a negative response. Yet they didn’t show disapproval, and more surprisingly, neither did they show approval. They really just did want my answer!

The experience showed me that something I thought was a trait of all humans was actually more like an attribute that varies based on the individual. Some people just want validation, but others genuinely want to hear what you have to say. That changes the game, because it means it’s not actually my job to say what people want to hear, it’s just how some people prefer to be dealt with. I can always keep my true thoughts aside for people who want to hear them.

Some time after, I shared my opinion with someone who responded dismissively. Yet days later, they asked me a question that showed that they were thinking about what I’d said. I learned that just because someone responds negatively, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are upset with me and want me to be different; sometimes it’s just a natural response to hearing something you don’t like or even just something new. What’s interesting is that had I continued saying what I thought others would want to hear, I wouldn’t have realised that people are ok with listening to what I have to say.

There are things I tend to avoid because they weren’t good experiences in the past and when I think of doing them now, it just feels like a bad idea. Sometimes when I’m with the right people or in the right context though, my mind realizes that there is a very low likelihood of something terrible happening, it’s just my heart that’s convinced that something awful will happen. But when my heart wants something badly enough, the risk becomes worth it and so I try it even though it feels scary. So far, it’s paid off every time. Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way I hope for, but then again nothing terrible happened either.

I think the difference is that where I used to pay attention to just my negative experiences, I now also pay attention to when there isn’t a negative response, both for my myself and when watching others interact. I notice that the ratio is different from what I’d always thought it was (1:0), because the people I’m with are different, because people change, and because I pay attention to a broader slice of reality. That’s why to feels safer to try (with the right people). (There’s also that I’m more capable now, and can therefore cope better with anything that might happen.)

I think it’s quite interesting how sometimes you can’t tell if your beliefs are wrong unless you are willing to do things that past experiences say you shouldn’t, and create opportunities to prove your beliefs false. It’s like confirmation bias, except I’d never thought to apply it to personal/​emotional experiences.

I don’t know, can’t know what your experiences are like—I couldn’t even understand Caperu_Wesperizzon’s and your comments. I want to say though, that I think people who are nice and good with boundaries do exist, and I hope that you get to meet them someday.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I think a miscommunication is happening here, and I think it’s because I used the word “boundary” for two different things (because that’s how it’s used out in the wild).

MSRayne seems to be trying to communicate that any violation of their personal boundary is non-benign. This is not a claim that the OP disagrees with; in fact, it’s a claim that the OP specifically makes.

I think ambigram is trying to talk about violations of the social boundary, and pointing out that those may very well be benign. MSRayne is saying “no, not in my experience,” but afaict MSRayne has also self-identified as being in the set of [people whose personal boundaries already lie outside of the social boundary, such that even things which do not violate the social boundary are already violating their personal boundary].

[MSRayne]

I think I don’t understand the difference between social and personal boundaries. Like, I read the post, I intellectually recognize the existence of this difference, but I have never noticed social boundaries, only my own personal ones. Presumably because my own are more strict, as you said. At some point I expect I must have absorbed a lot of them from the social milieu—but my social milieu growing up was television and books, and I deeply learned “avoid anything that looks like a situation on TV that made me cringe”, among other things.

[ambigram]

MSRayne is saying “no, not in my experience,” but afaict MSRayne has also self-identified as being in the set of [people whose personal boundaries already lie outside of the social boundary, such that even things which do not violate the social boundary are already violating their personal boundary].

Yes I’d read about this in the other comment but I think it didn’t really register until I saw MSRayne’s reply above.

The reply was enough for something to click in my head, possibly because it was a more concrete explanation, but your explanation made the misunderstanding more explicit to me, so thanks!

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Separately,

And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up.

This is simply and straightforwardly false. Different people live in different worlds. I make no claim about what percentage of people live in the same world as MSRayne; it could plausibly be as high as 90%, given everything I have seen of humans and human society.

But it is absolutely not a universal, in the way that MSRayne’s experience has led them to legitimately believe.

[MSRayne]

I don’t like this “different worlds” thing. It looks like a copout to me. “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Either I’m right or I’m wrong, after all. A claim about the world is either true or it is false, and I wish to believe it is true if it is true, and that it is false if it is false. Either people’s opinion of me consistently lowers slightly when I say no to them or it doesn’t.

That said, that’s a great post. I’ve read it before but forgot about it. Particularly when he says “I don’t think of myself as clearly having a ‘type’, but people I date tend to turn out similar in dimensions I didn’t expect when I first met them.” That is actually true for me. I’ve never “dated” anyone but people I get crushes I almost invariably find out later are drug addicts, which is… concerning.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

It is not the case that my opinion of people lowers when they say no to me (in many cases I can notice it unambiguously rising).

It is also not the case that the people around me consistently lower their opinion of others (including myself) when those others say no.

But I can’t speak to your experience, and whether you’re correctly perceiving a different thing happening to/​around you, or whether you’re misperceiving something. I default to trusting that the thing you report is, in fact, happening, and it’s just … different, from what happens to/​around me.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I think that the world you describe is true for you, and for many, but I just … I just live in a different one.

[benwr]

A thing I sort-of hoped to see in the “a few caveats” section:

* People’s boundaries do not emanate purely from their platonic selves, irrespective of the culture they’re in and the boundaries set by that culture. Related to the point about grooming/​testing-the-waters, if the cultural boundary is set at a given place, people’s personal boundaries will often expand or retract somewhat, to be nearer to the cultural boundary.

[MSRayne]

Haven’t finished the post yet, just reading the list of boundary violations that are benign to you, but I just have to say right now, holy excrement, absolutely none of those seem like they would be benign to me under any circumstances no matter how well I know someone! Like, just reading the list made me feel intensely uncomfortable.

I suspect that for me the concept of “benign boundary violations” essentially doesn’t exist; my boundaries are super-strict. That said, in some areas I do have boundaries that are far less restrictive than societal norms, but they’re mainly on the mental plane, rather than regarding physical behaviors. I have lots of other stuff to say about boundaries but I’ll edit and continue this comment after I’ve read the whole post.

Okay so… wow. Reading this post—just a bunch of text! - made me feel physically uncomfortable in much the same way I feel if someone tries to touch me. That never happens. To me it seems like all interactions with another person are opt-in, and the baseline should be “leave me completely alone, don’t touch me, don’t speak to me, don’t even acknowledge my presence.” I find basically all human interaction overwhelming and more or less boundary violating, and I didn’t realize until reading this post that my experience of life could be described that way. I mean, I knew I was unusually introverted, but I never thought to describe it in terms of boundaries.

On the topic of touch in particular: I was raised by emotionally abusive and neglectful parents, and I never experienced any kind of affection growing up. I was also (and still am) extremely isolated from other people. So I never learned to feel comfortable with touch or most other kinds of “informal” interaction. The only times I can remember my parents touching me were all unpleasant or even subtly violating. To others I probably seem somewhat stiff and overly formal, because I don’t know the social protocols (other people’s boundaries, I guess) and I wouldn’t feel good about doing things that seem normal to others but seem like boundary violations to me. So: to me, the idea that there exist benign boundary violations is… so overwhelmingly unintuitive, that I would never have thought of it. (Or, more accurately, I’ve thought of them many times, but only as something intrinsically sexual and kinky. Yes, even stuff like the ones you listed. And that’s a whole ’nother bucket of worms.)

I’ve been thinking for a long time about ethics and how people ought to treat one another etc, and I usually do it in terms of something like what you’re calling boundaries, only I assume they all would in an ideal world be explicitly negotiated: people say when they meet what all their boundaries are in all the relevant domains of life (which I’d like to enumerate), or even like trade sheets of paper on which all those things are written, and agree to respect one another’s boundaries. And of course if something comes up that wasn’t in the relationship contract, it is negotiated right then and there by asking, NEVER guessing.

That way all that frightening, confusing, complicated, implicit human emotion and relationship stuff that I don’t understand could be made explicit and easy for me to navigate with no uncertainty (and I am extremely, indeed probably pathologically, risk-averse, which may be related): just follow written rules! Even then, though, I probably wouldn’t do many things (like what’s in your list) that people accept. And benign boundary violations would not exist and be totally alien and unheard of in that ideal world of mine, since they rely on guessing which I Do Not Do, Ever, and it’s hard for me to intuitively imagine being someone who does do that.

When you said that the loss of these benign boundary violations is a loss of human intimacy… well, I’ve never in my life had human intimacy of any kind, don’t understand it, and am honestly frightened enough by it, apparently, that just reading this made my skin crawl a little bit. I guess I’m in a really high upper percentile of sensitivity… I don’t know what to do about this, but it’s probably important and it’s almost certainly damaging my life in some way. Thanks for inducing me to notice this in this way.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

(I don’t have a proper, substantive response to this comment yet, but I wanted to note that I very much appreciate it and am grateful you took the time to write it in this depth and detail. Strong upvote.)

[Caperu_Wesperizzon]

To me it seems like all interactions with another person are opt-in, and the baseline should be “leave me completely alone, don’t touch me, don’t speak to me, don’t even acknowledge my presence.” I find basically all human interaction overwhelming and more or less boundary violating, and I didn’t realize until reading this post that my experience of life could be described that way.

Is it just me or does this policy effectively leave no way to opt in?

If noöne can interact with you without violating your boundaries, only boundary violators will interact with you—an asshole filter.

[MSRayne]

Well, what I said was something of an exaggeration. There are acceptable means of interaction but I get “saturated” really quickly and want to get away after that.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I additionally wonder if you’ve read, and would be interested in your commentary on, meadow theory, as it relates to the above.

Especially:

That way all that frightening, confusing, complicated, implicit human emotion and relationship stuff that I don’t understand could be made explicit and easy for me to navigate with no uncertainty (and I am extremely, indeed probably pathologically, risk-averse, which may be related): just follow written rules!

… though obviously you have no obligation to read or respond.

[MSRayne]

Sorry I didn’t respond before, I didn’t notice your second reply somehow!

I just read the meadow theory post, and tbh, I find it quite opaque and it’s unclear what you’re trying to say. You started with a metaphor without really clearly expressing what it’s a metaphor for, and it has that “Eliezer using colorful pseudo-zen stories to try to sound deep and impressive so people will respect him more” energy which always irks me a bit (and which I have noticed others in this community have semi-subconsciously learned to mimic for follow-the-leader social credit points, which also irks me a bit). I basically agree with ambigram’s comment, in other words.

That said, I feel as if there is some value in it. I’m just… really not sure what. I can see why you think it’s relevant to that specific quote from me, but I’m not sure what to say about that. If I had to guess, the point here is that you think I’m (to use what I understood of the symbols in the post) not running around enough because I’m too worried about running into posts due to my being (or believing I am) comparatively more “blinded” than other people and not having a healthy parent /​ internalized parental image to point them out to me?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

My sense was more “MSRayne has run into various posts, for a variety of reasons including people misleading them about where the posts are, and this is why it’s extremely sensible that they want very clear and unambiguous maps from other people about where those other people’s posts/​boundaries are.”

[MSRayne]

Ah. Yes. It’s fun when your parent who protects you from posts, and the posts themselves, are the exact same entity. Growing up like that has probably permanently damaged my mental health and ability to function properly in human society, since everything that for them would be a surefire predictor of danger is totally innocuous in the majority of other people. My prior for humans is “narcissist pretending to be kind in order to get something out of me.”

Ah, and now I see what you meant about worlds. The thing is, the fact that we have differing life experience doesn’t actually provide me any evidence that I’m wrong. I’m not sure what evidence that I’m wrong there would even look like; my paranoia could explain away any amount of it.

I need to be careful though. Take anything I say about my own psychology with several grains of salt—it changes with my mood and everything I say about myself is a conjecture due to having basically no idea what is actually going on below the surface of my own brain most of the time. It’s entirely possible that I don’t automatically assume people are narcissists out to get me, but just think that I assume that when I’m already primed with the idea of paranoia. This is where I go into spirals.

[ambigram]

I find the terminology confusing because asking for more “benign boundary violations” sounds like wanting strangers to do things that breach social boundaries that are not personal boundaries, yet the examples refer to friends and partners, not strangers. It doesn’t make sense to say these are examples of “benign boundary violations” for close relationships though. Boundaries for friends are different for boundaries for strangers, so such behavior wouldn’t be considered boundary violations.

I think of it differently: within any relationship, there is a space that you are generally allowed to explore without first asking for explicit consent. (“Allowed to explore” meaning that mistakes are tolerated.) You still need to negotiate your boundaries within this space, but it’s done via informed guesses, non-verbal cues or slow escalation, rather than directly asking someone for their answer.

When someone tries an interaction (e.g. ruffling your hair), there are two levels to look at:

1. Is it ok that they explored that interaction space, e.g. are you ok with them trying friendly physical touch?

2. Are you ok with the action e.g. are you ok with having your hair ruffled?

Being too explicit when asking for someone’s consent implies that you don’t consider the action to lie within the permitted exploration space for the relationship, and therefore that you think that your relationship is more distant (like how you would preface a personal question with “Can I ask you a personal question?” for a stranger but not a friend). Daring to try something that violates social norms (e.g. ruffling someone’s hair) implies that you think you are in a close enough relationship to justify the attempt, even if turns out that the other person doesn’t like it. If it is indeed a close enough relationship, the other person can always accept the attempt while rejecting the specific action.

---

I think a typical way of handling individuals who have needs that are violated by social norms would carving out spaces for people with different needs, like having quiet carriages on trains, or providing vegetarian options on a menu. We can also be more accepting towards people who try to carve out their own spaces. For example, if someone needs alone time to recharge and thus chooses to sit separately from the group, the group accepts this rather than complaining about anti-social behavior.

[MSRayne]

This seems very reasonable to me. This post and the whole conversation has been an eye opener for me, because I never realized that other people had porous boundaries—mine are rock solid and super strict. For instance I would never have independently come up with the idea of “exploration space”—for me, in all of my relationships, there is exactly none. No guessing. Only asking. It would not have occurred to me that there are people—indeed, apparently the majority of people—for whom this is not the case! It’s rather mind-boggling. But then, I’ve never understood human intimacy and always been extremely ambivalent about it, so it makes sense that I wouldn’t have picked up on things like this—I’ve never experienced any kind of interpersonal intimacy at all and tend to actively avoid it.

[DanielFilan]

Interestingly AFAICT Australian culture has more inter-personal benign boundary violations than US culture as described in this post (e.g. calling your friends words that are unprintable in this forum), and also strict legal enforcement of speed limits, COVID rules, etc.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Maybe what I thought was autism was actually australianism.

[Bucky]

There’s a theory of humor called benign violation theory.

The BVT claims that humor occurs when three conditions are satisfied: 1) something threatens one’s sense of how the world “ought to be”, 2) the threatening situation seems benign, and 3) a person sees both interpretations at the same time.

I think your description of pranks etc. fits in nicely with this—you even chose the same words to describe it so maybe you’re already aware?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Yeah, I was hoping to catch a little resonance there.

[tcheasdfjkl]

This reads as a rewrite of (some parts of?) the punch bug post (which I didn’t like at the time) with several years’ more wisdom. I really appreciate the careful precise delineation of the exact things you do and don’t mean; I think this works very well here.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

To be clear, I think I have zero percent shifted my sense of, like, what’s good and healthy, or what society is doing to people, or what the tradeoffs are, or whatever, since punch bug. I haven’t updated any of the underlying models (e.g. I reread punch bug and don’t think any of the sections are wrong). To the extent that you’re seeing added wisdom, I would guess it’s mostly in being more skilled at not running afoul of people’s triggers.

[blacktrance]

Besides the scope of a person’s boundaries, there’s also variance in how bad a boundary violation feels. Those of us who experience boundary violations as particularly negative might prefer others not to try to find benign violations, even if the violator is well-intentioned and sincerely promises to never do that specific thing again. For these people, would-be violators’ fear of punishment is a feature. The same goes for people unlikely to experience a benign violation because their gap between social and personal boundaries is small.

[Richard_Kennaway]

Besides individual variations, where the boundaries are also depends hugely on what relationship currently exists between the parties, and on the social context of the moment.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I’ve noticed a scattering of commentary both here and elsewhere to the effect that this is a fixed or improved version of In Defense of Punch Bug.

And while quite I’m glad that people find it less triggering or more responsibly crafted or less controversial or whatever, and while I agree that the two essays play in overlapping spaces (along with Invalidating Imaginary Injury), it feels pretty important to me that they be understood to be about different things.

The claim of Benign Boundary Violations, in a paragraph:

Society sets cautious/​conservative boundaries, relative to most people (but NOT all), which means that for most people (but NOT all) there’s space between society’s boundaries and their own personal boundaries, and playing around in that space is deeply nourishing for many people. It’s important (for many) to feel alive and seen and touched and interacted-with in the space outside of your personal boundaries, and not feel like there’s a ten-foot bubble of cringing caution separating you from all the other monkeys.

The claim of In Defense of Punch Bug, in a paragraph:

There is a level of boundary violation (of your real, actual, personal boundaries, not merely of the social boundary beyond your personal one) that is healthy, and it is greater than zero. Too much boundary violation, and you take real damage and become traumatized, but too little, and you atrophy and get the socio-emotional equivalent of wild autoimmune disorders.

The overlap between the essays is something like:

If someone treats you in a way that is appropriate to treat an average/​unremarkable member of society, and thereby accidentally and unknowingly violates some unstated boundary that you have, or triggers some unusual sensitivity, this person has done nothing wrong and is not morally culpable (the first time). Expecting others to pre-guess and preemptively conform to unusual sensitivities is unsustainable on the societal level, and punishing people for failing to do it is approximately as bad as knowingly transgressing an explicit boundary.

[romeostevensit]

Cultures without slagging are somewhat unpleasant to me, they are an important form of roughhouse playing that helps people construct and maintain boundaries. In the same way that I expect children physically restrained from physical play with one another, including wrestling etc, to have social autoregulation problems as adults.

[Dagon]

I’d love to see a top-level post on this, with a few examples more specific than “kids today are coddled and weak” (which I don’t know if you’re saying but a lot of non-LW people have said). I had a really unpleasant time in early grades, before I found my clique of nerds in high school, and I’d love to hear recommendations of what parts of that experience should be preserved for others.

Based on my experiences, I tend to believe that “consent” in roughhousing and verbal put-downs, especially for pre-teen children (though young adulthood for some), is impossible—some participants are mostly victims, and they don’t have a way to opt out.

I do see the point that a whole lot of things (and people) in life are unpleasant and unavoidable, and it’s better for most to learn coping strategies early rather than being unprepared. At early ages, I learned mostly avoidance and anger, but got more sophisticated later. I hope many would have the support and more diverse social experiences to learn better responses earlier, but it’s hard for me to recommend it.

Maybe this is just another case of avoiding typical mind fallacy and recognizing that one size does not fit all. I’m happy to be reminded that a somewhat adversarial culture is considered a good thing by some.

[romeostevensit]

I think consent can be obtained often, but also if only the skilled version of something is allowed then de facto kids aren’t allowed to do it.

[MondSemmel]

A corollary: if only the skilled version of something is allowed, then learning the skill is de facto not allowed.

[green_leaf]

Can you think of some specific examples of an important kind of physical play where the consent of the other kid can’t be obtained explicitly (if that’s what you have in mind)?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I can’t think of any examples where consent cannot be obtained explicitly (barring things like, the person is currently in a state where they’re not capable of being verbal or processing verbal communication, or whatever).

The point is that there is a cost associated with obtaining explicit verbal consent. I think that it’s entirely plausible that that is, nevertheless, exactly the way to go—that this is the right distribution of costs, to protect people who are otherwise vulnerable.

But I don’t think we can actually do the math unless we actually weigh the costs and take them into account. I think a certain kind of person thinks that explicit verbal communication is costless, and tends to typical-mind about this, and thereby not validate its costly nature for People Unlike Themselves (of whom there are a lot).

Roughhousing-in-general is an example of the sort of place where, for a lot of humans and probably a majority (and probably a supermajority of males), obtaining explicit consent à la “wanna have a pillow fight?” is notably less nourishing than picking up a pillow and swinging away.

[green_leaf]

I agree (even though I would always err on the side of asking). I see three options:

1. Starting right away with a pillow fight. This has a potential of turning out to be highly uncomfortable/​emotionally hurtful to a kid who doesn’t want to be suddenly hit with a pillow.

2. Initiating an epsilon big stimulus, and seeing if there is a positive or a negative feedback (and then continue either in a positive or a negative feedback loop). This could emotionally hurt a kid who doesn’t want even epsilon big probes without asking (even though not in case of a pillow fight, probably).

3. Asking first.

4. Giving the hypercomputer to Visser Three after all, since humans apparently can’t even have a pillow fight without emotionally hurting each other in some way

(Also, I’m not a consequentialist, so I wouldn’t resolve this by considering the utility lost by asking and comparing it to the utility gained by being cautious.)

[MSRayne]

I would never have considered that verbal consent has a cost. It’s just something totally outside my world model up to now. I guess I’m one of those people who typical-minds. The fact is, though, I tend to actively dislike and not want to be around the kind of people who would have trouble with that—or indeed, the kind of people who would just pick up a pillow and hit me with it without asking first! This probably relates to the fear /​ disgust /​ hatred of masculinity I had (was indoctrinated with by the media?) as a child. Funny how everything is connected...

[MondSemmel]

Concerning your final questions, in response to what could be done:

If we were in a future with augmented reality (as in, people wear smart glasses or something), and people had accurate self-images of their personal boundaries, then those people could make their boundaries visible in that augmented reality.

So if I wanted to depict large boundaries, I could choose to look visibly spiky, like a sea urchin; whereas if I wanted to indicate small boundaries, I could choose something very fluffy instead.

In other words, if the problem is that we all have the equivalent of invisible auras, and so people can’t tell how those look without probing them in ways that risk rejection or reproach, then one solution is to make those boundaries (and their feedback to interaction) as visible and expressive and reactive as possible. Transform them in a way that allows a Gears-level understanding of them.

[ambigram]

Not really a response, just something I thought of while reading this comment:

The obvious solution to people having different and unclear boundaries is to make those boundaries clearer, such as by asking for explicit consent, or by having a No-Prank List mentioned in johnswentworth’s comment. Stating boundaries too clearly may lead to misuse though, but I suppose it does also make bad actors more obvious, because they can no longer hide behind the excuse of ignorance.

Nonetheless, even if we do somehow manage to convey most of our boundaries (e.g. via AR glasses), it would be highly unlikely that we’d be able to communicate all our boundaries all the time. Boundaries are sensitive to context and may change from moment to moment. We may not even realise where our boundaries lie until someone violates it. It would be impractical to find ways to make our boundaries clear enough that accidental boundary violations no longer happen. Worse still, if we managed to clearly communicate the simpler boundaries (where the consequence of violating boundaries are often lesser) but not the more complex boundaries (where consequences tend to be more severe), how would we get to practice negotiating ambiguous boundaries? There won’t be any simple cases to safely experiment and learn from!

Thus, the more practical solution would be to improve people’s abilities to negotiate ambiguous boundaries, such as the skills mentioned in Linda Linsefors’ comment, or learning how to say no. Or say, learning to pay attention to your personal boundaries instead of just social boundaries. (e.g. if someone touches me in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable, I move away instead of staying still just because there’s no social rule saying that it’s wrong) Another useful skill would be finding ways to limit the consequences of having your boundaries violated (or finding ways to meet your needs without violating other people’s boundaries). For example, informing your hosts beforehand that you are allergic to peanuts, or bringing earplugs to noisy places if you’re sensitive to sounds.

I’d thought that how the No-Prank List and “welcomes hugs” stickers worked was by making boundaries clearer so people know what they’re allowed to do and what they cannot do, but now it seems like their value lies more in how they limit the downsides of being wrong. Because you now know who doesn’t want to be pranked, or who doesn’t want unsolicited feedback, you can safely take action without fearing unacceptably negative consequences. Maybe someone likes being pranked in some ways but not others, and I use a prank they don’t really enjoy. However, since they did not add their names to the list, it suggests that they think they will be okay with most pranks (even if they may not like it). The list doesn’t ensure I never violate other people’s boundaries; it makes it safer for me to explore.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Strong upvote for this comment, which contains imo very useful insight.

We may not even realise where our boundaries lie until someone violates it.

This is a crucial point; people are often wrong about what they will be okay with, when they make their predictions in advance. I’m not at all in BDSM culture, but one thing that I’ve learned from people who are, and ported over to my own philosophy, is awareness of the following dynamic:

• Person A offers Person B a specific experience (e.g. “I will do X, Y, and Z.”)

• Person B misunderstands Person A as offering them a good experience (e.g. “I will do X, Y, and Z [and you will like it].”)

• The experience turns out to be unenjoyable

• Person B feels betrayed or lied-to by Person A, and (understandably) reacts with anger or other strong negative emotion

• Person A feels wrongly accused by Person B, and (understandably) reacts with confusion and hurt and possibly goes on the counterattack themselves

… all of which is circumvented if people can get on the level of “Okay, I’m going to try this experience because I expect it to be good, and also I expect I’ve got the resources to handle my own reactions if I’m wrong about that, and also I expect I’ve got the external support to handle things if I’m wrong about that. But either way, it won’t be anybody else’s ‘fault’.”

The list doesn’t ensure I never violate other people’s boundaries; it makes it safer for me to explore.

This feels, to me, like the key.

[MSRayne]

I suspect that most human social problems would be solved if we had neural implants downloading other people’s personal boundaries into our brains as knowsense—automatic intuition we don’t have to think about. Essentially it would be an expansion of cognitive empathy, which is sorely needed. Then, everyone would know exactly how to treat everyone else they meet, and it would be easier to recognize malign actors who willingly refuse to respect boundaries, as they don’t have the “I didn’t know!” excuse.

[tamgent]

Siblings do this a lot growing up.

[Sinclair Chen]

> the only punishments possible are a frown or a hand grenade

This is similar to the ultimatum game. Which implies that absent social coordination, a personal solution is for the victim to fine the the medium-transgressor a certain amount in damages, under threat of some probability of cancelling them, with a probability chosen such that the transgressor would be better off just paying the fine.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Yeah. Which sucks, as an equilibrium, which is why I’m fond of groups that can leap to a better one that’s at least as stable.

[nim]

I zoned out halfway through your attempt to justify benign boundary violations, because the defense feels like such implicature. The first section of your post built a mental model for me in which I heard you saying “I would like reassurance that I belong to a group which sets and follows social norms distinct from those of society at large”, to which I reply, “well duh”.

I was recently introduced to the concept of geek social fallacies, and the “no valid and wholesome social group can have norms other than those of the wider society” thing that you seem so (justifiably, imo, unfortunately) worried about getting slapped with for writing this feels like it rhymes closely with those.

Thank you for discussing a thing online which can often be socially dangerous to discuss. I think you did it well.

[swarriner]

It seems to me like a big part of the picture here is legibility. Social and private boundaries are a highly illegible domain, and that state of affairs is in conflict with the desires of a society which is increasingly risk-averse. To stick with the language of this particular analogy, a successful benign violation for you is one that shows metis over the domain of “living with Duncan”. On the flip side, the illegibility makes it harder for you to distinguish between malicious probing for weakness and innocent misjudgment, and for the other party to distinguish between “Duncan will be fine” and “Duncan will be a bit annoyed” and “Duncan will distrust or dislike me”.

Unfortunately I think that means my takeaway is that this is a lesson that basically lives within each individual’s personal sphere and doesn’t generalize well. You can master the art of living with your own loved ones but probably not master living with everyone. You can say “the world will be better if we all get better at navigating this illegible territory,” and you’re right, but the how and when is left as an exercise for the reader.

[NormanPerlmutter]

This is a fascinating essay that made me think of some of my personal experiences with having my boundaries violated in a new light. Thank you.

You pointed out that just asking for consent can be costly. I think an important social/​communication/​culture technology to consider is how to make consent requests less costly and/​or less frequently necessary, while still allowing a strong social norm around consent.. For instance, having meta-discussions about consent with your friends or meta-rules about consent in your social group or community, that are organized in such a way that asking for consent is seen as easy. Giving close friends broad consent to a wide range of acts, and occasionally checking in on that over time. Etc.

[PoignardAzur]

I read the title plus two lines of the article before I thought “This is going to be a Duncan Sabien essay, isn’t it?”. Quick author check aaaand, yup.

Good article. I agree with your uncertainty in the end, in that I’m not sure it’s actually better at conveying its message than “In Defense of Punch Bug” was.

[Ruby]

Curated. I think does post does indeed do a good job of talking about a fraught topic. One of the things that impressed me when I first joined the LW/​rationality community is how societal norms were questioned, and when found to be sub-optimal, were locally changed. Ready examples here are vocal disagreement, providing/​requesting critical feedback, publicly changing your mind, and polyamory. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new example and I’m glad to see this one discussed because I agree with Duncan that things feel like they’ve been shifting regarding boundaries in the last decade, and it’s worth thinking about that. As Duncan suggests, maybe it’s the right direction for things to move, but let’s consider the costs.

(I have my personal experience of this from a Bachelor’s party: a friend had requested we do something before his wedding and I hatched a plan that involved “kidnapping” him. I was pretty confident he’d be entirely fine with it (he was), but some people were very vocally concerned in a way that could have easily prevented this fun and memorable experience.)

[Pattern]

There are all sorts of different domains in which we have those different boundaries. If the above were a representation of people’s feelings about personal space, then the person on the left would probably be big into hugs and slaps-on-the-shoulder, while the one on the right might not be comfortable sharing an elevator with more than one other person (if that).

If the above were a representation of, say, people’s openness to criticism, then the person on the left probably wouldn’t mind if you told them their presentation sucked, in front of an audience of their friends, colleagues, and potential romantic partners. Meanwhile, the person on the right would probably prefer that you send a private message checking to see whether they were even interested in critical feedback at this time.

Can we abandon one dimensional continuums as models for everything? (They work well for one thing! They’re awful everywhere else. As a ‘representation of people’s feelings about personal space’ it didn’t need an explanation—it was simple to extrapolate. Then you added more dimensions that don’t collapse well.)

Some people like hugs.

Some people don’t.

Some people are fine with ‘hugs and slaps’.

Some people are not.

The above also doesn’t do a great job of showing uncertainty in one’s boundaries, which is often substantial. The “grey area” between okay and not okay might be quite small, in some cases (you have a clear, unambiguous “line” that you do not want crossed) and quite wide in others where you’re not sure how you feel, and you might not know exactly where that gradient begins and ends.

While we’re here we might as well review set theory, namely the difference between:

[0, 1] and (0, 1), and maybe cover fuzzy sets as well (whatever those are).

But for any given subculture, it seems to me that society tries to set the boundaries at something like “ninety percent of the present/​relevant/​participating people will not have their personal boundaries violated.”

might want to emphasize subculture there.

depending on all sorts of factors

It seems like different groups clearly have this set to different thresholds. (4chan might be unusual in this regard, even if it is broadly accurate.)

I suspect some people’s minds will have leapt straight to the (true!) point that

If you wanted to write an essay without so many caveats, you could have talked about ‘boundaries between you and ‘the world″ and gone on about how sometimes you like ‘going on adventures’ where you are fine with that boundary between ‘you and ‘the world’ being different’.

Would that have served the purpose of this essay? Perhaps not.

The only way to tell that a given social boundary violation is benign is to find out, from the individual, whether it in fact failed to violate their personal boundary.

Fair enough. ‘failed’ isn’t an ideal metaphor. The pie thing might be fine as part of a game, once. (You lose the set of matches, pie to the face. The winner gets to...eat a pie. Normally.)

Yet another way is to say that if it did, in fact, cross your personal boundary, then it was by definition not benign in the sense intended here.

This is a different place from where this essay seemed like it was going at the start:

I said (among other things) that I’d really enjoy some benign boundary violations.

Perhaps the terminology could be refined further, to make that more clear.

I predict that nonzero readers will be something-like offended, or perhaps alarmed, that I’m trying to crystallize a concept like “benign boundary violation” at all, since it could e.g. be abused to give cover to those other, worse things.

I object to the terminology—it’s not clear.

Examples like ‘me and [friend name] like giving each other really hard high fives for fun. (but not too hard)’ are easy to get.

(remember, the fact that they are benign for me does not imply they are generally so):

I’d have added a ‘sometimes’ before the benign.

So they are indeed past the social boundary. But they didn’t violate my boundaries.

This is why the terminology is unclear. ‘boundary violation’ - which ‘boundary’?

but they all seem to dismiss a set of costs as not-being-costs, rather than properly weighing and accounting for them.

You could make this specific—costs to you.

For example: “Why don’t people just ask you if you’re chill with being hit with water balloons, and then ever after they can hit you with water balloons?”

‘What do you want for your party?’

‘Let’s have a waterballoon fight, etc.’

it’s still an update in the direction of diminished intimacy.

Do you want a party with fights with water balloons? Or a costume party? (With nerf darts?)

These are somewhat exclusive. Oh no! Choices!

Both, arguably requires more planning—costumes that are good with water (and to run in)...

We haven’t banned Reese’s from all public spaces, even though this is a hardship for people with peanut allergies, because it saves too few at too high a cost.

What public spaces have Reese’s?

(e.g. our society offers martial arts classes, which you can pay for and put into your weekly schedule. It does not offer friendly surprise attacks.)

Seems somewhat doable with pranks?

This is the part where I would like to have suggestions or recommendations or next actions, but I largely don’t. I didn’t anticipate this essay being nearly as fraught as it felt, when I first set out to write it. I thought that I would just say “sometimes it’s nice to be pushed into the pool,” and explain my three reasons why, and that would be that.

Obviously, we need to find a way to combine nerf darts with water in a way that isn’t terrible.

(And meanwhile the ten percent of people

This didn’t seem accurate? Did seem excessive.

Who (plural) like driving at 100 miles an hour?

And as a result, people are a little less creeping and terrified.

creeping?

bailey-and-motte’d

Enter stage right, the court will not accept X as evidence, but they will accept Y. (If a society is cool with a lot of things that aren’t cool, then there may be a sharp discontinuity where once a line is crossed that people know others will have their back, yeah, ‘the pitchforks come out’.)

In my culture. Not in this one. In this one, we don’t seem to have very many medium-sized responses left. We have some responses which average out to medium-sized, in that they’re sometimes huge and usually nothing, but that’s not the same thing.

Ah, is that a rejection I spy, of those utility axioms about which I have heard so much? (Or just ‘small consistent responses are more effective deterrence.’)

(And there are also, I suspect, a lot of people with legitimate medium-sized grievances who are going without justice because the only tools they have at their disposal are frowny-face stickers and hand grenades, and the former doesn’t suffice and the latter feels like overkill.)

And then there’s the problem of what happens next.

1. ^{^}

Which means that something like 4% of people will declare them to be okay; we round that to zero.

What if it’s going a little fast on a bike (with pedals) instead of a car?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I am uncertain what the purpose of this comment is.

(I mean that genuinely, not as like some snide comment. I started reading with the intent to engage and respond, and was unable to figure out what kind of engagement or response was wanted, or even if any was wanted.)

If there’s a prompt for me or others, I missed it, and would appreciate a restatement of it. =)

[Pattern]

(Prompt:)

The important part would be:

1. The post communicates its point but the terminology could be better. (Which is probably why there are so many “hedges”.)

Less important:

2. In order to scale up, some things do require opt in/​advance notice. Some possibilities are (largely) exclusive of each other. (A costume party and a surprise water balloon fight.)
3. The post mentions different subcultures have different rules, but talks about society boundaries like they are one thing only.

(Purpose:)

Overall, I made notes as I read the post. (This post is fairly straightforward and didn’t need lots of re-reads to understand, but it is kind of long. More complex and long occasionally go together, so I made notes as I went. It’s also useful for more formed thoughts and has a few quotes or points I could go back and re-read, instead of having to skim the whole thing to get back to.)

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

(Thanks)

1. There’s been a bid elsewhere for “boundaries” to refer exclusively to the individually-specified thing, and “norms” to be used to indicate the social boundary. This … tracks, and seems good, although it leaves out that people e.g. say “Boundaries, Phil, geez!” in reinforcement of social ones, and that the word “norms” refers to many things besides boundaries.
   
   But I don’t object to using those as the terms if enough other people think they make sense.
   

2. No disagreement that some things (many, even) require opting in or advance notice.

3. I think they largely are one-thing-only within a subculture (where e.g. “LW” would count as a subculture, and “LWers who live in California when they meet in person” would count as a somewhat different one). I think there is approximately always, for any given collection of humans in any given time and place, a surprisingly-consistent-across-people sense of what the norms are.

[Pattern]

1. Yeah, this is tricky. I didn’t like the terminology, but I didn’t have a replacement. It’s hard to come up with a term for this (for reasons discussed at length in the post). I was looking more at ‘both are ’boundaries″ and disambiguating that it is your boundary (versus the social one) that you are sort of opting in/​asking others to work with you to define. (Opting-in (by self) to boundary exploration (of self by others).) ‘Boundary exploration’ still doesn’t sound good, though ‘boundary violation’ sounds worse. Emphasizing the opt-in part in the terminology seems helpful, given that it’s what you want is a surprise, hence it not being ‘someone asks for permission to push you in the pool’.

¹⁄₂. It seems clear that what you want would involve people asking someone other than the person being surprised. (Like planning a surprise party, or ‘Friend A throws Friend B into the pool in order to splash Friend C during a water fight/​similar game’.)

2. Yeah, aside from the issue over all (surprising seems hard to scale)...You were mostly talking about other things, but it kind of sounded like you wanted a surprise party. (Or to be surprised by, not it, but what would happen there.) That seems like it could be

• hard to do with a party.

• Very dependent on stuff like where you are (versus talking about an abstract topic on LW). (Like, is the weather good enough that, your friends don’t tell you where the party will be, and the day of, they surprise you by*...going to the beach. Or some other place that’s fun for a group, and it’s a surprise.)

*associated details might include, your eyes are covered or closed until you get there etc.

This is a narrower topic than ‘how to handle/​negotiate fitting the personal bounds rather than the other one, which is being treated in this post as serving a different purpose’, so I didn’t focus on it more.

3. That makes sense.

[A. Weber]

I’ve definitely been thinking about something like this for a while recently. My thoughts were about the limits of consent as an reigning societal principle. For example, in American culture you shouldn’t touch someone without their consent. But if you need to get their attention, it’s generally considered acceptable to politely tap their shoulder once or twice so that they turn around. Or if you’re stuck in a crowded elevator or train, it’s understood as unavoidable that you might slip and accidentally bump into somebody standing next to you. The more common explanation of this is that “by being out in public, you implicitly consent to these types of touch,” but “implicit consent” is kind of… oogy to me. This maybe gets a little closer to what I’m getting towards: that we a society carve these exceptions out of consent so that human interaction still works smoothly.

(I’m thinking also about exceptions to these exceptions. For example, there’s infamous stories about people pulling earbuds out of someone’s head to get their attention, or molesters using a crowded train as a smokescreen to hide their inappropriate actions. Obviously these are people abusing the exceptions afforded them, and we as a society denounce these actions as going too far.)

[Yustynn Panicker]

Some additional points from the perspective of the benign violator (the other side of the happy interaction coin). I really enjoy being the benign violator with everyone, and am generalizing on my own experience:

• Functionally, it’s relationship-deepening for the reasons mentioned for the benign-violated perspective (trust, demo of personal knowledge, joy in making a friend happy by creating a positive, more memorable experience). I like deep, intimate relationships with people I choose to spend time with.

• Signals symmetry—I’d enjoy being pushed in the pool too!

• With new people: Nice way to build up rapport and establish mutual happiness-causing patterns from the get go (in my experience, most people like slightly risky social boundary violation and I like almost all my relationship types to be fun-loving). Goes wrong sometimes, but it’s usually easy to adjust or even filter out people whose boundaries aren’t conducive to my own joy.

[Stephen Bennett]

The broader social ecosystem is more important but also more difficult to grapple with, so let’s start small. Would you like me to do things that are definitely boundary violations but that I expect to be benign^[1]?

You teased at an answer to that question, but I don’t think you gave anything definitive. You said that your culture should have medium-sized responses to transgressions that end up not being benign, and so ought to incentivize what a potential actor believes to be a benign boundary violation, but you didn’t quite go the distance and say that you want people in your life attempting what they believe to be benign boundary violations. It sounds like from your bachelor party request that you’d like that from people close to you, but what about acquaintances?

1. ^

   In expectation not more unpleasant than stubbing your toe or a light turning red on you while you’re driving, although with possibly wide tails.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I absolutely personally want people to violate the social boundaries at me, in places where they genuinely expect that the social boundary is way overcompensating for me personally and that the [action] they’re considering will not violate my personal boundaries.

I want people in my life, acquaintances included, to try to play in the actual space I have available, not (via their good intentions) make me feel like I’m isolated from them and everything by a ten-foot bubble.

My generic social contract is “I will adhere to a policy of forgiving well-intentioned first-offense missteps where people genuinely couldn’t have known, in order to purchase your willingness to Try Things. In places where I can’t afford to absorb first-offense missteps, I’ll consider it my own responsibility to proactively inform, the same way I would if I had a lethal peanut allergy. Your primary responsibility in turn is to listen, and update, if I clarify a boundary.”

More broadly, on the social level, “I will defend others in what I perceive to have been well-intentioned first-offense missteps where they genuinely couldn’t have known, from attacks which tend to take those missteps in bad faith and chill/​deter people from Trying Things At All.”

[Slider]

If it is not “ask”- and “tell”-culture differences I am wondering where the other style of getting that good of “being known” is.

The pattern would be that you don’t push people into pools if you don’t know them and push only those people who you know that like it into pools. In order to get those “push priviledges” you talk about all kinds of generalities with people. So when you talk with a person and learn that they like it that gives a sense of closeness if it is disclosed in the spirit that it can and shall be applied. This model has costs in that you might talk about hypothetical stuff that never gets applied which in effect means emotional vulnerablity with no “payoff”.

And I suspect the delineation is more like this style doesn’t think that pushing is the way to get push priviledges. And the “benign violation style” thinks that talking about pushing is not the way to get pushing priviledges. In that there is a probably a counterpart for “benign inquiry” where you put another in a position where they can do nothing but reveal or define themselfs. Certain styles might find this not desirable, if you can do lazy evaluation on what you want there might be a handy position rather than being precommited to be a certain kind of person. Or maybe the difference is that if you live throught a decision you can just react and discover what you do which is relatively effortless but thinking about it before hand is a kind of work and requires self-knowledge?

I am also a bit confused in that when a person pushes another into pool betting it is the move to make, then its a blend of knowing and guessing. To the extent it is knowledge I get how its expressing care to the person. But to the extent its knowledgelessness the same logic doesn’t apply. If it is a method of generating that knowledge, its merely expressing wanting that information rather than demonstrating of posessing it. And from a certain perspective it could be understood that they want to participate without knowing and that can be a form of distaste of knowing. But I guess being desired is a similar even if separate psychological good?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

I think that guess/​ask/​tell culture differences are definitely tangled up in this somewhere, but I don’t know if that’s the full explanation.

The pattern would be that you don’t push people into pools if you don’t know them and push only those people who you know that like it into pools

That’s close but not quite. I think if you require “knowledge” in a strict sense, then some precious opportunity has already been missed. Put another way, what I’m saying is that the surprise and discovery are part of the puzzle somehow?

I don’t push people into pools if I don’t know them well enough to be pretty sure that they will like it. But I don’t think certainty is the bar to meet. I think “pretty sure, plus confident that it won’t be disastrously traumatic if I’m wrong” is closer.

Or maybe the difference is that if you live through a decision you can just react and discover what you do which is relatively effortless but thinking about it before hand is a kind of work and requires self-knowledge?

This feels like an important piece, yeah. Doing all of the calculation up front seems to be a pretty heavy burden, and the empirical result is that a lot of people just clam up or get frozen out or end up isolated and anxious because they can never be sure that it’ll go well. In the culture I want to participate in, there’s more slack and more support, such that people can explore more because they don’t fear extremely disastrous consequences of genuine well-meant exploration.

I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always:

“No, I don’t like that.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. I won’t go there again.”

“Okay, good. No worries, then.”

re: participating without knowing, that’s the part that signals trust. More precisely, you can’t have it in a context that lacks trust, so if you have it, this is strong evidence that trust is present.

[Slider]

I could imagine that one of the ways for the fallout not to be disastrously traumatic is if one accepts whatever “judgement” is to come ie guanteed pleadingly quilty with no/​little resistance. Say that pushing people into pool unhappily means you get side-eyed for 30 minutes. If one knows the fallout beforehand there is no chance of an undefinite downward spiral. The way that a traumatic fallout occurs if the people disagree on how to proceed (ie no punishment vs punishment).

I am kind of linking this in my mind to the “try catch” programming pattern. Some might have a style preference that correctly working code should not deal with errors too much (ie representing “not found” as “return −1” or “raise NoSuchElementException”). I tried to search for previous usage of that that and indeed The Magnitude of His Own Folly is structured as a story about how a exception that was caught in a bad way was made uncaught and allowed to escalate. Curious that also explictly deals with trust.

In a problematic situation a party might have no choice but to trust. In a hostile work environment you can have the choice of working or not working. Deducing from peope choosing work (and thus “implicit trust”) that there is a good environment is not the most reliable of logics. Assholes can be “recklessly clueless” and that counts against them rather than for them.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Yeah, trusting the overall system of punishment/​consequence to be at least approximately fair, and that everyone involved has enough spare resources to survive/​absorb occasional small miscarriages of justice, is a crucial part of this.

[Viliam]

I want to live in a culture where the expected pattern is approximately always: [...]

How many strangers does an average person interact with each day? If many, then the example dialog would not help much, because the next time it would be a different person who doesn’t know.

[manavortex]

This is an excellent post, thank you for making it. I don’t have anything to add to the discussion right now, other than sharing my strategy for boundary violations where I can’t sufficiently judge the benignness/​traumatizing worst-case outcome:

“Unless you tell me not to, I’m going to hug you now.”

Works as long as the other party is in a condition to understand speech—because even <desperate wail> signals me to stop,.

[M. Y. Zuo]

When it comes to boundary violations in particular, it seems to me that the middle ground is evaporating, as social media becomes an ever-more important part of our lives and our careers and approximately everybody weighs in on approximately everything that catches our collective attention and the zeitgeist lurches from one scandal to the next (while still ignoring 99.999% of all scandals).

Only among the population vying for social status.

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

That seems like an overstatement, to me.

“Primarily” or “most frighteningly” among the population vying for social status, perhaps.

But I don’t think you can support “only,” and I also don’t think it’s a reasonable prior.

[M. Y. Zuo]

Why do you think it isn’t a reasonable prior?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

My actual answer is “because it starts with the word ‘only’.”

Statements that assert that something is only true of subset X, or true of every member of group Y, or other similar universals/​absolutes, are almost never true either in literal specific or in “spirit,” and so in my estimation they bear the burden of proof, and should be considered suspect until demonstrated reasonable.

I have other, more complicated thoughts about why humans who are not explicitly targeting social status are nevertheless affected by and vulnerable to large changes in the status dynamic. But the above seems to be sufficient to start with.

[M. Y. Zuo]

I can of course define ‘population vying for social status’ narrowly enough that ‘Only’ applies in every literal instance. And you can of course define it broadly it enough that it never applies even ‘in spirit’.

So to go any further would seem to be splitting hairs, to be honest.

Personally, I rather not spend the time to write a long explanation when there are a boundless number of potentially valid rejoinders, due to the nature of drawing lines in the sand.

EDIT: Perhaps that is also an error of form, and/​or style, on my part, but I also rather not turn short sentences into long paragraphs.

The more interesting point is in your latter paragraph,

humans who are not explicitly targeting social status are nevertheless affected by and vulnerable to large changes in the status dynamic

Yes, that seems to be a common sentiment among many, and it matches my observations as well, given a sufficiently high threshold of ‘large changes’ (of course we may disagree as to where that threshold is and it would become a drawing lines in the sand problem too.)

Can you elaborate?

[[DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien]

Sorry, I think this is an important point, and not trivial/​irrelevant splitting hairs:

I can of course define ‘population vying for social status’ narrowly enough that ‘Only’ applies in every literal instance.

I do not believe this is the case, while continuing to use words in ways that resemble the way other people use those words.

In other words, “vying” is a phrase with meaning. It means something about intention, it means something about prioritization, it means something about the core target or purpose of someone’s actions. It’s true that one can set up a local, idiosyncratic meaning of a phrase that means anything, but I think it is false that there’s anything which is [true] which also, say, 70+ people out of a randomly polled 100 would agree means “only among the population vying for social status.”

Words have meaning. Their meaning is a distribution rather than a crisply defined single point, but there is in fact an objectively evaluable thing around “does X mean Y, in practice?”

And from that perspective—from the perspective of “words approximately mean what a supermajority of people interpret them to mean”—it’s importantly false that the middle ground is evaporating in a way that substantially negatively impacts people [only among the population vying for social status].

It seems from the rest of your comment that you already agree with this, so my belaboring the point may be extraneous from your perspective. But that’s a line I want to reinforce on LessWrong—I don’t want people on LessWrong to cavalierly say false things. I want to protect the sense in which words convey actual meaning, and I don’t want “that’s false” to be answered with “well, we could split hairs, but whatever.”

[M. Y. Zuo]

Duncan you haven’t actually refuted my point, but write as if you had in the latter paragraphs… Take for example,

It’s true that one can set up a local, idiosyncratic meaning of a phrase that means anything, but I think it is false that there’s anything which is [true] which also, say, 70+ people out of a randomly polled 100 would agree means “only among the population vying for social status.”

Okay, maybe it is false that 70+ out of 100 would share the meaning of my original statement, we obviously will not figure out the exact threshold without spending far more effort.

But I’m okay with utilizing definitions only 69 out of 100 would share. The exact proportion doesn’t really matter much to me, whether 69, or 70, or more, or less, out of 100. That’s my point, there are a boundless number of potentially valid arguments for and against drawing the cutoff somewhere along that spectrum. For never drawing lines, for always drawing lines, for a mixed strategy, etc.

EDIT: To be clear there are probably many folks on LW with somewhat higher or lower cutoffs, many who’ve never considered this at all, many who decide not to think in terms of a true/​false binary, and so on. And if you trawl through the archives you can see many examples.

You write as if I had invented completely different meanings that 0 out of 100 would share.

So it’s only potentially false according to your ironically idiosyncratic requirement that 70+ out of 100 is the cutoff for being ‘true’.

If you’ve thought about it enough to realize it’s a continuous spectrum in practice versus a theoretical binary, like many other phenomena, then reflect on why you then try to defend an arbitrary cutoff, perhaps it is related to the topic of social status, testing boundaries, or other ideas covered in the op.