Published on July 19, 2025 10:22 PM GMT
Author's note: These days, my thoughts go onto my substack by default, instead of onto LessWrong. Everything I write becomes free after a week or so, but it’s only paid subscriptions that make it possible for me to write. If you find a coffee’s worth of value in this or any of my other work, please consider signing up to support me; every bill I can pay with writing is a bill I don’t have to pay by doing other stuff instead. I also accept and greatly appreciate one-time donations of any size.
I.
You’ve probably seen that scene where someone reaches out to give a comforting hug to the poor sad abused traumatized orphan and/or battered wife character, and the poor sad abused traumatized orphan and/or battered wife flinches.
Aw, geez, we are meant to understand. This poor person has had it so bad that they can’t even recognize this offer of love and support for what it is. They’ve been trained to expect only violence, so they recoil by reflex. Tragic.
In fiction, the misunderstanding is almost always immediately clear, and generally straightforward to solve (even if it takes the characters time to prove themselves, and build up the necessary trust and safety).
But that’s in part because (the way these scenes are usually written) the flinch is not itself an attack. It doesn’t harm the would-be hugger, who is usually a character with lots of emotional resources to spare.
II.
It’s not hard to imagine the version of the scene where the flinch does harm the hugger—if, say, the hugger has offered hundreds of hugs, over and over again, for years on end, and has literally never hurt the poor sad abused traumatized orphan and/or battered wife character, nor even raised their voice at them.
(Sure, we’d like to be infinitely noble and patient, such that a lack of response to our “obvious” good intentions doesn’t ever start to wear on us. But many of us aren’t infinitely patient. After being nothing but open and supportive a hundred times in a row, many of us want/hope/expect/need for there to be some visible progress. And often, there isn’t, and often, this hurts. Even though it’s not personal, it can start to feel personal, in a seriously, what do I have to do to prove myself, here? sort of way.)
Or perhaps the scene takes place in public, in a space where the would-be hugger’s reputation is not fully secure. Perhaps there are strangers around who might look askance—people who would see the flinch and leap to the conclusion that the flinch is about the hugger—that the hugger is the reason this person has a flinch reflex in the first place.
Again, as the hugger, we might hope to be the bigger person, in such a situation—to breeze through it with confidence and ease. But it’s probably not hard to imagine feeling a spike of social panic, and it’s probably not hard to imagine that panic turning into something less than perfect, angelic behavior. Sometimes you’ve had a hard week, and you’re not fully on top of your game.
III.
A flinch, by itself, is usually not an attack. But sometimes defense is active rather than passive. Sometimes, instead of merely flinching, the poor sad abused traumatized orphan and/or battered wife will slap the hugger’s arm away.
To be extremely clear: that’s also not an attack! But it might read as one, to the hugger, and this isn’t always entirely unreasonable (especially since the hugger might walk away with an actual bruise).
Analogously: Alexis innocently asks a question that they think is completely innocuous. But Bryce, sensitized by a bunch of previous sad experience, thinks they smell a setup, or something disingenuous—an attempt to dismiss or belittle or mock or extort that’s merely posing as a question—and shuts Alexis down hard.
The source of tragedy here is a deep cultural mismatch. Bryce lives in a world where attacks are frequent, and can come from any direction, and thus you have to have your shields up at all times and your sword loose in its scabbard.
(And also everyone knows this and expects this, and thus no one takes it personally and no one thinks you ought to be doing anything differently, what do you mean, leave the house without your sword, do you want to get yourself killed?)
Alexis, on the other hand, comes from a place where attacks are rare and unusual, and thus seeing Bryce ease their sword in its sheath feels like a threat. Alexis might not have even clocked that Bryce was carrying a sword, nobody does that around here, I thought that was a walking stick or a prop or something, are you kidding me, what the fuck is going on?
IV.
An acquaintance of mine once pointed out that, if you never let the silence stretch for more than five or ten seconds during conversation, there are entire genres of conversation that you never get to experience.
Like, conversations that include thirty-second pauses aren’t just … the same as faster-paced conversations, except for the pauses. They’re not otherwise-normal conversations that simply happen slower. Things happen in those thirty seconds that do not and cannot happen when the flow of words is more-or-less nonstop. There are complicated thoughts that can’t be thought in less than thirty seconds, and so if you want to have the sort of conversation that includes that sort of thought, the long pauses are an absolutely necessary precondition.
Similarly: there are kinds of conversation (and kinds of interaction, and experiences generally) that you cannot have, in a world where everyone walks around gripping the hilt of their swords. There’s a reason we have a trope of certain conversations being easier to have in the safety and privacy of your own living room, with only your closest friends present. Certain topics require a hefty dose of good faith and charity and patience and shared context; there’s vulnerability and intimacy that aren’t a good idea in a world where lots of sharp things might try to poke you, and where your own attempt to extend a friendly hand might be interpreted as an attack.
(Or taken advantage of by violent people who see an opportunity to yank you off balance.)
(Sorry, I’m mixing all the metaphors, here. Hopefully it’s making sense.)
What this all adds up to, in practice, is that it’s not easy for Alexis and Bryce to coexist, in the same spaces. Alexis’s open invitations are perceived by Bryce as threats or traps; Bryce’s reasonable self-defense is perceived by Alexis as an accusation or an attack.
V.
Unfortunately, this incompatibility means that, to the extent that Alexis’s nice quiet peaceful suburban neighborhood is a pleasant and enjoyable place to be, often Bryce isn’t welcome. There’s a fragile cooperative equilibrium among all the people who’ve collectively lowered their weapons. Someone wearing violence-colored glasses, who interprets neutral moves as dangerous and responds with heightened alertness, is threatening that equilibrium.
(I’m saying all of this very quickly rather than diving in deeply, but one way to think about this is that from Alexis’s perspective, Bryce is hitting “defect” on a prisoner’s dilemma, and after you’ve been defected on a couple of times, you start hitting defect yourself. Or, to gesture at it another way: many humans have an emotional subroutine that goes something like “if I’m going to be punished as if I was being mean/rude/violent/whatever, when I wasn’t, then I might as well stop putting in the effort to be nice.”)
Which leaves us with a puzzle. If Bryce wants to escape from their darker, more dangerous world to the quiet, peaceful suburbs—
(And if we want to help Bryce with this endeavor, which I’m going to assume that we do.)
—then what do we do?
In most cases, it’s not going to work to simply declare to Bryce that This Place Is Safe, Actually. For starters, Bryce’s deeper emotional systems and psychological reflexes aren’t going to switch gears overnight. And to make matters worse, in Bryce’s world, that’s the sort of thing abusers and cults say all the time, to lure in their unsuspecting victims. It’s unwise to lower your shields just because someone told you it was safe to do so.
What Bryce needs is time in the safer environment. Time to gather evidence of its actual safety, time for new patterns of behavior to slowly etch themselves into their mind. Bryce needs a bunch of consecutive instances of nobody attacking them, so their defensive reflexes can start to gather rust, become more slow to fire.
But during that time, those defenses are going to keep firing! Repeatedly! Bryce will be radiating precisely the-thing-the-space-crucially-needs-to-not-have, polluting the environment with behavior that (from Bryce’s perspective) is entirely reasonable and justified and necessary. It’s like taking someone from a family where the only way to be heard was to talk over everyone else, and dropping them into a conversation full of thirty-second-thinkers. Bryce’s default way of being is lethal to the vibe.
VI.
The solution, according to me, is to make more grayspaces.
If you’ve ever hand-washed dishes in an industrial kitchen, you might have had the experience of dunking all the dirty dishes in one big filthy tub, where the largest chunks of food and gunk get loosened up and scrubbed away.
Then you transfer the mostly clean dish to a much-cleaner tub of clear soapy water, where it gets more-or-less disinfected.
(Sometimes there’s a third tub of soapless water, to wash off the soap, or sometimes you just rinse under a faucet.)
The soapy tub (and the rinse tub, if it exists) are grayspaces. They’re transitional places specifically designed for moving the plates from one state—in this case, “dirty”—to another state—in this case, “clean.”
(The key is that you don’t try to make the dirty dishes cleaner by just … throwing them in among the clean plates. Throwing a dirty dish in among the clean plates tends to just make all the plates dirty.)
A grayspace is a transitional cultural space. It’s not quite one culture and it’s not quite the other. It’s a halfway house. It’s designed to pull people from one culture toward the other, scaffolding their transformation. It’s a training ground, not just for surface-level norms and behaviors, but also for the soul.
Extremely importantly: grayspaces aren’t the same as The Final Cultural Space. Things which can only happen in the final cultural space don’t happen in the grayspace.
(You don’t eat off of plates while they’re in the soapy tub.)
I’m highlighting this because I think a great many people, from a great many subcultures, care quite a lot about making those subcultures accessible, and being welcoming to newcomers.
But I think a lot of people from a lot of subcultures end up asking the wrong question. I hear people say “how can we make this space welcoming to beginners?” which is not at all the same as “how can we make sure that beginners can eventually get to this space?”
(Without getting frustrated or demoralized or excluded or what-have-you.)
I think people consistently underweight the damage that can be done to a space, by eager and well-meaning novices who lack the capacity to even understand the harm they are doing, to the local norms and culture. I think spacemakers fail to realize that they can build an airlock (or, perhaps more marketably, an on-ramp), and that the airlock/on-ramp doesn’t have to be inside the space itself.
(It can be next to it. You know—like an airlock, or an on-ramp.)
If you think of the target space as a place where An Unusual Good Thing Happens, based on five or six special preconditions that make that target space different from the broader outside world...
...then the grayspace is the place where those five or six special preconditions are being laid down. The Unusual Good Thing isn’t actually happening in the grayspace. It isn’t even being attempted. And The Unusual Good Thing isn’t being exposed to people who don’t have the prereqs down pat.
VII.
Bible school is a grayspace, and so is kindergarten. Residencies at training hospitals are grayspaces. Colleges mostly aren’t grayspaces, but many specific undergraduate programs are, and most graduate programs definitely are. The Center for Applied Rationality, where I used to be the curriculum director, ran four-and-a-half-day retreat workshops that were definitely a grayspace for transitioning people into the broader rationalist milieu.
(A diplomatic community is a good example of a liminal cultural space that isn’t a grayspace. Diplomatic communities bring together people from many different cultures, and they have their own special rules that allow those people to rub shoulders and coexist, but the goal of a diplomatic community isn’t education or conversion or assimilation, it’s non-transformative communication and cooperation. Diplomats and ambassadors aren’t supposed to “leave” their home culture in any meaningful sense, and when it happens by accident it’s often considered to be something of a problem.)
When I was twelve years old, my parents took me to Lee Brothers’ Tae Kwon Do Academy in Burlington, North Carolina. We met with (now Grand)master Sang Ho Lee in a small room with a padded floor and cinderblock walls and mirrors all along one side, where he showed us a short video on VHS and then taught me a small handful of movements to get a sense of me as a learner before agreeing to accept me as a “no-belt” student.
As a twelve-year-old, I thought that I was in, right from the beginning. After just three days, I got my white belt, and Master Lee wrote my name in Hangul on the lapel of my uniform. In my first month of training, I learned how to count to twenty in Korean, and two dozen other words and phrases besides. After six months, I had memorized the Lee Brothers’ Code, which was about twenty lines long and recited in full at the start of every class. For the first time in my life, I called other people “sir” and “ma’am” and actually meant it. I learned to bow—not just to the instructors and the other students, but to the dojang itself, as I entered and exited. Taking off my shoes at the door quickly changed from being something I had to remember to being something that just felt right.
(Or, more accurately, wearing shoes on the mats started to feel wrong, to the point that I had a hard time adjusting when I later joined a parkour gym with a matted floor.)
And yet. There’s a common saying in martial arts that it’s not until you earn your black belt that you truly start learning. It’s sort of like how picking up the alphabet and a few hundred words is a prerequisite for reading real books.
And indeed, when I entered Lee Brothers’ advanced classes at the age of fifteen, things really were different. Those classes took for granted so much—not only the foundational physical skills, but also the discipline, the motivation, the fundamental attitude. They were predicated on the assumption that everyone present shared the same cultural foundation, the same way that a calculus professor assumes their students understand algebra.
I hadn’t even noticed that the first three years of training were transitional, but they were—at one point, Master Lee tried adding a young, skilled fighter from outside the school directly into the advanced group, but it didn’t work (even though he was objectively more skilled than almost all of us, as far as raw physicality is concerned).
He didn’t fit in. He didn’t grok the vibe. His default way-of-being was disruptive to the vibe, and ultimately he was sent back for a(n accelerated, but still pretty involved/extensive) pass through all of the same intermediate steps that the rest of us had gone through.
(And by the time he rejoined the advanced classes, somehow things were better. There probably exists some faster way to get a person from State A to State B, but Just Going Through All The Steps was sufficient even if it wasn’t strictly necessary.)
(If you teach someone the mechanics of flirting without any soul to back it up, you don’t end up with a skilled romantic. You end up with a pickup artist, which is not the same thing.)
VIII.
I don’t have a complete map of what makes a grayspace, or how to build one. For one thing, I don’t think grayspaces are a natural category—I’m sort of superimposing a description on top of a fuzzy, multidimensional thing that comes in a million different varieties and intensities, out there in nature. Reality wasn’t made to fit into my preexisting concepts.
But there are a few things I’m pretty confident about, from my experience of subcultures that [had a grayspace that worked], and my experience of subcultures that [failed in ways that seemed to me to be downstream of not having a proper grayspace]:
- It needs to be separated from the origin culture, both physically and ritualistically. There have to be Genuinely Different Norms, a clearly defined Moment of Entry and Exit. The stuff from the origin culture that is inimical to the target culture has to be completely forbidden, and the forbidding has to be serious. It can’t be halfhearted or embarrassed.It needs to ask things of its participants. The sacrifice of some fraction of the origin culture is a good start, but that’s not quite enough, all by itself. There have to be opportunities for effort and sacrifice, and those efforts and sacrifices need to be visibly rewarded with status and appreciation and shiny new affordances.
(If you trained up to be able to do all of the splits, you got to wear a blood-red uniform. If you missed classes for three weeks in a row without a legible reason, you were not welcomed back until you explained yourself, and did work to earn your way back into Master Lee’s good graces.)It needs to be separated from the target culture, too, for the sake of the integrity of the target culture. Even if you outlaw specific, nameable behaviors that will cause problems within the target culture, you’ve still got hearts and minds that are origin-culture-shaped, and will constantly spew out new and novel corrosive behaviors. You can’t possibly explicitly ban every single objectionable thing, especially since a lot of the behavior will be marginal and thresholdy. The grayspace has to be its own airlock.It needs to be adjacent to the target culture, though—it can’t be a totally isolated bubble. The participants in the grayspace need to be constantly catching glimpses out of the corner of their eyes, of just how good things are in the target culture. You want them to feel the golden glow of the thing they’re moving toward, get simultaneously inspired and infected by its visceral coolness.
(At Lee Brothers, this was accomplished by the black belts training literally on the other side of a single, open, gymnasium-sized space. You could hear their camaraderie, see the cool stuff they were doing, etc.)
(As a bonus, this lets people discover whether they actually want to be in the target culture. Like, it’s good for people who thought that they wanted to become martial artists, before they actually understood what that entailed, to have a place where they can dip their toes in.)It needs to be staffed by members of the target culture, and those members need to be well-rested and well-resourced. In many cases, the people who guide newcomers through the early stages of transition are essentially embedding themselves in enemy territory, re-exposing themselves to precisely the kinds of things they left the origin culture to get away from, the same things that they had to painstakingly learn not to do, in order to join the target culture. They need to be able to (e.g.) not take it personally, when they offer a hug and the would-be recipient flinches. They have to be robust in a way that the average member of the target culture isn’t.
(It helps for them to have breaks, and to regularly be able to relax back into the target culture, off the clock, to rest and recharge.)It needs to actually provide a scaffold and a staircase. There has to be structure that actually helps people, on their journey from the origin culture to the target culture. This doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of explicit instruction, like a martial arts academy, but the makers of the grayspace have to navigate between demanding too much and expecting too little. They have to be able to say “this, not that,” and the requests have to be reasonable, and ordered sensibly such that small asks and feats build toward medium asks and feats that build toward large asks and feats.
(Lee Brothers first asked me to bow, and say “yes sir,” and do a front kick, and count to ten. It was much, much later that it asked me to recite the code from memory, and explain the meaning of various Korean proverbs, and break cinderblocks with my forearm.)It needs to be willing to turn people away. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism; a standard is only actually a standard if those that don’t measure up get held back. Some participants in a grayspace will just need more time and more assistance and accommodation to clear the hurdles. Others are simply not a good fit for the target culture, and will be either unwilling or unable to make the necessary shifts. Any grayspace that isn’t willing to say “sorry, this is as far as we’re going to let you go” is one that will inevitably degrade back into the origin culture.
(Like letting dirty plates through even if they aren’t clean, under the justification that they spent time in the tub, though!)
IX.
I don’t think any of this is particularly revelatory, or complicated. I suspect most of you have encountered things that you could label “grayspaces,” now that I’ve handed you the term; like I said, I’m trying to describe something that’s already out there.
But I think that there aren’t many people that are thinking in terms of:
- What is our target culture actually made of? What are the strange and critical preconditions of the thing that we want to do, here? In what ways do we need every single participant to be similarly weird, in order to pull off the mission? What parts of the origin culture are inimical to that?How do we filter out people who [don’t want to] or [can’t] express that kind of weirdness, and how do we bring along the people who are willing and teachable?How do we protect the good thing that we’ve got going on, as we bring in new people? How do we ensure that we’re not diluting and polluting, while also making sure that we don’t stagnate and dwindle? How do we avoid burning out our ambassadors?
…and so on. I think most people just try to wing it—
(usually by having no separation between the grayspace and the garden, and trying to bring radioactive newcomers directly into the sacred space, c.f. "eternal September")
—and as a result, most microcultural experiments fail. I think that having access to the concept of a grayspace—
(separate from the concept of a progressive curriculum that just transfers the skills themselves)
—and thinking explicitly about how to build them, makes it more likely that you can Do The Thing, and I’d love to see more people doing Things of all kinds.
Good luck.
Discuss
