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Barry_Cotter comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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Some women? And you're Irish? This behaviour is practically tattooing "I have poor social skills or severe confidence issues" on your forehead in any guess culture. Odd is about as positive a description as it's going to get outside of people who've not read a good deal of woman's studies stuff.
It's almost as though some people consider your status hit as something of extremely low importance!
Understood - but essentially no humans consider their own status hits as of extremely low importance. this is so strong that directing other people to lower their status - even if it's in their best long-term interest - is only rarely practical advice.
Oh absolutely. To be clear, I am asserting that people making this recommendation are basically following the FDA playbook. Given a tradeoff between bad things happening and costly safety measures...radically optimize for an expensive six sigmas of certainty that no bad event ever happens, with massive costs to everyone else.
Now, this strategy can make sense, if either:
Arguably, the few people in this thread that are advocating extremely socially costly "safety measures" believe a combination of both.
This is sometimes a fair characterization, but remember that (like this thread has been discussing) the social cost depends a lot on your environment. Better to say that categorically recommending behaviors without understanding the perspectives of those that those behaviors would harm is a problem (obviously somewhat inevitable due to ignorance). (I think we need the term "typical social group fallacy".)
Certainly! As such, we should figure out how to turn geekdoms into ask cultures, when they aren't already. Putting even marginally socially-awkward people in situations where they have to guess other people's intentions, when everyone is intentionally avoiding making their intentions common knowledge, well, that's sort of cruel.
So, this become a problem we can actually try to solve. In a relatively small environment, like a group of a dozen or so, what can one do to induce "ask culture", instead of "guess culture"?
(This should probably be a discussion post of its own... hm.)
My own approach: if I can afford the status-hit, I ask about stuff in a guess culture, and I explicitly answer questions there. In some cases I volunteer explicit explanations even when questions weren't asked, although I'm careful about this, because it can cause a status-hit for the person I'm talking to as well.
Some additional notes:
I was raised in two different guess cultures simultaneously, then transferred to an ask culture in my adolescence, and I'm fairly socially adept. This caused me to think explicitly about this stuff rather a lot, even before I had words for it. That said, I strongly suspect that there's much clearer understandings of this stuff available in research literature, and a good scholar would be invaluable if you were serious about this as a project.
Talking about "affording the status-hit" is oversimplifying to the point of being misleading, since I live in the intersection of multiple cultures and being seen in culture A as deliberately making a status-lowering move in culture B can be a status-raising move in A. Depending on how much I value A-status and B-status, "taking a hit" in B might not be a sacrifice at all. (Of course, being seen that way in A without actually making such a move in B... for example, pretending to my A friends that I am seen as a rebel in B while in fact being no such thing... is potentially a more valuable move, albeit a risky one. As well as a dishonest one, to the extent that that matters.)
The terms "ask culture" and "guess culture" are misleading as well; it's more precise to think in terms of topics for which a given culture takes an "ask" stance, and topics for which it takes a "guess" stance. It's even clearer to think in terms of preferred levels of directness and indirectness when trying to find something out, since successful people don't actually guess about topics for which their culture takes a "guess" stance, they investigate indirectly. But, having said all that, I'm willing to keep talking about "ask" and "guess" culture for convenience as long as we understand the limits of the labels.
A downside of asking for things in a guess culture is that people have to give you the things. (Unless you're demanding so much they'd rather refuse and lose you as an ally.) Imposing this cost on people hurts them, as well as lowers your status.
Note that I wrote "asking about", not "asking for".
I agree that turning down requests in a guess culture has social costs, which is one reason the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate requests is considered so important.
Imposing costs on others by making demands of them doesn't necessarily lower my status.
Where "doesn't necessarily" for most intents and purposes could mean "does the reverse of"!
Yes. But now you've gone and ruined my guess-culture use of understatement with your ask-culture explicitness! Hrumph.
It's probably more accurate to refer to hint cultures rather than guess cultures.
I wish lojban had worked out better-- it would be very handy to have a concise way of indicating whether you're talking about how a culture feels from the inside or the outside.
Probably depends who's talking.
(I'm Italian.)
Forgive me, my memory is poor, I took your references to Ireland to mean you were Irish.
(I studied in Ireland from September 2010 to May 2011.) EDIT: Why were this and the grandparent upvoted?
I wasn't the one who upvoted it, but volunteering extra information that reduces confusions certainly seems worth upvoting to me.
Because we want to see more comments like this (i.e. clearing up confusion), and because in a thread this large it only takes a small percentage of people deciding that a comment is high-quality for it to get upvoted.