Let me make this more concrete with the hot sauce situation. (Note: this got a bit long. Saying stuff clearly here is quite hard.)
It took a few tries for me to empathise with what was going on in situation 1 (perhaps because I’m still not a cook), but I realise that giving someone a meal is often read heavily within guess culture. The meal is intended to be a strong signal that you understand the person’s food needs and preferences, and is intended to be a complete meal for taste and nourishment.
You can imagine a fairly ceremonial meal, where the king and queen of one land prepares a public meal for the visiting diplomats from a bigger country, and the diplomats have a bite and then (with an audience watching) pull out some ketchup and pour it all over the high quality meal, and the king and queen are so embarrassed by how low quality the diplomats thought the meal was, that it wasn’t perfect but instead needed some cheap seasoning to improve it.
You can imagine the diplomats saying “Why are you taking this as a calculated insult, I just like to eat meals with ketchup, we’re just learning facts about my tastes and your cooking” but it most likely would indeed be an intentional public action to imply that the food of this nation was bad, and in this position it would require extreme social unawareness for the diplomats to not notice what the effects of their actions would be.
Going back to the reddit thread, the question is whether this “…insults her cooking and insinuates that she doesn’t know how to cook.” An insult is something like to intentionally and unnecessarily make it common knowledge that someone is bad or lacking in some trait.
It’s hard to define exactly—saying that someone’s outfit is ugly is often mean-spirited, saying that your employee’s work has been of low quality can feel insulting but is generally appropriate and retaliating is wrong. I’m not going to zoom in more on this conceptual analysis, but suffice to say, to pour a cheap condiment all over someone’s carefully prepared dish is to make it common knowledge between you that you believe the food is low-quality / bad, and is often considered an insult.
Elizabeth replies with
Adding hot sauce reveals information (maybe about him, maybe about the food), but cannot change the facts on the ground.
She says though this is a defense, as though revealing true facts cannot be an insult or should never be punished. But in many cases it’s still rude to say “Your food that you carefully just prepared for me is bad and I only want to eat it with cheap condiments on it”. This varies depending on circumstance, but it seems clear that the redditor was in a situation where the girl was intending it to be this sort of guess-culture costly signal, which I think is commonly the norm around places who make an effort to cook good food for the people close to them.
The important point is that in the woman’s culture, perhaps her home culture, if someone said that kind of thing, it would be common knowledge that this was a level 3⁄4 attack, even if the person said “But I’m just making an object level claim about my personal taste”.
To change the equilibrium, you actually need to do some communicative work to move with her to a new equilibrium where that isn’t common knowledge. But unilaterally punishing her for not being in your equilibrium is pretty aggressive, and especially when you didn’t need to do that, inconsiderate and unkind.
Admittedly, it’s plausible that the person was being naive, but again, naivety doesn’t mean you don’t hurt people or aren’t taking dumb actions given what’s common knowledge.
My model says that being naive is in *some* ways a defense but not others. A level 3+ action has (at least) two components. It has the information it reveals directly “I didn’t like your food.” It also has the motivation behind the action “I am deciding to tell you I didn’t like your food.”
There is a difference between (A) “I am deciding to go out of my way to tell you X”, (B) “I value doing Y more than I value not telling you X”, (C) “There was no way to avoid telling you X, so X” and (D) “I am naive and not aware that you will figure out or assume X from my actions.” And what matters for the reaction is which one it *looks* like you’re doing, to the other person.
So if GF thinks this is (D), she will still be mad that he insulted her cooking, but not mad that he intentionally insulted her cooking, which is worse - (A) is worse/a-bigger-deal than (B) is worse than (C or D).
I don’t think this is guess culture / ask culture, although I see how one would get that idea. Certainly they relate to insults differently, but in this case I think it works for either. You can definitely insult someone inside ask culture by asking, if asking reveals information—to not have this be true, asks would have to have the weird Bayesian immunity I talk about in the post, and they just don’t. Asks have a qualified “I’m not insulting you by claiming you couldn’t figure out what I wanted” immunity, but they don’t have an immunity on the “I want what I’m asking for” front.
Let me make this more concrete with the hot sauce situation. (Note: this got a bit long. Saying stuff clearly here is quite hard.)
It took a few tries for me to empathise with what was going on in situation 1 (perhaps because I’m still not a cook), but I realise that giving someone a meal is often read heavily within guess culture. The meal is intended to be a strong signal that you understand the person’s food needs and preferences, and is intended to be a complete meal for taste and nourishment.
You can imagine a fairly ceremonial meal, where the king and queen of one land prepares a public meal for the visiting diplomats from a bigger country, and the diplomats have a bite and then (with an audience watching) pull out some ketchup and pour it all over the high quality meal, and the king and queen are so embarrassed by how low quality the diplomats thought the meal was, that it wasn’t perfect but instead needed some cheap seasoning to improve it.
You can imagine the diplomats saying “Why are you taking this as a calculated insult, I just like to eat meals with ketchup, we’re just learning facts about my tastes and your cooking” but it most likely would indeed be an intentional public action to imply that the food of this nation was bad, and in this position it would require extreme social unawareness for the diplomats to not notice what the effects of their actions would be.
Going back to the reddit thread, the question is whether this “…insults her cooking and insinuates that she doesn’t know how to cook.” An insult is something like to intentionally and unnecessarily make it common knowledge that someone is bad or lacking in some trait.
It’s hard to define exactly—saying that someone’s outfit is ugly is often mean-spirited, saying that your employee’s work has been of low quality can feel insulting but is generally appropriate and retaliating is wrong. I’m not going to zoom in more on this conceptual analysis, but suffice to say, to pour a cheap condiment all over someone’s carefully prepared dish is to make it common knowledge between you that you believe the food is low-quality / bad, and is often considered an insult.
Elizabeth replies with
She says though this is a defense, as though revealing true facts cannot be an insult or should never be punished. But in many cases it’s still rude to say “Your food that you carefully just prepared for me is bad and I only want to eat it with cheap condiments on it”. This varies depending on circumstance, but it seems clear that the redditor was in a situation where the girl was intending it to be this sort of guess-culture costly signal, which I think is commonly the norm around places who make an effort to cook good food for the people close to them.
The important point is that in the woman’s culture, perhaps her home culture, if someone said that kind of thing, it would be common knowledge that this was a level 3⁄4 attack, even if the person said “But I’m just making an object level claim about my personal taste”.
To change the equilibrium, you actually need to do some communicative work to move with her to a new equilibrium where that isn’t common knowledge. But unilaterally punishing her for not being in your equilibrium is pretty aggressive, and especially when you didn’t need to do that, inconsiderate and unkind.
Admittedly, it’s plausible that the person was being naive, but again, naivety doesn’t mean you don’t hurt people or aren’t taking dumb actions given what’s common knowledge.
It’s weird.
My model says that being naive is in *some* ways a defense but not others. A level 3+ action has (at least) two components. It has the information it reveals directly “I didn’t like your food.” It also has the motivation behind the action “I am deciding to tell you I didn’t like your food.”
There is a difference between (A) “I am deciding to go out of my way to tell you X”, (B) “I value doing Y more than I value not telling you X”, (C) “There was no way to avoid telling you X, so X” and (D) “I am naive and not aware that you will figure out or assume X from my actions.” And what matters for the reaction is which one it *looks* like you’re doing, to the other person.
So if GF thinks this is (D), she will still be mad that he insulted her cooking, but not mad that he intentionally insulted her cooking, which is worse - (A) is worse/a-bigger-deal than (B) is worse than (C or D).
I don’t think this is guess culture / ask culture, although I see how one would get that idea. Certainly they relate to insults differently, but in this case I think it works for either. You can definitely insult someone inside ask culture by asking, if asking reveals information—to not have this be true, asks would have to have the weird Bayesian immunity I talk about in the post, and they just don’t. Asks have a qualified “I’m not insulting you by claiming you couldn’t figure out what I wanted” immunity, but they don’t have an immunity on the “I want what I’m asking for” front.