And the short answer to that is “well, the group standard is what everyone else believes the group standard is”. And this is the exact context in which social miasma dynamics come into play. To any individual in a group, it can easily be the case that they think the group standard seems dumb, but in a situation of risk aversion, the important part is that you do things that look to everyone like the kind of thing that others would think is part of the standard.
Combat general social miasma dynamics (e.g. by running surveys or otherwise collapsing a bunch of the weird social uncertainty that makes things insane). Public conversations seem like they should help a bunch, though my sense is that if the conversation ends up being less about the object-level and more about persecuting people (or trying to police what people think) this can make things worse.
My general sense is that we can do a lot to surface what we as a community actually believe and that will help a lot here.
Yeah, I’m confused about this. Seems like some amount of “collapsing social uncertainty” is very good for healthy community dynamics, and too much (like having a live ranking of where you stand) would be wildly bad. I don’t think I currently have a precise way of cutting these things. My current best guess is that the more you push to make the work descriptive, the better, and the more it becomes normative and “shape up!”-oriented, the worse, but it’s hard to know exactly what ratio of descriptive:normative you’re accomplishing via any given attempt at transparency or common knowledge creation.
I’m nervous about non-representative samples (such as only polling people who are active on Twitter) to strongly inform important decisions, but in general I am supportive of doing some polling to learn what people tend to think. I’d rather have some rough data on what people want than simply going by “vibes” and by what the people I read/talk to tend to say.
My general sense is that we can do a lot to surface what we as a community actually believe and that will help a lot here.
eg Polls like this where we learn what the median respondent actually thinks https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ea-strategy-1/analytics
Yeah, I’m confused about this. Seems like some amount of “collapsing social uncertainty” is very good for healthy community dynamics, and too much (like having a live ranking of where you stand) would be wildly bad. I don’t think I currently have a precise way of cutting these things. My current best guess is that the more you push to make the work descriptive, the better, and the more it becomes normative and “shape up!”-oriented, the worse, but it’s hard to know exactly what ratio of descriptive:normative you’re accomplishing via any given attempt at transparency or common knowledge creation.
Sorry what do you mean here? With my poll specifically? The community in general?
Ratio of descriptive: “this is how things are” to normative: “shape up”
I’m nervous about non-representative samples (such as only polling people who are active on Twitter) to strongly inform important decisions, but in general I am supportive of doing some polling to learn what people tend to think. I’d rather have some rough data on what people want than simply going by “vibes” and by what the people I read/talk to tend to say.