I used to be envious of people who were best friends, and now I am lucky to find myself a third of a complementary trio of close friends. It’s been interesting to try to analyze our unspoken norms, our deep assumptions on how you’re supposed to interact with others, which has evidently yet unconsciously facilitated our friendship. Our friendship can be characterized by being highly conversation-intensive, which I highly enjoy.
Here are some characteristics we’ve identified, derived from informative cultural clashes with guests. It is derived from a collaborative draft, but I’m taking this as an exercise in editing it in the way I’d better understand it.
The identified norms:
-
separation of personal and factual Taste and logic are extremely distinct, and they both always matter. It’s assumed that all logic is motivated by emotion. There are no objective value judgments. Conversely, there’s always a logic to emotion. Everything outside of the driving emotional core can be challenged, including beliefs about the emotional core. But the fact that there is a core is a given, and it can never be wrong, because feelings are just feelings. We try very hard to distinguish statements of facts and statements of feeling.
-
separation of personal and societal We see society’s aesthetic as pretty arbitrary, so we don’t evaluate people’s worth in a broader societal-values sense and tend to come off as nonjudgmental. But we judge things as far as they relate to our interests/tastes; we find people uninteresting or aesthetically displeasing. Apparently, the norm is to put a lot of weight into your own and others’ societal worth.
-
moral truth seeking vs self-interested purity There is no responsibility to always look for more truth, because there’s so much of it, and also truth is instrumental so you should do what’s interesting to you. In other words, you are permitted to not care about lots of things and put model-flaws on the backburner, as long it is acknowledged as such. The expectation is in trying to purify/make consistent what you do model and care about. This is distinct from the rationalist norm, where there is moral responsibility to seek the truth immediately; here, truth-seeking is merely because you care.
-
good faith Everybody has coherent models and is trying to communicate clearly about them, so even if you disagree, assume that they have something else coherent in view. It’s assumed that mutual understanding is a long, slow process. The conversation is largely about clarifying all the facts so that a convergent understanding arises relatively trivially. At the object level, everything can be questioned, including somebody’s logic and standing. This is sustainable because at the meta level, we always trust each other to be able to align, and that’s why we’re here; it’s never in question as long as we’re present.
-
intention orientation It is hard to control emotion, so we tend to read intention much more heavily. This means that harsh tones are often taken impersonally and ignored, unless someone explicitly wants to put it on the table as a factor to consider. This allows the discussion to default towards attempting to build a coherent explanatory model, unless they explicitly want to switch modes towards having emotions assauged. The more prevalent norm seems to expect people to express their emotion right, so that interpreted emotion is assumed to be reality.
-
commitment We think it’s important to strive for global coherency in yourself and present yourself to other people with as much consistency as possible. You are expected to be the best judge of your values and have the best vantage point for considering the full trajectory of a decision (see 4. good faith). Therefore we are very accepting of others’ autonomy in decision-making, even if not well-understood. However, the decision maker is always responsible for the outcome. No resentment allowed. It seems more normal to share responsibility in decision-making i.e. resent someone for their influence on your decision.
Are there deeper trends behind these observations?
I wonder if these norms arise and converge due to the experience of having a more distant starting point relative to other people, so we are used to assuming a more naive and tolerant stance, combined with a desire to build and improve aesthetic internal frameworks with others. This prioritizes norms that make communication clearer and lower-stakes, especially of otherwise sensitive/taboo internal data and perceptions. In other words, this optimization gives us sufficient degrees of freedom to resolve seeming paradoxes.
This is rather tentative modeling; I am curious how the relatability (or not) to this description corresponds to real life experiences.
Innumerable thanks to O and B.
comments solicited, kludgey comment-able form here.