(og thread) every group of people develops some set of norms, and there is typically friction when a new entrant joins the group and violates those norms. and not many people are good at navigating this with grace. good comedians do tremendous public service when they help with this

a bunch of the relatively benign-ish stuff that gets called sexism, racism, some transphobia, etc is actually this; people being confused and angry about deviance from norms. I’m not saying the -isms aren’t real, but rather that some of it is resolvable misunderstanding. and resolving the misunderstandings actually makes it easier to address the worse stuff properly. conflating different degrees of badness muddies up everything unproductively, all sensible people know this.

I’ve been thinking/feeling that a good on-ramp to explain this is to talk about the experience of “being the new guy”. Everyone has at some point been the new guy somewhere, and everyone has witnessed some new guy show up somewhere. At school, work, whatever

and there’s this whole act of negotiation that has to play out, right. and there are all these possible variables, like how welcoming/open is the group to the new guy, how respectful is the new guy of existing group norms. what if some of those norms are bad, actually…

as someone who has been the new guy multiple times in multiple contexts, and has experimented with my approaches, I believe I’ve learned that there are ways to operate that are just straight up more effective than others. This is semi-subjective but I don’t think it’s entirely so

second time today I’ve started a thread and realized oh no I’m not gonna be able to cover everything 😂 this be an infinitely messy, hairy problem, but an important one. I have a couple of long rambly videos on YouTube abt this, navigating cultural differences…

but I guess the main thing I wanted to gesture at here is that, not all misunderstandings are calamitous. some are resolvable. and little progresses are worth making. I think this is a recurring theme I’m trying to develop. About cultivating understandings, solo and shared

zooming out from this particular thread, yea I feel like… I have been tinkering and shuffling for months now trying to externalize and share my understandings. somehow that feels different than “learnings” or “knowledge”