Link post Crosspost from Medium; relevant to LessWrong in general and possibly to specific ongoing cultural tensions of the past four months or so. Proposes a simple tool for improving culture-clash dynamics and offers some specifics about the cultural diff between the author and other people. 30min read.
(I’m not sure I’ve ever actually read this post the entire way through, but the "In My Culture" framing device has been occasionally useful.)
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For this reason, I wouldn’t want this post included in the 2019 highlights. I just looked at this for the review, and the part which some people report finding useful is in the brief description of the concept at the very beginning. The bulk of the post is a freeform, rambling exploration of the concept and its implications which I mostly couldn’t bring myself to focus on; this exploratory style seems totally appropriate for a personal blog post, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d want to read if I were looking back at a curated list of the best stuff from 2019.
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(I strong upvoted this comment because it is wise.)
In the spirit of "how could this post be improved, such that it makes sense to include in a ‘Best Of’, or otherwise enter into Lesswrong’s longterm memory", my suggestion would be "publish an summary version which is just an abridgment of the current piece’s introduction plus maaaybe a few selected paragraphs from deeper in, probably no need to bother writing any new words."
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(note: it’d actually be helpful if you re-posted this as a Review comment so that our system for checking which posts have been reviewed at least once can notice it)
I don’t think the current implementation of this post is ideal (the phrase "In my culture..." doesn’t seem to always translate with the intended connotations, in particular online in low-context settings). But, I think the general problem this post was trying to solve is quite important, and I think it’s at least an incremental improvement over the status quo to have this concept-handle. I think of "how to navigate divergent cultural expectations" as one of the central coordination (and rationality) problems we face. I think it’s significant that it’s cultural, rather than simply "a set of personal practices" because I think humans are largely built out of culture, and even imaginary cultures have weight. And as Malcolm Ocean notes in Reveal Culture, it often matters a lot that there be shared cultural assumptions. Meanwhile, there are competing access needs that different cultures can attempt to resolve in different ways. Archipelago is good, even if it’s leadership bottlenecked. So, having tools that are specifically for resolving cultural clashes seems pretty important.