So, as long as we're Telling, I'm going to talk about my own internal state. I think at least some aspects of my reactions may be shared by other people, including people whom readers of this thread may be interested in influencing or interacting with. Anybody who's not interested in this should definitely stop reading. I promise I won't be offended. :-)

Although I still think I had a point, if I look back at why I really wrote my response, I think that point was mostly "cover" for a less acceptable motivation. I think I really wrote it mostly out of irritation with the way the word "rationalist" was used in the original posting. And I find myself feeling the same way in response to some of your reply.

My first reaction is to see it as an ugly form of appropriation to take the word "rationalist" to mean "person identified with the Less Wrong community or associated communities, especially if said member uses jargon A, B, and C, and subscribes to only-tangentially-rational norms X, Y, and Z". Especially when it's coupled with signals of group superiority like "don't try this with Muggles" (used to be "mundanes"). It provokes an immediate "screw you" reaction.

I expressed my irritation only as hopefully-veiled but still obnoxious snark(for which I am sorry), but it was there.

The Bay Area, and presumably New York and the world, contain people who are committed to rationality by almost any definition, yet who've never read the Sequences, probably wouldn't want to, and probably have no great interest in the community I think you mean. Some of them have pretty high profiles, too. Making a land grab for the word "rationalist" probably doesn't make most of those people want into the club, and neither does name calling. Both seem more likely to make them think the club is composed of jerks.

On another, but perhaps related, front...

By my last paragraph's description of my reaction, I didn't mean to write off the "Tell" suggestion completely as a suggestion about what social norms should be, whether in a subculture or in The Wider Culture(TM). I'm pretty skeptical about the idea, but I wasn't trying to be completely dismissive there.

In that part, I was, perhaps amid more snark, trying to warn about a possibly inobvious reaction. What I was trying to describe was how I, as an individual, actually envision myself reacting to the stated tactic for introducing the "Tell" approach.

I used to spend a fair amount of time, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, with communities that overlap with, and/or could be seen as antecedents of, the Less Wrong/CFAR/MIRI "rationalists". In those communities, I met a lot of people who had unconventional approaches to interacting with others. I often found some of those people annoying and aversive. That's true even though I'm no grandmaster of "normal" social approaches myself, and even though I suspect that I am far less sensitive to deviations from them than the average bear.

What I would truly expect to go through my mind would be something like "Oh, no, yet another one of those people who think removing all filters will improve society, and want me to be part of the grand experiment"... or possibly "Oh, no, yet another one of those people who don't realize that filters are expected at all", or, worse "Oh, no, one of those people who think they can use some kind of philosophical gobbledygook to justify inconsiderate passive-aggressive pushiness". Because I've met all of those more than once.

That would cause discomfort, and in the future I'd tend to avoid the source of that discomfort. I was trying to point out was that the strategy might appear to work, but still backfire, because the immediate feedback from the interlocutor wouldn't necessarily be honest.

Maybe I'd get over it, but maybe I wouldn't, too.

For the record on your first paragraph, I'm really, really skeptical of Crocker's rules working over the long term, but I admit I've never tried them. I don't think the rest of the things you mention are similar.

I don't know of any common social norm against, say, tabooing words, or asking about anticipated experiences. I think you can use those sorts of methods with more or less anybody. You may run into resistance or anger if somebody thinks you're trying to pull a nasty rhetorical trick, but you can defuse that if you take the time to cross the inferential distance gently, and starting on the project before you're in the middle of a heated conflict where the other person will reject absolutely anything you suggest.

For that matter, you can often just quietly stop using a word without saying anything at all about "tabooing" it.

Likewise, I don't think most people mind "I'm confused"... unless it's obviously dishonest and meant to provide plausibly deniable cover to some following snark.

On the other hand, I do see lots of social norms around what tactics are and are not OK for getting somebody else to do something for you, and also around how much of your internal state you share at what stages of intimacy. So I think this is different in kind.

And of course I may also have completely misread your comment...

[On edit, cleaned up a couple of proofreading errors]