How to communicate

with humans

2019-04-02 — 2025-11-27

Wherein the art of communication is described, assertive speech is proposed as an emotional lingua franca, crunch‑mode trade‑offs are analysed, and asking is recommended over guesswork.

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Figure 1

Communicating in the highly artificial situations of modern life is a skill. They’re crucial skills. Often not taught. Worse, we systematically fail to realize we lack them.

Here are some resources I use to work on these skills. I analyze these in a broader social context, for example speech standards.

1 Assertive communication

Back and Back’s classic (and cheap) Assertiveness at work is short, clear, and has practical exercises. I buy copies of this in bulk and give them to friends facing workplace friction. This book is really good; I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not least because the downside risk of a $5 second-hand book is low. Back, Back, and Bates (1991):

We use the word ‘assertion’ … to refer to behaviour that involves:

  • Standing up for your own rights in such a way that you do not violate another person’s rights
  • Expressing your needs, wants, opinions, feelings and beliefs in direct, honest and appropriate ways

We will demonstrate this with an example. Suppose your manager asked you to complete some additional work by the end of the month. You are the best person to do the work, but your time is already fully committed to other work. An assertive response in this situation would be:

“I appreciate that you would like this work completed by the end of the month. However, I don’t see that I can fit it in with my workload as it is at present, so can we discuss it?”

So assertiveness is based on the beliefs that in any situation:

  • You have needs to be met
  • The other people involved have needs to be met
  • You have rights; so do others
  • You have something to contribute; so do others

The aim of assertive behaviour is to satisfy the needs and wants of both parties involved in the situation.

This is one of those things that isn’t rocket science when we read it back to ourselves, but in my experience it’s poorly taught everywhere.

I really like their framing. They discuss assertive speech as a standard of communication that we can mutually agree upon, which, if we all accede to, will lower overall stress. It is a proposal for an emotional lingua franca.

Occasionally I get pushback from people who don’t like the assertiveness ideal. What about people who are raised in a culture where they can never assert their own needs? What about people who have particular communicative challenges that make it hard to be assertive? What about toxic environments where assertiveness is punished? What about minorities who are punished for assertiveness?

Yes, fair enough. Some people face barriers that make it hard to express themselves, whether internal or external. I don’t want to claim that anyone is a bad person for not being assertive. I do, however, argue that it’s a good ideal, and its underlying concepts are useful for analysis.

  1. Naming communication styles is a good idea so we can be aware that there are communication styles and what each of these styles implies.
  2. The authors’ taxonomy of assertive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive communication gives us a useful vocabulary for discussing different communicative moves.
  3. The assertive communication style is a good lingua franca, which is not to say the only language anyone should speak. As with any cross-cultural communication situation, if other dialects are in play we can negotiate to speak them too; learning dialects can sometimes be a worthwhile price to pay.

Not yet read:

Negotiation trainer Misha Glouberman is, of course, eloquent on the Dave McRaney podcast: How to have better conversations with loved ones (and just about anyone) about difficult topics (and just about anything). His work seems to be based on work like Stone and Heen (2011) and Ury and Fisher (2012).

2 On crunch mode

I was recently asked:

In a high-urgency environment […] ‘moving fast’ often conflicts with building an inclusive and psychologically safe culture. How do you personally feel about this trade-off? When, if ever, is it acceptable to sacrifice team well-being or good processes for the sake of speed?

My response:

It’s myopically acceptable when it is empirically supported as an optimal move for a given project. On the one hand, there is much empirical evidence that in the long run psychological safety is upstream of high-performing teams (Kim, Lee, and Connerton 2020; Edmondson 1999), so our priors should favour psychologically safe environments, in some sense, by default, and update when there is empirical counter-evidence, rather than a single high-status individual unilaterally declaring that they can, e.g., play dominance games in the absence of credible evidence that it will benefit the project.

We can have both, by which I mean a psychologically safe, consensual negotiation of risky work practices. In my previous crunch-mode projects I negotiated unsustainable, risky psychological environments, relying on prior trust. In the best cases I did this by estimating the organizational debt incurred. For an example from a previous team it seems to take about 3 months to recover relationally plus about 2 weeks of leave individually from 3 months of sprint-mode (10 hour day, 7 day weeks, playing by Crocker’s rules for all comms.). Generally people in such teams are not able to resume crunch mode for quite a while. A sprint that fits that description is ex ante worth it, if the expected value of sprint-mode is greater than the cost of dissolving that team for about 3 months and suffering from the reduced capacity of the breaks all participants need.

I emphasise that this kind of stunt was feasible for this team because we had already negotiated a high-trust relationship in which we could make this call, and a clear-eyed evaluation of the counterfactual EV; I don’t think you get to skip either of those.

Imagine an organization which constantly required crunch-mode unsustainable practices and did not provide evidence that the associated burn down of organizational and human capital was worthwhile, nor negotiated prior sufficient trust to engage crunch mode. What reason would we have to suppose that such an organization was either ethical, or aligned to actually delivering impact? If we claimed to be interested in aligning algorithms, would we, additionally, face a credibility problem if we used a misaligned mechanism to research alignment? Ultimately, an environment that has an appetite for baseless imposition of psychological risk might differentially select for individuals who enjoy imposing psychologically unhealthy conditions on staff for their own reasons, rather than relying on evidence and consent. It would filter out high-value team members who need a higher degree of psychological safety and are nonetheless worth keeping because of their extreme value-add.

I’m aware that some people would mention Tesla or SpaceX as examples of psychologically unsafe, high-performing organizations. I’m not an expert in the internals of such organizations. I agree that in themselves they are high performing. OTOH, I’ve met enough burned-out Tesla alumni who have gone on to behave dysfunctionally and counterproductively in their subsequent projects that I suspect these organizations are imposing a burden of burned-out “hard-core” engineers upon their fields which is not usually accounted for.

3 Non-aggressive communication

Dave Bailey summarises Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, whose key advice is similar. It looks similar to the FBI Behavioral Change Stairway Model, (Vecchi, Van Hasseltb, and Romano 2005) which they use for hostage negotiations and suicide threats, so it’s literally a battle-tested system in that regard.

Deep canvassing is probably in this category (Broockman and Kalla 2016). A convenient Dave McRaney podcast on this theme.

Figure 2

4 Principle of charity

Ethics Explainer: The principle of charity

The principle of charity suggests we should try to understand ideas before criticising them.

Arguments should aim at finding the truth, not winning the fight.

Figure 3: The misanthrope is robbed by the world

Nate Soares, Assuming Positive Intent

I believe that the ability to expect that conversation partners are well-intentioned by default is a public good. An extremely valuable public good. When criticism turns to attacking the intentions of others, I perceive that to be burning the commons.

Obviously some people in the world don’t want positive things, and we need to be aware of that. However, importing the communicative norms of, say, political Twitter or some other such weaponised battlefield into intimate communication will kill trust before it’s born.

I personally love this. But I need to point out that we can’t do this unilaterally. Maintaining trust in positive intent requires successfully playing an iterative conversation game together. Assuming positive intent is more or less playing “cooperate first”.

5 Negotiating communicative styles

Figure 4

Trust dancing is a fun term coined by Malcolm Ocean.

The term here is supposed to highlight a meta-protocol for negotiating the actual communicative protocol we will use, rather than assuming that everyone can work with whatever system we’re used to. In practice, successful multicultural societies seem good at this.

This resonates with me because I recently had a falling out with a flatmate who found my classic conversational gambits triggering — what I thought was active listening and non-violent communication felt manipulative and/or patronising to her. How should we progress a discussion in such circumstances?

I find Piper Harron’s post Why I Do Not Talk About Math troubling. Is this a parable about failing to negotiate a satisfactory communicative style despite great effort?

Nobody was mean to me, nobody consciously laughed at me. There’s just a way that mathematicians have been socialized (I guess?!) to interact with each other that I find oppressive. If you have never had someone mansplain or whitesplain things to you, it may be hard for you to understand what I’m going to describe.

I find it hard, but I want to understand this example.

For me, the norms in mathematics are kinda fun. I find tone-deaf, argumentative environments homely most days. If I don’t enjoy it on a particular day, I can usually negotiate something different. Some people feel they don’t have the scope to do that, and for all I know they’re correct. How to fix?1

5.1 Asking

This is an important norm worth making explicit. See ‘Askers’ vs. ‘Guessers’, which credits Metafilter user tangerine from MetaFilter:

This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets 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.

A recent podcast discussion of this was Spencer Greenberg’s Guess culture vs. ask culture (with Will Eden and Sam Rosen). I take issue with that podcast, though — I felt it weak-manned the case for asking. The pro-asking advocate seemed to describe asking culture as cultivating an expectation of tendentious, provocative questions in situations with marginal psychological safety. For me, the central idea of asking is that an efficient way of negotiating psychological safety is to ask about things, even those that seem taboo, and to take the answers at face value. Conversely, when in doubt, ambiguous needs can be clarified and the explanations should be taken at face value. This is much simpler and, to my mind, less exclusionary than, for example, communication systems that require high degrees of in-group tacit knowledge.

Asking can be taken to excess — asking someone about a recent traumatic experience isn’t being an Asker; it’s being tactless in a context where asking isn’t safe. However, in day-to-day life, I think it’s the way. I feel better when people assume less about me, and I feel better when I assume less about others. This means that, when talking to someone I don’t know, I can reduce my reliance on stereotypes and prejudice and increase my capacity to take people as they are, rather than reducing them to a caricature of their group. Guessing culture is for closed in-groups, psychotherapy sessions, social workers amongst fraught populations, and so on. That is, I hew close to Jonathan Chait’s opinion, Ask, Don’t Guess:

Guessers are wrong, and Askers are right. Asking is how you actually determine what the Asker wants and the giver is willing to receive. Guessing culture is a recipe for frustration.

What’s more, Guessers, who are usually trying to be nice and are holding themselves to a higher level of politeness, ruin things for the rest of us. I’m not a super hospitable guy, but I frequently find myself offering things to other people that I’d like them to take—say, leave their kids at my house to play with my kids—but they refuse to take because they think I’m a Guesser, offering hospitality I secretly hope will be turned down. Guessers are what forces people with poor social discernment, like me, to regard all kinds of interactions as a minefield of awkwardness.

5.2 Crocker’s rules

Here’s a name for a norm I sometimes notice and enjoy in academia: Crocker’s rules.

Declaring yourself to be operating by “Crocker’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimise their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker’s Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind — if you’re offended, it’s your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favour. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone’s afraid to tell you you’re wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker’s Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting. Obviously, don’t declare yourself to be operating by Crocker’s Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline.

Note that Crocker’s Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don’t have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker’s Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker’s Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker’s Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received — not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favour.

By framing these as a consensual communication strategy, we defang one problem with brusque communication — different people interpret it differently; for some it’s aggression, for others it’s respect for another person’s time.

I’m part of many academic email exchanges that are ‘cleanskin’ Crocker exchanges, and I find them effective. [TODO clarify]

6 Decoupling

A term for dealing with arguments based on their content rather than their context. For me, this is something we need to do to make progress. I accept that decoupling must be accomplished rather than assumed.

Much has been written on this theme. For an example, see A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy, and for some background, see Decoupling revisited.

Question: Is decoupling possible in conflict-theoretic worldviews?

Helpful insight: Decoupling as a Moral Decision.

The Motte is a miniature subreddit spinoff that attempts to be all-decoupling, all the time. It is hard work, especially in an open public sphere where people are constantly coming in and messing it up. It’s also kind of addictive.

7 Workplace in particular

See workplace habits.

8 As a manager

See managing

9 Compliments

11 Intimately

See relationships

12 …with me

Here are my current communicative preferences, affordances, and commitments.

I’d like to work with people to learn true things: truth is good, it can be used to make the world better, and that in turn makes truths about it more beautiful. To that end, I invite your disagreement, criticism, and collaboration on knowledge, and, I guess, on life itself.

Disagreement is one of the hardest things to do in conversation. Here’s some background for communicating with me generally, especially about disagreement.

  • Native English speaker.
  • Obligate extrovert.
  • Generally interested in people and their wonderful weirdness and variety.
  • I attach a high value to kindness, empathy, equity, truth, and respect for other humans, and do my best to model that, or at least fake it until I make it.
  • My preferences are valid. So are yours. Let’s negotiate.
  • My metamorphosis from guesser to asker is complete, and I’m having trouble remembering how guessers work.
  • Going by my history, many of my opinions are wrong, and I can be persuaded to change them, though it usually takes a few tries.
  • I try not to believe many things, but I assign high certainty to some—probably more than I’d prefer.
  • I do my best to welcome and learn from your criticism of my opinions. (If I know you well enough, I’m game to play by Crocker’s rules).
  • We don’t need to get it right the first time. I’m happy to have do-overs, and for either of us to revoke what we said last time.
  • I think every topic is open for discussion, although not in every context.
  • At the same time, we need to discuss things with care and compassion, because while disagreement is not violence, speech can sometimes be a form of violence. If you don’t agree, you probably don’t know anyone who has been in an abusive relationship, and you are blessed.
  • I believe an argument’s force is primarily dictated by its logical and observational content, not who makes it (which is not to say your identity doesn’t influence the observations you make, or the discussions we might have).
  • I start from the assumption of positive intent, and in particular…
  • I do my best to take your statements at face value rather than as memetic warfare, unless you make it clear you intend otherwise.
  • I might enjoy debating with you in a contrary, contentious fashion, in the Rational Style if you were game for that.
  • If you tell me that something will burn me, I’ll probably touch it.
  • I am ready to play stag before rabbit.
  • My weak suit is the silent treatment. If you freeze me out without explanation, I’ll have trouble assuming you mean well. A short explanation of what’s going on would be high value if you could manage it.

In short, I’m a stroppy, empathetic extrovert who aspires to the possibility of reasonable discussion, and who would probably like you if you have interesting opinions.

13 Incoming

Online comment moderation advice (I’d like this to be data-backed): A Pragmatic Approach To Thorny People Problems.

Ian Leslie, Ten causes of breakdown in communication. The top one is excellent: believing you have communicated.

Gaël Varoquaux on Technical maintenance discussions.

Ozy Brennan on covert contracts.

no hello is a handy webpage about why one should not start chats with “hey”.

Cooperative Overlap.

See also personality tests; If I recall correctly, there’s some communicative stuff there.

Academic writing is not so much brusque as verbosely passive-aggressive. We don’t talk inside the ivory towers in the same style in which we declaim from them, or at least my teams don’t.

  • The meta-protocol for human trust-building

  • Reveal Culture

  • “You know nothing”: a conversational mindset

  • Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

    Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

    It’s easy to assume that givers are virtuous and takers are villainous, but that’s giver propaganda. Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still. Takers can paddle for both sides, relieving their partners of the duty to generate the next thing.

Jeff Guenther:

8 really vulnerable questions to ask your partner that will deepen your connection.

  1. What was your first impression of me, and how has it changed since we’ve been together?
  2. What is something you love about our relationship, and what is something you think we could work on?
  3. Can you share a moment in our relationship when you felt especially close or connected to me? What made that moment special?
  4. What is one thing you wish I understood better about you, or something you’ve hesitated to share with me?
  5. How do you feel about the balance between giving and receiving in our relationship? Are there areas where you’d like to see more reciprocity?
  6. What’s a fear or concern you have about our future together? How can we address it as a team?
  7. Can you tell me about a time when you felt truly supported or understood by me? What made you feel that way?
  8. What is your favourite memory of us, and what do you hope for our future together?

14 References

Acemoglu, Chernozhukov, and Yildiz. 2006. “Learning and Disagreement in an Uncertain World.” Working Paper 12648.
Back, Back, and Bates. 1991. Assertiveness at Work: A Practical Guide to Handling Awkward Situations.
Broockman, and Kalla. 2016. “Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing.” Science.
Cheng, Bernstein, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, et al. 2017. “Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions.” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
Edmondson. 1999. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly.
Goel, Mason, and Watts. 2010. “Real and Perceived Attitude Agreement in Social Networks.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Grant. 2017. “The Third ‘Generation’ of Workplace Coaching: Creating a Culture of Quality Conversations.” Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice.
Hodson, Rush, and Macinnis. 2010. “A joke is just a joke (except when it isn’t): cavalier humor beliefs facilitate the expression of group dominance motives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Kim, Lee, and Connerton. 2020. “How Psychological Safety Affects Team Performance: Mediating Role of Efficacy and Learning Behavior.” Frontiers in Psychology.
Kruger, Epley, Parker, et al. 2005. “Egocentrism over e-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Schulman. 2017. Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair.
Sillars, and Zorn. 2021. “Hypernegative Interpretation of Negatively Perceived Email at Work.” Management Communication Quarterly.
Stone, and Heen. 2011. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.
Tan, Niculae, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, et al. 2016. “Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-Faith Online Discussions.” In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. WWW ’16.
Ury, and Fisher. 2012. Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in.
Vecchi, Van Hasseltb, and Romano. 2005. “Crisis (Hostage) Negotiation: Current Strategies and Issues in High-Risk Conflict Resolution.” Aggression and Violent Behavior.
Weitzel, and Center for Creative Leadership, eds. 2019. Feedback That Works: How to Build and Deliver Your Message. The Ideas into Action Series.

Footnotes

  1. NB: I’m not qualified to assess Harron’s research for novelty, but I can say her science communication is seriously innovative and top-grade; it would have been a loss to the field if she had given up. See her thesis for wonderfully comprehensible explanations of deep algebraic weirdness that most people would consider inscrutable.↩︎