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Awareness
Openness
Experimentation
Unsu...
There is another story I have heard of the chavrusa. Two Talmudic students were going hammer and tongs, as they do, when one of them found himself at a loss how to reply to the other's latest argument. As he struggled in thought, the other stepped in and said, such-and-such is how you should argue against what I just said.
This is a good post; thank you for writing it. I think this dichotomy, while perhaps not a perfect categorization, is pretty good, and clarifies some things.
My background and preference is what you call “Combat Culture”. “Nurture Culture” has always seemed obviously wrong and detrimental to me, and has seemed more wrong and more detrimental the more I’ve seen it in action. This, of course, is not news, and I mention it only to give context to what I have to say.
I have two substantive comments to make:
First, “It devolves into a status game.” is something that easily can, and often does, happen to “Nurture Culture” spaces also. What this looks like is that “you are not communicating in a [ nurturing | nonviolent | prosocial | etc. ] way” gets weaponized and used as a cudgel in status plays; meanwhile, participants of higher social status skirt the letter of whatever guidelines exist to enforce a “nurturing” atmosphere, while saying and doing things whose effects are to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage contrarian or opposing views. (And the more that “nurturing” communities attempt to pare down their “nurturing”-enforcement rules to the basics of “be nice”, the more the
...Thanks!
I agree that Nurture Culture can be exploited for status too, perhaps equally so. When I was writing the post, I was thinking that Combat Culture more readily heads in that direction since in Combat Culture you are already permitted to act in ways which in other contexts would be outright power-plays, e.g. calling their ideas dumb. With Nurture Culture, it has to be more indirect, e.g. the whole "you are not conforming to the norm" thing. Thinking about it more, I'm not sure. It could be they're on par for status exploitability.
An increase in combativeness alongside familiarity and comfort matches my observation too, but I don't think it's universal - possibly a selection effect for those more natively Combative. To offer a single counterexample, my wife describes herself as being sickeningly nurturing when together with one of her closest friends. Possibly nurturing is one way to show that you care and this causes it to become ramped up in some very close relationships. Possibly it's that receiving nurturing creates warm feelings of safety, security, and comfort for some such that they provide this to each other to a higher extent in closer relationships. I'm not sure, I haven't thought about this particular aspect in depth.
To offer a single counterexample, my wife describes herself as being sickeningly nurturing when together with one of her closest friends.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. My response in close relationships tends to be both extra combative and extra nurturing, depending on the context.
The extra combativeness comes from common knowledge of respect, as has already been discussed. The extra nurturing is more interesting, and there are multiple things going on.
Telling people when they're being dumb and having them listen can be important. If those paths haven't been carved yet, it can be important to say "this is dumb" and prove that you can be reliably right when you say things like that. Doing that productively isn't trivial, and the fight to get your words respected at full value can get in the way of nurturing. In my close relationships where I can simply say "you're being dumb" and have them stop and say "oops, what am I missing?" I sometimes do, but I'm also far more likely to be uninterested in saying that because they'll figure it out soon enough and I actually am curious why they're doing someth...
An outright "You're dumb" is a mistake, period, unless you actually meant to say that the person is in fact dumb. This rounding is a pure bad, and there's no need of it. Adding 'being' or 'playing' or 'doing something' before the dumb is necessary.
Part of a good combative-type culture is that you mean what you say and say what you mean, so the rounding off here is a serious problem even before the (important) feelings/status issue.
The exact phrasing isn't important, but conveying the right message is. As Zvi and Ruby note, that “being”/”doing”/etc part is important. “You’re dumb” is not an acceptable alternative because it does not mean the same thing. “Your argument is bad” is also unacceptable because it also means something completely different.
"Your argument is bad" only means “your argument is bad”, and it is possible to go about things in a perfectly reasonable way and still have bad arguments sometimes. It is completely different than a situation where someone is failing to notice problems in their arguments which would be obvious to them if they weren’t engaging in motivated cognition and muddying their own thinking. An inability to think well is quite literally what “dumb” is, and “being dumb” is a literal description of what they’re doing, not a sloppy or motivated attempt to say or pretend to be saying something else.
As far as “then why does it always come out that way”, besides the fact that “you’re being dumb” is far quicker to say than the more neutral “you’re engaging in motivated cognition”, in my experience it doesn’t always or even usually come out that way — and in fact oft...
Having been inspired by the comments here, I'm now thinking that there are two communication dimensions at play here within the Cultures. The correlation between these dimensions and the Cultures is incomplete which has been causing confusion.
1) The adversarial-collaborative dimension. Adversarial communication is each side attacking the other's views while defending their own. Collaborative communication is openness and curiosity to each other's ideas. As Ben Pace describes it:
I'll say a thing, and you'll add to it. Lots of 'yes-and'. If you disagree, then we'll step back a bit, and continue building where we can both see the truth. If I disagree, I won't attack your idea, but I'll simply notice I'm confused about a piece of the structure we're building, and ask you to add something else instead, or wonder why you'd want to build it that way.
2) The "emotional concern and effort" dimension. Communication can be conducted with little attention or effort placed on ensuring the emotional comfort of the participants, often resulting in a directness or bluntness (b...
I think this is 2-dimension schema is pretty good. The original dichotomy bothered me a bit (like it was overwriting important detail) but this one doesn’t.
One more correlated but distinct dimension I’d propose is whether the participants are trying to maximize (and therefore learn a lot) or minimize (and therefore avoid conflict) the scope of the argument.
US courts tend to take an (adversarial, low emotional concern, minimize) point of view, while scientific experiments are supposed to maximize the implications of disagreement.
American judges like to decide cases in ways that clarify undetermined areas of law as little as possible. This is oriented towards preserving the stability of the system. If a case can be decided on a technicality that allows a court to avoid opining on some broader issue, the court will often take that way out. Consider the US Supreme Court's decision on the gay wedding cake - the court put off a decision on the core issue by instead finding a narrower procedural reason to doubt the integrity of the decisionmaking body that sanctioned the baker. Both sides in a case have an incentive to avoid asking courts to overturn precedents, since that reduces their chance of victory.
Plea bargains are another example where the thing the court is mainly trying to do is resolve conflicting interests with minimal work, not learn what happened.
In general, if you see the interesting thing about arguments as the social conflict, finding creative ways to avoid the need for the argument helps you defuse fights faster and more reliably, at the expense of learning.
By contrast, in science, the best experiments and ones scientists are rewarded for seeking out are ones that overturn existing models ...
[Update: the new version is now live!!]
[Author writing here.]
The initial version of this post was written quickly on a whim, but given the value people have gotten from this post (as evidenced by the 2018 Review nomination and reviews), I think it warrants a significant update which I plan to write in time for possibly publication in a book, and ideally the Review voting stage.
Things I plan to include in the update:
This is a false dichotomy. But whenever someone marks two points on an otherwise featureless map, typically the rest of the space of possibilities that the world explodes with disappears from the minds of the participants. People end up saying "combat good, nurture bad", or the reverse, and then defend their position by presenting ways in which one is good and ways in which the other is bad. Or someone expatiates on the good and bad qualities of each one, in multiple permutations, and ends up with a Ribbonfarm post.
Said Achmiz has spoken eloquently of bad things that happen in "nurture culture". For examples of bad things in "combat culture", see any snark-based community, such as 4chan or rationalwiki. All of these things are destructive of epistemic quality. (If anything, nurture goes more wrong than combat, because it presents a smile, a knife in the back, and crocodile tears, while snark wields its weapons openly.)
When you leave out all of the ways that either supposed culture can go wrong, what is left of them? In a culture without snark or smothering, good ideas will be accepted, and constructively built on, not extinguished. Bad ideas will be po...
Communication can be direct and unambiguous when it doesn’t need to be “cushioned” to protect feelings.
I don't believe that communication becomes direct in a combative discussion. Participants in a combative discussion usually try to hide spots where they or their arguments are vulnerable. This means it's harder to get at the true rejection of the other person.
There's a huge problem in our Western culture where having knowledge is seen as the ability to have a opinion about a topic that can be effectively defended intellectually instead of knowledge being the ability to interact directly with the real world or to make predictions about it.
In a combative environment I can't speak about those things that I know to be true where I can make good predictions but that I can't defend intellectually in a way that makes sense to the person I'm speaking with.
This is an excellent point, and I too have had this experience.
Very relevant to this are Arthur Schopenhauer’s comments in the introduction to his excellent Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten (usually translated as The Art of Controversy). Schopenhauer comments on people’s vanity, irrationality, stubbornness, and tendency toward rationalization:
...If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They spe
Great essay!
Another aspect of this divide is about articulability. In a nurturing context, it's possible to bring something up before you can articulate it clearly, and even elicit help articulating it.
For example, "Something about <the proposal we're discussing> strikes me as contradictory -- like it's somehow not taking into account <X>?". And then the other person and I collaborate to figure out if and what exactly that contradiction is.
Or more informally, "There's something about this that feels uncomfortable to me". This can be very useful to express even when I can't say exactly what it is that I'm uncomfortable with, IF my conversation partner respects that, and doesn't dismiss what I'm saying because it's not precise enough.
In a combative context, on the other hand, this seems like a kind of interaction you just can't have (I may be wrong, I don't have much experience in them). Because there, inarticulateness just reads as your arguments being weak. And you don't want to run the risk of putting half-baked ideas out there and having them swatted down. So your only real choices are t...
Most people who commented on this post seemed to recognise it from their experience and get a general idea of what the different cultures look like (although some people differ on the details, see later). This is partly because it is explained well but also because I think the names were chosen well.
Here are a few people saying that they have used/referenced it: 1, 2, 3 plus me.
From a LW standpoint thinking about this framing helps me to not be offended by blunt comments. My family was very combat culture but in life in general I find people are unwilling to say “you’re wrong” so it now comes as a bit of a shock. Now when someone says something blunt on LW I just picture it being said by my older brother and realise that probably no offense is meant.
Outside of LW, this post has caused me to add a bit into my induction of new employees at work. I encourage a fairly robust combat culture in my department but I realise that some people aren’t used to this so I try to give people a warning up front and make sure they know that no offense is meant.
***
There were a few examples in the comments where it seemed like the distinction between the two cultures wasn...
This post is well written and not over-long. If the concepts it describes are unfamiliar to you, it is a well written introduction. If you're already familiar with them, you can skim it quickly for a warm feeling of validation.
I think the post would be even better with a short introduction describing its topic and scope, but I'm aware that other people have different preferences. In particular:
I read this post when it initially came out. It resonated with me to such an extent that even three weeks ago, I found myself referencing it when counseling a colleague on how to deal with a student whose heterodoxy caused the colleague to make isolated demands for rigor from this student.
The author’s argument that Nurture Culture should be the default still resonates with me, but I think there are important amendments and caveats that should be made. The author said:
"To a fair extent, it doesn’t even matter if you believe that someone...
This section describes the most significant changes from version 1 to version 2 of this post:
Shout out to Raemon, Bucky, and Swimmer963 for their help with the 2nd Version.
At first, I felt that 'nurture' was a terrible name, because the primary thing I associated with the idea you're discussing is that we are building up an axiomatised system together. Collaboratively. I'll say a thing, and you'll add to it. Lots of 'yes-and'. If you disagree, then we'll step back a bit, and continue building where we can both see the truth. If I disagree, I won't attack your idea, but I'll simply notice I'm confused about a piece of the structure we're building, and ask you to add ...
I think one of the key motivations for nurturing culture is that we don’t have common knowledge that everything will be okay in many part of our lives, and in the most important decisions in our lives way more is at stake than in academia. Some example decisions where being wrong about them has far worse consequences for your life than being wrong about whether Fermat’s Last Theorem is true or false:
I do not really agree with your view here, but I think what you say points to something quite important.
I have sometimes said that personal loyalty is one of the most important virtues. Certainly it has always seemed to me to be a neglected virtue, in rationalist circles. (Possibly this is because giving personal loyalty pre-eminence in one’s value system is difficult, at best, to reconcile with a utilitarian moral framework. This is one of the many reasons I am not a utilitarian.)
One of the benefits of mutual personal loyalty between two people is that they can each expect not to be abandoned, even if the other judges them to be wrong. This is patriotism in microcosm: “my country, right or wrong” scaled down to the relation between individuals—“my friend, right or wrong”. So you say
...Thanks for your reply, I also do not agree with it but found that it points to something important ideas. (In the past I have tended to frame the conversation more about 'trust' rather than 'personal loyalty', but I think with otherwise similar effect.)
The first question I want to ask is: how do you get to the stage where personal loyalty is warranted?
From time to time, I think back to the part of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone where Harry, Hermione and Ron become loyal to one another - the point where they build the strength of relationship where they can face down Voldemort without worrying that one another may leave out of fear.
It is after Harry and Ron run in to save Hermione from a troll.
The people who I have the most loyalty to in the world are those who have proven that it is there, with quite costly signals. And this was not a stress-free situation. It involved some pressure on each of our souls, though the important thing was that we came out with our souls intact, and also built something we both thought truly valuable.
So it is not clear to me that you can get to the stage of true loyalty without facing some trolls together, and risking ...
There’s a lot I have to say in response to your comment.
I’ll start with some meta commentary:
From time to time, I think back to the part of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone where Harry, Hermione and Ron become loyal to one another—the point where they build the strength of relationship where they can face down Voldemort without worrying that one another may leave out of fear.
It is after Harry and Ron run in to save Hermione from a troll.
Harry and Ron never ran in to save Hermione from a troll, never became loyal to one another as a result, never built any strength of relationship, and never faced down Voldemort. None of these events ever happened; and Harry, Ron, and Hermione, in fact, never existed.
I know, I know: I’m being pedantic, nitpicking, of course you didn’t mean to suggest that these were actual events, you were only using them as an example, etc. I understand. But as Eliezer wrote:
...What’s wrong with using movies or novels as starting points for the discussion? No one’s claiming that it’s true, after all. Where is the lie, where is the rationalist sin? …
Not every misstep in the precise dance of rationality consists of outright belief in a falsehood; there are
There's a subtle difference in focus between nurture culture as described here, and what I'd call "collaborative truthseeking." Nurture brings to mind helping people to grow. Collaborative brings to mind more like "we're on a team", which doesn't just mean we're on the same side, but that we each have some responsibilities to bring to the table.
Wow, I really love that this has been updated and appendix'd. It's really nice to see how this has grown with community feedback and gotten polished this from a rough concept.
Creating common knowledge on how 'cultures' of communication can differ seems really valuable for a community focused on cooperatively finding truth.
Promoted to curated: I think this post is quite exceptionally clear in pointing at an important distinction, and I've already referenced it a few times in the last two weeks, which is a good sign. I don't think this post necessarily says anything massively new, but I don't remember any write-up of similar clarity, and so I do think it adds a bunch to the intellectual commons.
Addressing ...
... "The tradeoffs between the two cultures" and the advantages of one or the other and ...
... examining these takeoffs is for purposes of evaluating Combat vs. Caring as truth-seeking tools —
We must bear in mind that when applying Caring norms, the claims made by a sufficiently emotionally brittle and/or exquisitely sensitive interlocutor can become unquestionable and unassailable by the truth-seeking process.
Any any attempt to invoke Caring norms needs to remain clearly cognizant that reality does not care about your feelings.
I’ve referred back to this multiple times and it has helped (e.g. at work) to get people to understand each other better.
This post highlighted one of the two main disagreements I see about LW conversationsal culture (the other being contextualizing vs. decoupling). Having a handle to refer to this thing is quite handy for common knowledge.
mod note: this post probably shouldn't have been included in the 2020 review. It was behaving a bit weirdly because it had appeared in a previous review, and it'd be a fair amount of coding work to get it to seamlessly display the correct number of reviews. It's similar to a post of mine in that it was edited substantially for the 2018 review and re-published in 2020, which updated it's postedAt date which resulted in it bypassing the intended filters of 'must have been published in 2020'
I had previously changed the postedAt date on my post to be pre-2020 so that it wouldn't appear here, and just did the same for this one.
I found the ideas behind Radical Candor to be quite useful. I think they're similar to ones here. Link
I've won practically every interaction I've ever had. I've become so good at winning that most people won't actually interact with me anymore.
This reminds me of the distinction between debate and dialectic. Both can be means to truth seeking, both have their own failure modes (debate can become about winning instead of the truth; dialectic can become confused without adequate experience with synthesis), and different people can have a preference for one over the other. Thinking in terms of a culture though is perhaps better suited to what's going on than talking about preference for a particular technique because it gets at something deeper fueling that preference for particular methods.
Als...
I propose these amendment to the essay at top:
1) "Nurture Culture makes a lot of sense in a world where criticism and disagreement are often [or are perceived to be] an attack or threat."
2) I question the reasonability of describing intellectual "criticism and disagreement" as "an attack or threat". I propose that this change "an attack or threat" -> "a threat to the ego of the target of the criticism or rebuttal".
My waving a knife can be reasonably inferred to be "an attack or threat" My statement that "your logic is faulty beca...
You are viewing Version 2 of this post: a major revision written for the LessWrong 2018 Review. The original version published on 9th November 2018 can be viewed here.
See my change notes for major updates between V1 and V2.
Combat Culture
I went to an orthodox Jewish high school in Australia. For most of my early teenage years, I spent one to three hours each morning debating the true meaning of abstruse phrases of Talmudic Aramaic. The majority of class time was spent sitting opposite your chavrusa (study partner, but linguistically the term has the same root as the word “friend”) arguing vehemently for your interpretation of the arcane words. I didn’t think in terms of probabilities back then, but if I had, I think at any point I should have given roughly even odds to my view vs my chavrusa’s view on most occasions. Yet that didn’t really matter. Whatever your credence, you argued as hard as you could for the view that made sense in your mind, explaining why your adversary/partner/friend’s view was utterly inconsistent with reality. That was the process. Eventually, you’d reach agreement or agree to disagree (which was perfectly legitimate), and then move onto the next passage to decipher.
Later, I studied mainstream analytic philosophy at university. There wasn’t the chavrusa, pair-study format, but the culture of debate felt the same to me. Different philosophers would write long papers explaining why philosophers holding opposite views were utterly confused and mistaken for reasons one through fifty. They’d go back and forth, each arguing for their own correctness and the others’ mistakeness with great rigor. I’m still impressed with the rigor and thoroughness of especially good analytic philosophers.
I’ll describe this style as combative, or Combat Culture. You have your view, they have their view, and you each work to prove your rightness by defending your view and attacking theirs. Occasionally one side will update, but more commonly you develop or modify your view to meet the criticisms. Overall, the pool of arguments and views develops and as a group you feel like you’ve made progress.
While it’s true that you’ll often shake your head at the folly of those who disagree with you, the fact that you’re bothering to discuss with them at all implies a certain minimum of respect and recognition. You don’t write lengthy papers or books to respond to people whose intellect you have no recognition of, people you don’t regard as peers at all.
There’s an undertone of countersignalling to healthy Combat Culture. It is because recognition and respect are so strongly assumed between parties that they can be so blunt and direct with each other. If there were any ambiguity about the common knowledge of respect, you couldn’t be blunt without the risk of offending someone. That you are blunt is evidence you do respect someone. This is portrayed clearly in a passage from Daniel’s Ellsberg recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (pp. 35-36):
That a senior member of the RAND group he had recently joined was willing to be completely direct in shooting down his idea didn’t cause the author to shut down in anguish and rejection, on the contrary, it made it author feel respected and included. I’ve found a home.
Nurture Culture
As I’ve experienced more of the world, I discovered that many people, perhaps even most people, strongly dislike combative discussions where they are being told that they are wrong for ten different reasons. I’m sure some readers are hitting their foreheads and thinking “duh, obvious,” yet as above, it’s not obvious if you’re used to a different culture.
While Combat Culture prioritizes directness and the free expression of ideas, in contrast, Nurture Culture prioritizes the comfort, wellbeing, and relationships of participants in a conversation. It wants everyone to feel safe, welcome, and well-regarded within a general spirit of “we’re on the same side here”.
Since disagreement, criticism, and pushback can all lead to feelings of distance between people, Nurture Culture tries to counter those potential effects with signals of goodwill and respect. Nurture Culture wants it to be clear that notwithstanding that I think your idea is wrong/stupid/confused/bad/harmful, that doesn’t mean that I think you’re stupid/bad/harmful/unwelcome/enemy, or that I don’t wish to continue to hear your ideas.
Nurture Culture makes a lot of sense in a world where criticism and disagreement are often an attack or threat– people talk at length about how their enemies and outgroups are mistaken, never about how they’re correct. Even if I have no intention to attack someone by arguing that they are wrong, I’m still providing evidence of their poor reasoning whenever I critique.
There is a simple entailment: holding a mistaken belief or making a poor argument is evidence of poor reasoning such that when I say you are wrong, I’m implying, however slightly, that your reasoning or information is poor. And each time you’re seen to be wrong, you (rightly) lose a few points in people’s estimation of you. It might be a tiny fractional loss of a point of respect and regard, but it can’t be zero.
So some fraction of the time people express disagreement because they generally believe it, but also in the wider world, a large fraction of the time people express disagreement it is as an attack [1]. A healthy epistemic Nurture Culture works to make it possible to safely have productive disagreement by showing that disagreement is safe and not intended as an attack.
To offer a concrete example of Nurture Culture and why you might want it, I wrote the following fictional account of Alex Percy:
IN A LESS NURTURING UNIVERSE
It might be a virtue to be tough and resilient, but it also costly to to bring that degree of emotional fortitude to bare. Someone might be pushing against a strong prior that they are unwelcome or that others are trying to make them push uphill contribute.
The first scenario describes Nurturing behavior. A busy senior manager signaling to the new person: “I’m going to give you a chance, I know you want to help.”
If nothing else, I expect the consulting firm where Nurturing behavior is commonplace to be a far more pleasant place to work, and probably better for people’s health and wellbeing.
The Key Cultural Distinction: Significance of a Speech-Act
It is possible to describe to Combat and Nurture cultures by where they fall on a number of dimensions such as adversarial-collaborative, “emotional effort and concern”, filtering, etc. I discuss these dimensions in Appendix 1.
However, I believe that the key distinction between Combat and Nurture cultures is found in one primary question:
By combative speech acts, I mean things like blatant disagreement, directly telling people they are wrong, and arguing one-sidedly against someone’s ideas with no attempt to find merit. The question is, within a culture, do these speech acts imply negative attitudes or have negative effects for the receiver? Or, conversely, are they treated like any other ordinary speech?
The defining feature of a Combat Culture is that these traditionally combative speech acts do not convey threat, attack, or disdain. Quite the opposite– when Herman Kahn says to Daniel Ellsberg, “you’re absolutely wrong”, Ellsberg interprets this as a sign of respect and inclusion. The same words said to Alex Percy by the senior managers of Euler Associates are likely to be interpreted as a painful “I’m not interested in you or what you have to say.”
And like in language in general, the significance of speech acts (combative or otherwise) needs to be coordinated between speakers and listeners. Obviously, issues arise when people from different cultures assign different meanings to the same thing in an interaction. Someone with Nurture Culture meanings associated to speech-acts can feel attacked in a Combative space. A Combatively-cultured person [2] in a Nurture culture space can make others feel attacked.
The prevailing culture often isn’t clear, and often spaces are mixed. You can imagine how that goes.
When does each culture make sense?
In the original version of this post, I mostly refrained from commenting on which culture was better. At this point, I think I can say a little more.
Combat Culture has a number of benefits that make it attractive, particularly for truth-seeking discussion: it has greater freedom of speech, no extra effort is required to phrase things politely, one doesn’t need to filter as much or dance around, and less attention is devoted to worrying about offending people.
And as Said Achmiz mentioned in a comment on the original post, “generally speaking, as people get to know each other, they tend to relax around each other, and drop down into a more “combative” orientation in discussions and debates with each other. They say what they think.” Or they outright countersignal. That’s some reason to have a generic preference for a culture where fewer speech acts parse as attacks or threats.
But Combat Culture only works when you’ve established that the standardly hostile speech acts aren’t unfriendly. It works when you’ve got a prior of friendliness, or have generally built up trust. And that means it tends to work well where people know each other well, have common interests, or some other strong factor that makes them feel aligned and on the same team. Something that creates a sense of trust and safety that you’re not being attacked even if your beliefs, works, or choices are.
Interestingly, while in any given particular exchange Combat Culture might seem to be more efficient and “pay less communicative overhead", that’s only possible because the Combat Culture previously invested “overhead” into creating a high-safety context. It is because you’ve spent so much time with a person and signaled so much caring and connection that you’re now able to bluntly tell them that they’re absolutely wrong.
However, there’s more than one path to being able to tell someone point-blank that they’re dead wrong. Being old friends is one method, but you also get the relevant kind of trust and safety in contexts where not everyone knows each other well, like in philosophy and mathematics departments, as well as my Talmud class and Ellsberg’s group at RAND.
In those contexts, I believe the mechanics work out to produce priors such as everyone makes mistakes; mistakes aren’t a big deal; you point out mistakes and move on. Perhaps it’s because in mathematics mistakes are very legible once identified and so everyone is seen to make them, or that for the whole endeavor to work, people have to people to point them out and people get completely used to it as normal. In philosophy, everyone’s been saying that everyone else is wrong for millennia. Someone saying you’re wrong just means you’re part of the game.
Somehow, these domains have done the work required to give blunt disagreement different significance than is normal in the wider world. They’ve set up conducive priors [A2] for healthy combat.
Combat without Safety, Nurture without Caring
One of my regrets with the original Combat vs Nurture post is that some people starting describing generically aggressive and combative conversation cultures as “Combat Culture.” No! I meant more specific and better! As clarified above, I meant specifically a culture where combative speech-acts aren’t perceived as threatening by people. If people do feel threatened or attacked, you don’t have a real Combat Culture!
Others pointed out that there are non-Combative cultures that aren’t actually nurturing at all. This is entirely correct. You can avoid blatantly being aggressive while still being neutral to hostile underneath. That isn’t what I meant to call Nurture Culture.
In a way, both Combat Culture and Nurture are my attempted steelmen for two legitimate conversational cultures which are situated within a larger space of many other conversational cultures. Abram Demski attempts to do a better job of carving up the entire space.
Know thyself and others
Compared to 5-10 years ago, I’ve updated that people operating in different cultures from my own are probably not evil. To my own surprise, I’ve seen myself both be an advocate for Combat and Nurture at different points.
I continue to think the most important advice in this space is being aware of both your own cultural tendencies and those of the people around you. Even if others are wrong, you’ll probably do better by understanding them and yourself relative to them.
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