Social wisdom classics

Mostly from the internet, a bunch of good vocabulary for thinking about how people communicate and work together.

Five Geek Social Fallacies

1. Ostracizers are evil
2. Friends accept me as I am
3. Friendship before all
4. Friendship is transitive
5. Friends do everything together

Ring theory

• The “Ring Theory” suggests that, in a crisis, we sit at the center of a set of social rings.
• When we face a crisis, the people closest to the crisis would fit around us in the first ring, and others fill outer rings the further they are from the crisis.
• The person in the center ring, and inner rings, can complain about the crisis to those in outer rings, but those in outer rings should offer only comfort and support to those in inner rings.

Ask culture vs Guess culture

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Ask vs Guess is a particularly vivid example of different cultural meta-communication styles in action. I recommend Deborah Tannen’s pop books about language & metacommunication not just for being good on the subject but as some of the books I most recommend, period: That’s Not What I Meant! introduces the subject in general and her book You Just Don’t Understand is very instructive on gendered communication patterns and their breakdowns, a not-evil not-sexist version of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I have a long Twitter thread mostly about gendered breakdowns in meta-communication. I also very strongly recommend the book Black And White Styles In Conflict about communication breakdowns which emerge from different styles in Black vs white meta-communcation which is powerful but also heartbreaking if one has any engagement in anti-racist work.

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness — and that is not the nature of a human group.

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free" social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.

The Missing Stair

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there's a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair.