Thanks for your reply and the additional clarification of your original point.
I certainly am not seeking additional identifying information. For one, it would do me no good as I don't have the local context knowledge to map it to anything anyway. Secondly, the gist of my initial comment was really more responding to the sense that taking a few examples and generalizing them to a larger group of people seemed inadvisable to me.
Along those same lines, I'm still really hesitant to get behind a statement that strongly implies that all well-intentioned newbies will start poorly negotiating in only one way (or one set of ways), and that anyone who starts negotiating poorly in a different or particular way (or set of ways) is obviously doing so from a place of poor intentions. The more visibility and reach this community has, the more diversity we're going to see in the new people who are finding it. And in the ways of communication they've learned are effective and acceptable. Additionally, not every newbie who comes into the community is ready or able to identify culture differences as the source of the problems they're encountering. Troubleshooting is its own skillset.
It also feels really important to me to point out that - if we're going to encourage people to ask and to practice asking (both of which are necessary in order to actually improve our asking and negotiating skills) then it creates some counter productive incentives if we then turn around and say things like "oh but folks who are asking in these particular ways are clearly a parasite."
While I agree that the examples you give of how a parasite might ask for something (or the scenarios they propose) don't look like particularly good deals... I still don't understand how this particular kind of ask is an indication of some sort of inherent parasitic nature the part of the asker. If we're going to create or maintain a culture where asking is an OK thing to do, then part of the underlying assumptions that go into it are that the other person is free to say "No."
To be completely fair, this is a legitimately difficult situation. In your initial comment you pointed out that one of the indicators you were looking at was the fact that these asks are primarily going towards newer folks (who may not be comfortable with ask/tell culture and who may feel obligated to say yes.) Which makes me think that perhaps the educational thrust I suggested initially was lacking in some key areas.
Perhaps - in addition to offering resources to new folks who want to learn how to ask effectively and responsibly - it would also be a really good idea to also include resources on things like how to say No/ how to be comfortable saying No, and - also really important for those coming from guess cultures - how to gracefully receive No.
I don't know that this is so much a solution for any particular individuals who are already here as it is a set-up for new people coming in that seems to give space for folks to learn the skills needed to not fall into a pattern of behavior that might be read as parasitic - before passing judgement on whether or not they are parasites.
I’m a Ravenclaw and Slytherin by nature. I like being clever. I like pursuing ambitious goals. But over the past few years, I’ve been cultivating the skills and attitudes of Hufflepuff, by choice.
I think those skills are woefully under-appreciated in the Rationality Community. The problem cuts across many dimensions:
In a nutshell, the emotional vibe of the community is preventing people from feeling happy and and connected, and a swath of skillsets that are essential for group intelligence and ambition to flourish are undersupplied.
If any one of these things were a problem, we might troubleshoot it in isolated way. But collectively they seem to add up to a cultural problem, that I can’t think of any way to express other than “Hufflepuff skills are insufficiently understood and respected.”
There are two things I mean by “insufficiently respected”:
And while this is difficult to explain, it feels to me that there is a central way of being, that encompasses emotional/operational intelligence and deeply integrates it with rationality, that we are missing as a community.
This is the first in a series of posts, attempting to plant a flag down and say “Let’s work together to try and resolve these problems, and if possible, find that central way-of-being.”
I’m decidedly not saying “this is the New Way that rationality Should Be”. The flag is not planted at the summit of a mountain we’re definitively heading towards. It’s planted on a beach where we’re building ships, preparing to embark on some social experiments. We may not all be traveling on the same boat, or in the exact same direction. But the flag is gesturing in a direction that can only be reached by multiple people working together.
A First Step: The Hufflepuff Unconference, and Parallel Projects
I’ll be visiting Berkeley during April, and while I’m there, I’d like to kickstart things with a Hufflepuff Unconference. We’ll be sharing ideas, talking about potential concerns, and brainstorming next actions. (I’d like to avoid settling on a long term trajectory for the project - I think that’d be premature. But I’d also like to start building some momentum towards some kind of action)
My hope is to have both attendees who are positively inclined towards the concept of “A Hufflepuff Way”, and people for whom it feels a bit alien. For this to succeed as a long-term cultural project, it needs to have buy-in from many corners of the rationality community. If people have nagging concerns that feel hard to articulate, I’d like to try to tease them out, and address them directly rather than ignoring them.
At the same time, I don’t want to get bogged down in endless debates, or focus so much on criticism that we can’t actually move forward. I don’t expect total-consensus, so my goal for the unconference is to get multiple projects and social experiments running in parallel.
Some of those projects might be high-barrier-to-entry, for people who want to hold themselves to a particular standard. Others might be explicitly open to all, with radical inclusiveness part of their approach. Others might be weird experiments nobody had imagined yet.
In a few months, there’ll be a followup event to check in on how those projects are going, evaluate, and see what more things we can try or further refine.
[Edit: The Unconference has been completed. Notes from the conference are here]
Thanks to Duncan Sabien, Lauren Horne, Ben Hoffman and Davis Kingsley for comments