Here’s a more cynical take: if a seemingly good “social idea” retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it’s strong evidence that the idea isn’t good enough even in its “uncorrupted” form to be widely applicable.
It’s similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so—they’re there for a reason. Likewise, I’d imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate “violently” by default, and unilaterally straying from this equilibrium puts one at a disadvantage.
This is not to say that nothing can ever be improved in the social realm, but IMO it’s not the sort of domain where “twenty-dollar bills” are plentiful and low-hanging.
Good enough on what criteria? If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true. But I know plenty of people who know about it and find it really valuable and important.
Asked how many people might have gotten exposed to it and gotten concrete value out of it, Claude estimated maybe 2.5 to 6 million people; Gemini put it lower at around 1.5 million. If we go for a very low-end estimate and say that only 1 million people in the world have benefited from knowing NVC… then it’s still at least good enough to benefit a million people, which isn’t enormous, but still pretty good for a system made up by one guy.
If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true.
No, I thought that’s what you thought about its potential (minus the comedic exaggeration), if everybody got the uncorrupted message. If you simply meant that ten million might benefit instead of one million, I have no objections.
Makes sense, thanks for explaining. I think when I wrote that, I meant to gesture more at “people will adopt useful-to-them versions of ideas even if those versions aren’t totally truthful”, though of course it does also imply that the uncorrupted version has truth value.
Here’s a more cynical take: if a seemingly good “social idea” retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it’s strong evidence that the idea isn’t good enough even in its “uncorrupted” form to be widely applicable.
It’s similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so—they’re there for a reason. Likewise, I’d imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate “violently” by default, and unilaterally straying from this equilibrium puts one at a disadvantage.
This is not to say that nothing can ever be improved in the social realm, but IMO it’s not the sort of domain where “twenty-dollar bills” are plentiful and low-hanging.
Good enough on what criteria? If you mean that NVC hasn’t managed to completely take over the world, bring world peace and reshape everyone’s language, that’s of course true. But I know plenty of people who know about it and find it really valuable and important.
Asked how many people might have gotten exposed to it and gotten concrete value out of it, Claude estimated maybe 2.5 to 6 million people; Gemini put it lower at around 1.5 million. If we go for a very low-end estimate and say that only 1 million people in the world have benefited from knowing NVC… then it’s still at least good enough to benefit a million people, which isn’t enormous, but still pretty good for a system made up by one guy.
No, I thought that’s what you thought about its potential (minus the comedic exaggeration), if everybody got the uncorrupted message. If you simply meant that ten million might benefit instead of one million, I have no objections.
Ah. I didn’t think I was saying anything about its potential one way or the other, only about the mechanics of how it seems to get interpreted.
I was mainly going of off this, the perceived implication being that there is a widely-applicable truth value in the uncorrupted idea.
Makes sense, thanks for explaining. I think when I wrote that, I meant to gesture more at “people will adopt useful-to-them versions of ideas even if those versions aren’t totally truthful”, though of course it does also imply that the uncorrupted version has truth value.