Content warning: Discussion of when to tolerate mental health issues and when not to tolerate them. May be distressing for people who feel their membership of their social circles is in question due to their flaws.
This post is about a strategy I've found incredibly useful for solving some of these issues. It will be a useful strategy for some spaces, and it will be a terrible strategy for others. If it's a terrible strategy for your space, don't use it. I want to introduce it to my social scene because I think more spaces than currently do should use it, not because I think all the spaces should use it.
I'm working on being more concise, so I've got an short version up top and a long version below. I'd be interested in feedback on whether the short version worked for you, and what you thought was missing from it vs what felt extraneous in the long version.
The short version:
Some groups want to have very high standards; if you want your software company to succeed, you should only hire employees who are good at writing code and you should also probably fire them if they don't write any code. Some groups want to have very low standards: a family needs to be able to support its members through rough times, and kicking people out as soon as they're less productive than average is a recipe for anxiety and conflict.
Other groups have a kludgy compromise of mixed standards; your project might include both serious employees and part-time volunteers who have different commitment levels, your sports club might have higher standards for competitive team members than purely recreational members, or your networking groupchat might be fine with a limited amount of supporting people who are struggling but still need the average quality of interactions to stay high enough to keep people around.
When you get conflict about what the standards should be, people often have defensive reactions that can warp the group's goals or ability to track truth. "That goal didn't matter anyway" is a defensive reaction someone might have to a perceived threat that they'll be kicked out (or criticised, or valued less) because they didn't meet a goal, and that's unhelpful if the goal's actually important. "Your strategy isn't actually better than my strategy" is a defensive reaction someone might have to a perceived threat that they'll be forced to adopt a more-stressful or less-fun strategy, and that's unhelpful if the strategy is actually necessary for winning more.
One tactic for reducing conflict, which you might already be familiar with, is to completely separate the standards for entering a group and the standards for staying in a group. You can maintain the average quality of interactions/contributions by having a high bar for who gets to join, and simultaneously reduce people's anxiety about getting kicked out by having a very high bar for getting kicked out. It's rare for someone to be skilled/cooperative/thoughtful enough to meet your bar for being hired/invited and then suddenly nosedive into being useless/aggressive/spammy, and you have enough resources in your group to cope with supporting the occasional person who's going through a tougher time so long as you don't have to do that often. Committing to continuing to value/like/keep people, even if they end up needing support or making mistakes, can mean that they're significantly more willing to admit when they need support and not get defensive about mistakes they've made. This helps preserve your epistemic environment.
A tactic that fewer people are familiar with, and which I think more groups should try, is to completely separate the standards you're supposed to believe in and the standards which you get punished for not meeting. That is to say, acknowledging that you made a mistake (and that it would've been better if you hadn't) is mandatory - but so long as you can do that, we'll still like you after you make mistakes and we won't kick you out. Agreeing that meeting a high standard is possible and desirable is mandatory, and you'll get intense and immediate pushback if you say that you shouldn't or can't be expected/pushed/pressured/encouraged to work towards the group's goals - but so long as you're aspiring to achieve the goal, we're willing to support members who can't get there yet.
This is harder than it sounds. Lots of people just implicitly believe that there will definitely be social punishment for failing, and so if they fail - or if they see a goal they don't want to succeed at because it'd be too effortful or time-consuming or ego-dystonic or otherwise painful - then it's very tempting to try and redefine the world until they didn't fail. The goal was impossible anyway! It wasn't their fault! The real goal should've been this other thing that they did or can succeed at! Having goals is bad, actually! It's immoral to enforce your ideas of right and wrong on other people! Expectations are too high these days!
You can support people by really consistently following through on not punishing them for failing, until they really believe and trust that it is safe to admit to failure. Of course, sometimes you actually do need to kick people out - you can't keep an employee who repeatedly sets fire to the office, or keep someone in your social group who assaults other members - so you need very clear criteria and procedures for when that'll happen. The need for clear criteria & procedures is covered well elsewhere; this essay is just pointing out an under-utilised option for a place you can draw a line. You'll need to also draw other lines in other places, and your standard for "how bad at basketball do you have to be before you get kicked off the basketball team" can be fairly unrelated to your standard for "how fast do we kick someone off the basketball team for punching a teammate".
My shorthand for this setup is "the standard is to admit the existence of the standard" - ie. the standard (for not being kicked out, disliked, or otherwise socially punished) is to be willing to agree that a high standard (of moral conduct, skill, achievement, etc) is real and good and achievable and you ought to try to meet it, and then not dissemble about that.
Not all groups should use this setup, but I think it's a very helpful tactic for getting clarity in the mixed-standards-kludgy-compromise type of group. It lets you keep people around who don't want to perform to the group's standards, without letting them try to change the group's goals and beliefs. For example, your fitness group can include some people who think that running is way too much effort, but not allow them to evangelise this to others - so your group can still be a good place for people who want to be held accountable to their ambitious running goals.
The Long Version
The Problem: On Mixed-Standard Groups
Some groups - generally groups that are trying to achieve something specific - hold people to high standards. If you don't practise your instrument regularly, you might be kicked out of the orchestra. If you don't know your lines, your understudy might get to take your part in your community theatre play. If you suck at writing code, you'll probably lose your programming job. There are clear reasons for having and needing these standards - your company or your project won't succeed if people don't do the work - and clear mechanisms for enforcing them - such as a Performance Improvement Plan coming into play to warn you that you're in danger of being fired.
Other groups - most often social and support groups - try not to demand that people meet high standards. If you learn that your cousin got a bad performance review at work and you respond by uninviting them from family Christmas, you're being an asshole. If somebody says that they're having trouble getting out of bed today because they're experiencing a mental health issue, and your response is to kick them from your social group because you only want the most elite and productive go-getters in your Discord group chat, then people will mostly think you are mean and rude.
There are lots of downsides to enforcing high standards in your social groups, even if you really are just trying to optimise the awesomeness your group achieves and not worrying about the preferences of the people you kicked out. Your social group won't be able to function as a support system for its members if admitting your problems gets you censure rather than support. Your productive awesome members might like hanging out with their friend who isn't very good at anything, or see strengths in them in some areas which compensate for their weaknesses in others, and they might leave too if you kick that guy out. You will make lots of people paralysingly anxious.
(There are also, of course, downsides to never enforcing some standards. The first time your friend calls you in the middle of the night because they're standing on a bridge feeling suicidal, you probably drive out to get them - no questions asked - and maybe let them crash on your couch for a few days so you can keep an eye on them until the suicidal episode passes. It would be cruel - or at least not good friend behaviour - to tell them that you don't care and you're going back to sleep. The fifty-seventh time you get that call, it's pretty fair to tell them, "Nope, I need my sleep tonight, I've got work in the morning. Call the crisis line.")
And then there's the groups I think of as "mixed-standards" groups; groups which are horrible kludgey compromises between people who want to achieve something and people who want to socialise and people who want other unrelated things. Standards may be unclear and unwritten, may be different in the various underlying sub-groups in unpredictable ways, may be constantly subtly shifting, or may be in a state of constant negotiation.
Think:
A community netball meetup that is totally open to casual players who don't care about winning and just want some socialising and exercise once a week, but there's also a subset of members who really care about winning their upcoming match against the neighbouring town's team
A writing group that is totally open to bad writers and would never kick someone out for being a bad writer, but is also full of people who want to improve as writers who host discussions and workshops about how to get better
A group house that is both just a place to live (which nobody should be kicked out of for not being an elite enough rationalist), and also somewhere where you specifically selected your housemates to be people who were trying to improve the world - who you want to encourage you and hold you accountable regarding your own world-improving - and also, y'know, the dishes do need to get done.
A social group that nominally hosts social dinners to casually chat about AI policy, but everyone there is a DC-area networking type who definitely wants to leverage these connections into getting jobs or political wins - if they can
Lots of rationalists and rat-adj groups are mixed-standards groups. They're social meetups that are nominally organised around EA but also care about being welcoming to non-EAs, or they're group projects which need to include both the hyper-dedicated founders and also some not-very-dedicated part-time volunteers, or they're conferences where some people are aggressively recruiting and others are just checking out the scene.
Mixed-standards groups which don't have very clear and explicit consensus about standards will find themselves having conflicts about standards; whether to raise them or lower them, how to push back against people who try to raise them or lower them in ways you don't like, people feeling hurt or scared that they're below what they perceive as the standard, people feeling frustrated that the standard is lower than they'd like.
Some people are tired of losing netball games and want to bench people who can't be bothered to show up for practice because they actually want to win, while other people are tired of feeling judged for being busy working moms who can't always make it to netball practice which is supposed to be fun and not all this pressure. Some people are grateful their community helps hold them accountable to their 500-words-a-day goal, while others complain that the pressure to constantly write and celebration of output is really toxic for them. Some people are tired of the elitists using too much jargon and others are tired of constantly having to re-explain the same concepts. Some people are tired of inviting collaborators to volunteer projects who barely do anything and still want credit, while other people are tired of feeling like they have to constantly prove their dedication in order to get invited to provide help for free.
These things are hard precisely because there isn't one side that is predictably correct. It's genuinely frustrating, when you're very good at something, to try and hold conversations about that thing in a space where people will enforce low standards. If you can't casually comment, "This esports team really should've controlled the high ground in this match," because someone will be hurt that you're assuming everyone knows that high ground is useful, or can't use the names of two or three feldspars in conversation without being told, "Your use of jargon feels really elitist," it's genuinely difficult to talk. Education isn't free and easy, and a space that is trying to be an educational space can rarely effectively also be a high-achieving project space; there are some meetings you genuinely can't invite the interns to. And yet the reason the "you're making too many assumptions and using too much jargon" is such an effective derailing/silencing accusation is because it can't just be dismissed out of hand, because sometimes it's true. Education is a skill worth developing and investing in, and some people genuinely do suck at estimating their audiences' familiarity and explaining things clearly, and those people should get better at it.
This post isn't about sketching out all the forms of this sort of conflict; it's about a specific strategy for mitigating the truth-warping downsides of standards conflict.
The subtle downsides: Warping truth and warping goals
If you put excessive pressure on people to win and achieve things, there's obvious downsides; it's often rude or mean, you'll often drive people to leave your group, you'll often fail to provide support for people who would benefit from support, etc.
If you don't put enough pressure on people to win and achieve things, there's obvious downsides to that too; you might lose your netball matches, have to tolerate bad writing, or get stuck washing others' dirty dishes. You might also be less productive because you need a little social pressure to help motivate you and keep you accountable.
The subtler (and, I think, worse) downside of low standards in a mixed-standards group is the way they can make your group's goals drift, warp your beliefs about how difficult or easy things are, or make discussions and consensus impossible. People react defensively to the perception that they're falling below a standard, or feeling a standard get raised on them, or being held to a standard they can't meet - and the ways they react are often terrible.
Some exaggerated caricatures, for ease of making the point:
A netball player saying, "You can't expect everyone to pass the ball when you call for a pass. Some of us are just here to have fun, and it's not fun for me to be so focused on playing optimally. It's more fun for me to try and shoot rather than pass, even if I don't have a great chance of scoring. I don't think I'm the problem for not passing to you - actually, you're the problem for expecting me to. In fact, I think we should have a norm that we passto people who haven't scored in a while, rather than just passing to our best shooters - that way everyone gets a chance to score!"
A writer saying, "Why do you assume your way of writing is better than mine just because yours uses standard grammar? I don't want to fix my grammar 'mistakes', I'm just trying to express myself. If you can't understand it, that's a you problem. There's no objective reality about what's good or bad writing, anyway, so it's really unfair that you get featured in the zine more than me."
Someone who hasn't been chipping in for household expenses, saying, "I just don't feel comfortable with this level of pressure for me to contribute. When you constantly suggest that I need to chip in, it just reminds me of how stressful the job search is, and I feel really aversive about getting a job at the moment. I want to be treated as an equal member of the household, not like I'm lesser or don't belong just because I can't afford rent right now."
Someone who has been asked not to touch others without their consent because several people felt sexually harassed, saying, "You know, society these days is so easily offended. I really worry that all this hypervigilance around boundaries and personal space is going to harm people's mental health - did you hear doctors can't hug patients anymore because they're worried about being sued? Why are we asking me not to tap people on the shoulder when we should be looking at why we're so touch-averse and how we could fix it?"
Someone in mental health crisis insisting, "Everyone rational is suicidal under late-stage capitalism. I'm sure you can avoid being suicidal if you're just delusional, but if you really understood current politics then you'd be self-harming too. Any group that treats recovery as a mandatory expected goal, rather than supporting each person with their own self-chosen goals, is just going to suffocate people. I thought you liked me - surely our friendship isn't conditional on me pretending the world is okay?"
Standards are a threat. If you don't meet them, then you might have to change your behaviour, or face criticism, or have people not like you, or get kicked out of a group.
Threatened people will sometimes shape up and meet the standard. Other times they'll argue that the behaviour is actually fine, or that the criticism is illegitimate, or that people should actually like them for their flaws, or that pressuring people to meet standards is toxic and controlling, or that kicking people out of groups is cruel and wrong.
Of course, sometimes people are right about all those things: it really is fine not to dust behind the fridge daily (and kind of excessive to expect your housemates to do it), someone really might criticise you in a way that is totally not true, some flaws might be bound up in a trait or strategy that also leads to strengths, some groups really are toxic or controlling or cruel, some moderators are a little trigger-happy with the banhammer, some things really should just be for fun.
But someone who's thinking "oh god I'm going to get kicked out of my makerspace for setting the shed on fire" isn't making the argument "we just don't have enough space for proper equipment ventilation - we should've invested in better insulation in the first place" because their genuine, considered, collaborative, truthseeking belief is that they could not have prevented a fire by being more careful with their welding tools. They're making that argument because the idea of everyone blaming them for being insufficiently careful is terrible and terrifying. Unfortunately, "no, the insulation and the ventilation were fine, you just really suck at welding" is a very rude thing to say, so it's very easy to let untrue things go unchallenged.
Other things can be true while also being irrelevant. Maybe you are completely correct that it'd be more fun to improvise new recipes daily, but the goal of your restaurant is to make money, and the chefs having fun is not actually supposed to be a priority; if you are incapable of sticking to cooking what's on the menu, you will no longer be employed there. Imagine how difficult it would be to make this fact clear to beginner chefs if there totally were some restaurants which were mainly focused around the chefs having fun, and chefs swapped between jobs at the just-for-fun restaurants and the money-making restaurants all the time, and it wasn't always clear from the advertising whether your restaurant was the fun-for-chefs kind or the money-making kind. It can be very, very difficult to make it clear to your just-for-fun netball player that they are a guest in your netball club, and while you love them, they are welcome only so long as they are not impeding the serious netball players from trying to win; they can be entirely correct that it's unreasonable to expect them to show up to practice on Saturday given their kids' schedules, and it does not follow that Saturday practice should be cancelled so that everyone can get some rest. They will just have to deal with their feelings about everyone else practising without them.
You can have people in your university-application support group who are looking at Ivies and others who are looking at community college, but if you can't form a consensus on questions like "what's the minimum SAT/ACT/GPA score to make an application to Harvard worthwhile?" without being derailed into a discussion of how the SAT doesn't define someone's moral worth and the community needs to be more inclusive to people from non-elite schools... then you start being tempted to form one of those snobby elitist groups that only accepts people who went to Ivies. You might totally agree that the SAT shouldn't define someone's moral worth, and still want to know the answer to how high a score you'll need to get into the school you want to go to!
Defensive reactions aren't inherently untrue or unreasonable. They are a problem when they involve making false claims, or trying to warp a group's goals away from the original goals, or preventing groups from requesting needed behaviour changes, or attacking the legitimacy and validity of succeeding or trying or wanting to succeed at all.
It's one thing if somebody reacts badly when criticised; it's a problem, but at least it's an obvious problem. If Alice tells Bob, "You suck at intercepting passes," and Bob replies, "It's not my fault I have slow reaction times! Maybe we should work on not losing the ball in the first place, Alice!" then Alice sucks at providing gentle feedback and Bob sucks at handling criticism.
Unfortunately, many people also feel indirectly threatened when you make any statements about what's good or what's bad or what standards should be - and those defensive reactions are a much more subtle problem. When Alice says, "Intercepting passes is very important, and we need to get better at it if we're going to beat the other team in our match on Saturday. Maybe it'd help if we paid more attention to the tells that someone's about to throw the ball, and called them out," and Bob feels defensive and says, "Well, I think Saturday's team is really strong and it might be better to focus on drilling some passes for long-term improvement rather than pushing ourselves too hard to win on Saturday," it's not nearly as obvious that Bob is defensively protecting himself. But, repeated over time, Bob's efforts to protect himself - whether he's protecting himself from having to face criticism he doesn't like, or whether he's trying to avoid getting kicked out, or whether he just feels uncomfortable being pressured to try harder - will pull the group's focus away from actually winning and improving.
If your group is trying to actually achieve something, you need to be able to talk about what needs to improve without very carefully caveating that you're not criticising anyone and not pressuring anyone to do more. In a mixed group, you don't need to put the goal above everything else; you can make some concessions to being a fun social group! But you do need to be able to admit that there's a goal, that it is good when people work towards the goal and bad when they act against it, that there are some things that are objectively better and winning-ier than other things, and that people who work hard towards the goal might get certain privileges in your group over people who are just there to hang out.
The most harmful dynamic, I think, is when people start not only thinking their flaws are cool but evangelising their flaws. It's socially scary to be the only non-technical person in a highly technical group, if that means that you might be lesser or might be at risk of being kicked out or might not meet expectations. It's tempting to start arguing, "You know, technical people really just don't have the same ability to understand people or art or anything with soul. Non-technical people are actually better at certain things..."
Which isn't true. Learning Python won't make you suddenly suck at music; mathematical competence is correlated with writing skill, not anticorrelated. But if we need to reassure our non-technical group member that they're still loved and accepted even though they don't know Python, it sure starts feeling tempting to say, sure, there's basically two kinds of people and they're artsy people and mathsy people and they're fundamentally equals so nobody ever has to feel bad about not knowing something, and maybe you should avoid learning any maths if you want to preserve your natural creativity...
Solution Part 1: Separate Out Admittance And Removal Standards
Let's say you care deeply about truthseeking and avoiding reality-warping incentives. How can you best capture the benefits of low standards and the benefits of high standards? The obvious strategy is to firmly separate out the standards for admittance to a group and the standards for removal from a group. You can have very high standards for who passes an interview process or tryout process, and then also have a high bar against kicking people out once they're in. (This does require being willing to kick people out if they cheated on the entrance exam!)
You can conceptualise inviting someone to your group/project/team as making a decision that you're not actually going to re-evaluate - or which you've scheduled a re-evaluation for, in six months or a year or after the championship, and you're simply not going to think about it again until then. You can conceptualise including someone as a commitment to them, to supporting them and helping them improve. Or you can just think it's good strategy to have your team/project members be focused on winning, rather than distracted by anxiety about whether they're getting kicked out.
I frequently practise "unconditional positive regard" when I'm coaching or managing: once I decide you're invited to my squad, I like you, no matter what you do or what you suck at.
I commit to you that, if I see you miss a shot, I'll always assume that it's because you had a bad day today or didn't understand that particular enemy's movement or were distracted, and not because you're fundamentally bad at aiming. This saves a lot of time on people telling me excuses like, "I know I missed that shot, but it was only because I was distracted by Jennifer yelling about the flankers," because they're defensively trying to avoid me believing that they're bad at aim (because they're scared that, if I believed that, their place on the team would be in question). We get to actually focus on the questions of what we could've done better next time without wasting time on debating whose fault anything is. It doesn't matter if it's your fault, because I still like you anyway.
Unconditional positive regard means that I might believe that you've done something stupid, but I will still like you, so I'll take an attitude of: "You weren't at practice yesterday - are you okay? Do you need help or support with anything?" rather than: "You weren't at practice yesterday... you know, if you're lazy or not committed to this team, then you should give your spot to somebody who does care..."
My husband, upon reading this draft, was immediately reminded of his experience in the American school system (where your teacher both helps you improve and also decides what your grades are) and the British school system (where your teacher mostly can't decide your grades and can only help you improve). Students whose teachers decided their grades had so much more incentive to lie. There's no point to lying that the dog ate your homework to your teacher if your grades will be the same regardless of whether your teacher thinks you're a studious homework-doer constantly beset by hungry dogs or you're a lazy slacker who doesn't study.
If failing to meet the standard isn't a threat to you, because the people around you are purely there to help you improve towards the goal and aren't deciding whether to kick you out for not meeting the standard, then you don't need to have those defensive reactions! And if your strong admittance filter successfully filters people, you get to have all the benefits of an elite group without the threat of removing people.
This worked fantastically for me running sports teams. It will probably work much less well for lots of social groups, because running a great tryout/interview process is really hard and nobody's going to do it. If you don't have the high-standards admission filter, and you also have a high bar against kicking people out, then... you're just a group that can't have any standards.
Solution Part 2: Separate Out Admittance/Removal Standards And Belief/Goal Standards
Separating admittance standards from removal standards isn't the only way you can separate out standards. Another is: be really really strict about being willing to admit that standards exist and are real and you should try to meet them, and then don't actually be strict at all about meeting the standards. That is: have astonishingly low standards for who is welcome, and astonishingly high ones for how we believe that people should act and what we will affirm people ought to do.
You can have elite standards for what we believe we should be capable of... while simultaneously not making that standard scary. We can explicitly say that people are not getting kicked out unless they meet very specific conditions and bypass carefully-communicated warnings and go through the whole Official Kicking People Out Process, and also, we can explicitly say that you are never supposed to respond to a discussion about what actions are good or bad or what our goals should be with an attempt to preserve your group status rather than to figure out the truth about those actions and goals.
That is to say:
Being late to practice is acceptable - in the sense that it doesn't mean you'll get kicked out or that we won't like you anymore - but it's not acceptable to believe that being late is okay or good. You can't turn up late and say, "I'm just not an obsessive hyper-punctual loser like you guys, I actually have a social life and relax sometimes." You have to admit that being late is bad and that it would be better if you weren't late (and then that can either be the basis for a conversation about how to improve at punctuality, or we can move on and discuss another topic; admitting that it's bad doesn't have to mean that it's productive to try and find a strategy to fix it right now.)
It's acceptable to have totally fumbled a situation, in the sense that you won't get kicked out and we still like you and we won't assume that you're incompetent because you fumbled it; we'll assume you fumbled it for some specific reason, like it being a totally novel situation that you were surprised by and unprepared for. It's not acceptable to believe that it's totally hilarious that you fumbled that situation, and it'd be hilarious if you did it again. You have to say, "Yep, I fumbled that, it was bad. I wish I'd been more prepared. Next time I'll use this other strategy."
We won't kick you out or dislike you for being bad at playing tanky junglers. It's not acceptable to say, "Guys, I just don't want to learn to play tanks. Aggressive assassins are way more fun and I'm good at them, and I don't like being pressured to switch to a character that is less fun just because it's better. Not everything is about being better or trying to be the best all the time." You have to be okay with saying that, yep, everything really is about being better and trying to be the best all the time, and you'd prefer to be amazing at every character if that were possible - so let's figure out whether the time investment for you to learn tanks is worthwhile, or if we'd be better off just using the more-familiar characters for this championship and you can learn the others later.
It's perfectly acceptable to build some shelving at your makerspace which is a little bit less sturdy because you riveted it instead of welding it. You can say, "Yeah, at some point I'd like to learn to weld, but I didn't need the extra sturdiness for this application, and I wanted the project done. Using suboptimal tools was worth it to not have to deal with an unfamiliar technique. Here's my calculations showing that it'll be fine up to double the expected load." What you cannot say is, "Look, I used rivets because I like rivets, and welding seems really hard. I don't want to learn more new tools when I'm enjoying getting better at my existing tools. Isn't the first rule of art to have fun and be yourself?" (The first rule of architectural safety is never to have fun and be yourself.)
We aren't going to kick you out for stepping on someone's toes, so long as you're willing to say, "Sorry for stepping on your toes. I hurt you, and I don't want to hurt people." If you say, "Well, maybe your toe shouldn't have been in my way, I have a right to stomp around in my heavy steel-toe boots without worrying about people's toes all the time," then maybe we will actually kick you out.
It's fine to not know things, but it's not fine to say, "Wow, you know that fact? What a nerd. I can't imagine wanting to know so much dumb, pointless trivia." You have to acknowledge that knowing things is generally good, and you'd like to know many more things if you weren't limited by your mortal human bounds of time / energy / memory.
We won't kick you out for being bad at communication, but you also can't say, "Well, that's just who I am - I'm just a quiet person. I make up for it by being great at aim and movement and strategy. I just have a quiet personality, so you can't really expect me to ever get better at communication." You have to admit that communicating is better than not communicating, and that "bad at communicating" isn't a personality trait and shouldn't be part of your identity.
If you lose and say, "I missed that ambush. I'll try to win next time," then your loss is entirely forgiven. If you lose and say, "This game is stupid! It's so dumb that it doesn't give you more warnings before you get ambushed! You shouldn't have to pick up on such tiny clues. Let's just surrender our next match and do something else. Everyone who's good at this is a lame sweaty tryhard," then you might no longer be invited to game with us.
Sometimes I express this in shorthand: "The standard is to admit the existence of the standard."
If I run an orchestra this way, my orchestra will accept members who practise their instrument every day. It will also accept members who want to practise every day, and try, but find it really difficult and usually fail - but they'll try again tomorrow. But it won't accept members who say things like, "Expecting everyone to practise every day is really unreasonable and honestly I think it's bad for you to be so focused on music at the exclusion of a social life." Those people are evangelising their flaws, and that makes it harder for everyone who wants to hold each other accountable to their shared goals.
(You do have to be careful and use good judgement; sometimes people aren't just being defensive and really do genuinely believe that practising every day is harmful, in which case maybe you need to pull out some scientific evidence about the benefits of regular short frequent practice, and maybe they'll pull out some evidence about the risks of repetitive strain injury, and you can all be truthseeking together. It's easiest to ensure this kind of thing is truthseeking if the conversation about "should we encourage people to practise every day" is kept entirely separate from any conversation about "should we kick Janet out because she never practises".)
Example 1: Aviation
The absolute best example of doing this really well, in my opinion, is the aviation industry.
The aviation industry has incredibly high standards for what they should achieve; they believe they ought to be able to send people to the sky in metal tubes powered by explosions and extremely consistently have everyone involved survive the experience, even if the engines fail. They achieve this incredibly high standard; you are very likely to survive air travel even if an engine explodes and the plane crash-lands.
Blameless post-mortems are a vital part of this success. If a pilot feels like they might go to jail if they admit to the mistake they made, they're likely to lie and try to cover up the mistake. If a pilot can just tell the inquiry exactly what they messed up, the inquiry can figure out how to design planes better so that the next pilot to almost make that mistake will be confronted with a big red "WARNING: THIS IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE" alarm.
It is not that pilots aren't punished for making flying mistakes because flying mistakes are acceptable and nobody minds enough to punish them. It is that safety is more important than punishment. Finding out how to make the plane safer for next time is more important than assigning fault or blame.
A pilot must care deeply about the safety of their passengers and strive to never make an aviation error - but they can make aviation errors, and the response is to support them in not repeating them rather than to immediately fire them. A pilot would be fired for saying, "I'm tired of being under so much pressure to maintain all these high standards. It's toxic, and it's not inclusive - not everyone can handle it. It's just not fun or sustainable for me to always do everything air traffic control says. I think there's nothing wrong with crashing occasionally..."
A good church will often believe that people should try to have all sorts of virtues. You should be honest all the time, be kind to everyone, help those in need, work hard, forgive people for being mean to you, stand up courageously for what you believe in, and also not do any sins. They also accept that almost nobody meets that standard, and everyone occasionally says something mean to their neighbour or gets socially pressured into something they shouldn't really have done. You're supposed to be able to get forgiveness for those sins, and then really and genuinely move on rather than continuing to beat yourself up over them.
You're also not supposed to say, "Well, being kind to everyone and never lying is really hard and I think it's unfair of God to expect that of me. I think we need to step back and re-evaluate and set some more achievable goals, like being kind to dogs and only lying to people about why I haven't met work deadlines." The standard you're supposed to aspire to is set in stone. It's non-negotiable. No amount of whining "but for some people shoplifting is a necessary coping strategy" is going to change "thou shalt not steal". You have to actually try not to steal anything... but if you do steal something, you go to confession for forgiveness, you don't get told that God hates you now and you should go try some other religion.
I'm a staunch atheist, but I'm sometimes tempted by the religious view of morality when I encounter people saying things like, "You can't force me not to lie. I might avoid lying if I feel like it, but I reject the idea that you have the authority to tell me not to. I'm a free person who can do whatever I want so long as I follow contracts I agreed to. There's no such thing as objective morality. It's actually more offensive for you to make demands of me, like your demand that I be honest, than it is for me to lie."
A group based on "the standard is to admit the existence of the standard" wouldn't kick you out for lying, but would kick you out for denying the legitimacy of any expectation that you shouldn't lie.
Admitting the existence of a standard can be hard, actually, but you can help
Requiring people to affirm a group's standards and goals is, actually, holding people to a fairly high standard in one specific sense.
It's actually hard to never get defensive. (I suck at it!) Being sensitive about your flaws is natural. Lots of us are anxious about the potential for people to dislike us or criticise us or kick us out of groups or not invite us to future groups. It's hard to kick the habit of being defensive, even if you've found yourself in a group where you're genuinely safe and don't need to be.
As far as I can tell, the best strategies for supporting people in this are all fairly unobjectionable strategies that involve being nice. This is very convenient!
For one thing, it's important to actually stick to the separation from both ends. If you sometimes say "our team really needs to improve at communication" when you want to imply "we should kick out Joe because he's quiet and bad at communicating" then Joe is correct to respond to "our team really needs to improve at communication" with fear for his spot on the team, rather than collaborative truthseeking about the team's priorities. It's really important to have clear communication around when people might actually get kicked out, and how that might happen, and what it'd look like if the process was starting.
For another thing, it's easier for people to believe that you like them if you tell them so - and when people feel secure in being liked, it is much easier for them to do emotionally painful or difficult things, like agree that they should do some things that they aren't currently doing.
It's especially useful to tell people that you like them for characteristics about them which aren't relevant to the standards you're enforcing. Telling your trivia quiz teammate that you love them for how knowledgeable they are doesn't do anything to reduce the pressure to defend the perception that they know everything that matters, which sometimes means aggressively arguing that a certain thing doesn't matter, which is how you end up with nonsense like: "Why are you getting on my case for not knowing the answer to that question about Romeo and Juliet? I don't know anything about literature because I'm not some pansy who worries about wishy-washy subjects - I study real things like science. Shakespeare sucks anyway, he's been dead for centuries and we should move on."
You can tell people things like:
"I love the way you approach problems. Even when you don't solve them, it's kind of inspiring to see you plug away determinedly at things."
"I really appreciate your sense of humour - it's so different from mine that it always feels fresh and unexpected."
"You know, even though this situation called for restraint and patience, I really do love how you're always willing to jump straight in and start fixing things; I love knowing that I have you available for those situations that do need that drive."
"You just have a really calming presence, and a way of making people feel seen and welcomed. I appreciate how authentic it feels when you connect with people."
This is very situational; if you're both therapists, then "you have a very calming presence" is extremely directly relevant to important standards like whether you're good at working with patients. You might sometimes need to tell someone that they're a bad therapist because they have an enraging and uncomfortable presence that sets patients on edge, and they need to fix that if they want to continue being a therapist. Complimenting a comedian on their sense of humour will usually be appreciated, but doesn't help with creating the underlying security-in-being-liked that lets them not be defensive during conversations about how to improve their comedy. On the other hand, if you have a job like air traffic control where somebody's ability to write fanfiction is entirely unrelated to their job, then telling them that you like their fanfiction helps create that fallback; even if one day they kind of suck at air traffic control, you'll still like them because they write good fanfic and cook a great paella and have a cute dog and host good chess nights and are your friend. That makes it much easier to talk non-defensively about the ways in which they kind of sucked at air traffic control today!
For a third thing, if you want to pull this off with maximum effectiveness then you have to walk the walk on the 'assuming good faith' thing. You actually have to act as though, when somebody spills pasta sauce all over the carpet, that was probably for reasons like "they ran into a genuinely-reasonably-unforeseeable circumstance, like someone moving a trip hazard into their path after they'd checked for trip hazards" or "they had a sudden medical issue that made carrying a bowl of pasta no longer feasible" or "they misunderstood some communication and thought you wanted the pasta sauce to be on the carpet" and not because they are stupid or careless or hate you. Otherwise people do, in fact, need to defend to you that they spilled pasta sauce on your carpet for reasons unrelated to being stupid or careless or hating you - because, from their perspective, it's a bad outcome if you end up believing those things!
Most people find it easy to believe that spilling pasta sauce on the carpet is bad, and we don't need to twist reality to say "well, a little bit of spilling pasta sauce on the carpet is actually good and healthy, so it'd be counterproductive to aim for perfection in never spilling pasta sauce on the carpet", and it's also easy to believe that it'd be a wild overreaction to kick someone out of their housing because they spilled pasta sauce on the carpet. The separation of 'agreeing to standards' and 'enforcing standards' is really easy here! However, it's sometimes really hard to genuinely approach people as though "they spilled pasta sauce because the sun really unexpectedly came out from behind a stormcloud and shone right in their eyes" is a more plausible explanation than "they are just really clumsy and aren't really trying to improve that". It requires many deep breaths. I don't recommend trying to approach everyone in the whole world this way, or at least not consistently and all the time; it's not just hard, it also makes you wrong a lot. I do, however, try to approach people this way if I've made a commitment to hold them in unconditional positive regard - or if we're good friends.
...And even with all of these strategies to support you, it's still hard sometimes to admit the existence of the standard. It's still sometimes emotionally rough to say "I could've been more polite to that person" instead of "I told that person to fuck off because they deserved it". It's still sometimes really really difficult to say, "Well, my first twenty strategies for improving at this quality didn't work, but I'm still open to the possibility that the twenty-first might work, or that I might naturally find this quality easier when I get a few years older, so it might go on the back-burner for now but I'd still like to be better at this," rather than, "I just can't improve at this, and it's unfair to think I should. I didn't want that stupid quality anyway!" And it's sometimes still hard to agree "I should practise my instrument every day" rather than saying "stop pressuring me into practising my instrument! It makes me want to practise my instrument less! I hate feeling pressured!"
Who should use the strategy
If the standard is to admit the existence of a standard, that's still a standard. It will exclude people who aren't emotionally capable of facing up to the reality that they are bad at some things, it would be better if they weren't bad at those things, and they should probably try to fix it. Some people don't want to change anything about themselves, some people don't think they "should" do anything except exactly what they want, some people think they are just here to have fun, and if your standard is "you must admit the existence of the standard and acknowledge its legitimacy" then you will exclude all of those people.
I think this is a fantastic standards strategy for the kind of mixed-goal groups I described earlier.
Your netball group can include both members of the team, and also people who just show up to have fun. The latter are welcome even if they're not very skilled or dedicated, but they do have to acknowledge that the team is valid to want to win; if they say things like "it's exclusionary how I don't get to play in official matches just because I almost never practice; we should change the rules so everyone gets equal playtime, so it'll be more fun" then they will get pushback, it will be explained that you do expect people to accept the standards of the team to be part of the group, and if they're mean to the people who are trying to win then they will get kicked out.
Your writing circle can include lots of people who write pretty badly, who are always welcome so long as they're there to improve. If they derail Writing Suggestions Hour by loudly arguing that they're not bad for making grammar mistakes and actually everyone else should change to make more grammar mistakes, then they are no longer welcome at Writing Suggestions Hour.
The rationalist group house can respond with "YET! GROWTH MINDSET!" when someone complains that they'll never figure out how to load the dishwasher, and they can sigh and repeat, "Yet. Growth mindset," and everyone will agree that this is a reasonable sort of interaction. "I'm a theoretical physicist, of course I can't do applied tasks like loading a dishwasher" can and should be met with: "You're a rationalist. Rationalists should win. You can win at loading the dishwasher."
In practice, lots of groups already use the "be relaxed about meeting standards, but be strict about acknowledging that standards are real and morally binding" strategy already. Plenty of people will tolerate covering a share of the rent for a housemate who's actively looking for a job, but will immediately lose patience if their housemate instead starts saying that actually expecting everyone to contribute equally to rent is socialism.
However, because they're not explicit about it or don't really think about it, people can wait too long to start pushing back on something unacceptable - and vice versa, people can run into unexpected minefields.
People may not push back on "yeah, I probably should wear eye protection while I'm using the angle grinder but I'm lazy" but will suddenly push back fiercely on fire safety or carcinogens. Safety standards slip and slip until someone finds a line they're willing to defend. You could push back earlier: "You're not lazy, and I don't think you should talk about yourself that way. What's your genuine considered belief about whether you need the eye protection? It's okay to not use protection if you endorse that you don't need it, but I think we shouldn't talk as if it's acceptable to not use something if you do believe you need it."
People will be surprised that their social group supported them and loved them and helped them through their first three mental health crises, but totally abandoned them on their fourth suicidal episode - not realising that they changed something about how they described their state or goals which made it sound like they no longer found it reasonable to expect that a fifth time ideally wouldn't happen.
Whether someone gets a banhammer may depend on phrasing: moderators of online spaces will take different views on whether "I don't really agree with that word being a slur, I can reclaim it" vs. "You really expect everyone to refrain from saying slurs all the time?" vs. "Well I'm not going to apologise for saying it because it's not a slur, but whatever," represent a user rejecting the idea that the moderators can ask them not to say a word or merely a user disagreeing with which words are okay to say. Many may be willing to tolerate a user whose stance is that they disagree with the rules but can follow them while they're in the space, and unwilling to tolerate a user whose stance is that they don't think the rules have any legitimate authority over them. It's helpful to make it clear and explicit when "agreeing with the idea that there is such a thing as polite behaviour and rude behaviour, and we should try to behave in polite ways and not in rude ways" is a ground rule!
So should your group use this strategy? It depends. Do you think you can do a good job of consistently, clearly pushing back against people who imply that they shouldn't be expected to have goals or try to do good things - while still being clear that you like and welcome them? Do you have a strong shared common idea of what your goals are - what is good, what does winning look like, what are the things people should really try to do? Do you think you can do a good job of separating out the kicking-people-out-for-being-bad type of conversation from the agreeing-that-people-should-be-good-and-not-bad type of conversation? Do you have an acceptable way to filter out liars and cheats who feel comfortable professing that they're trying while actually not even trying to try? Do you trust the people around you to hold you accountable for consistently truthseeking about what you ought to do, without enforcing their idea of what you should do when you genuinely disagree? If so, consider having a standard which is to accept the existence of the standard.
Things I Am Not Saying: On Criticism
Importantly: None of this is inherently about how you handle and respond to criticism.
If you require that people always respond positively to criticism, or always agree with criticism, that can create pretty unhealthy dynamics. If the only acceptable response to "I run a 5k every day - you should try it!" is "I'm sorry for not running a 5k every day, I'll try to improve at that" then people will just feel trapped by lots of unreasonable asks that they don't think achieve their goals anyway.
(I sometimes think in terms of: what is the bar that has to be met to criticise this person? Many people require that you meet a very reasonable bar, like "if you call me slurs while critiquing me then I'm not going to listen" or "I can't really take critique while I'm focused but I'm happy to hear it after the game's over" or "I'm upset right now, but I'm happy to talk about this in an hour". Other people require that you meet a very unreasonable bar, like that you say exactly the right things at all times to coddle their feelings because otherwise they'll only accept critique on fifth Sundays between 04:00 and 04:15. Some people claim they'll be happy to hear feedback tomorrow, but tomorrow something else comes up, and the good time never actually arrives. Look at how often the bar can be met in practice, rather than how theoretically easy the person claims it should be to meet.)
Admitting that a standard exists means agreeing with the goals and values of a space. In a fitness-focused group, that might mean agreeing that you want to improve your fitness. It does not require agreeing with everyone about facts.
You might validly say:
"Running is a bad idea for me because my knees are dodgy, but I could try swimming or cycling a 5k."
"I don't think trying to run a 5k every day will really improve my fitness, because I'll get injured and that'll force more downtime. That might be a reasonable goal to build up to, and it's awesome that you do it, but for right now I'm going to try 1k every other day and also some tennis."
"I looked at some evidence that suggested that running a 5k every day doesn't improve fitness as much as doing burst sprints and weightlifting."
"I do agree I should run a 5k every day, and I've got plans to start that in the fall, but I'm really prioritising my career and have a huge deadline next month. Please don't keep bringing it up - you'll tempt me into doing it and I do really need this promotion - I promise I'll be out there with you in November!"
"Thanks, but I'm not taking suggestions on my fitness routine right now! I'm working on it with my personal trainer."
Admitting the existence of the standard means not saying:
"Running a 5k every day is just unreasonable. Nobody can do that, and anyone who claims to is just lying or very privileged."
"That just doesn't sound fun. You know, fitness isn't everything in life. Maybe you should try going out for drinks with friends more and running less, and then you'd be more fun."
"I wish this group wasn't constantly full of people boasting about how they run 5ks. It makes me feel pressured to do the same, and I don't really want to."
"It's really elitist to act as though running a 5k every day makes you better at fitness than other people. Personally, I do some yoga once a week, and I'm happy with that. Stop acting as though one is better than the other."
"Yeah, sure, you can be the 5k runner of the group and I'll be the cute comedy relief of the group. We all have our strengths! I couldn't be anywhere near this funny if I was all serious and focused like that!"
The idea here is that a fitness group is improved by factual debate about what activities will help your fitness the most, whereas it is harmed by people who push for the group to be unable to form a consensus about fitness-improving activities and hold its members accountable for pursuing them.
It is, of course, valid to not want to improve one's fitness. It is simply not valid to be uninterested in improving your fitness and also expect a fitness group to accommodate this preference. If you choose to join a fitness group anyway because you like their T-shirts and want to flirt with them, then it is on you to not engage in truth-obscuring or goal-warping behaviours like trying to persuade people that fitness is actually silly and the group should become a coffee hangout.
Advertising what the goal is upfront is a very important part of making sure such groups aren't mistreating people. If you think you're joining a book club and then end up being pressured into running 5Ks, you have meaningfully been wronged. If you join a fitness club, then you ought to be aware that the thing that many people want from this space is pressure to run more 5Ks - and it is your own responsibility, if you don't want to run them, to assert this without derailing the rest of the group.
In Conclusion
If you want to use this strategy, you need to clearly advertise:
We believe in achieving X goal here / trying to be at least Y good at our skills here / following Z standards here. The goal of the group is to achieve these goals, or support members in getting better at these skills, or hold each other accountable to that standard.
If you don't like that goal or don't want to have those skills, you are welcome as a guest in our space, but we aren't going to routinely accept arguments that we should actually stop having our goals. We might accept some of those arguments at scheduled meetings where we check in on our goals and see if they still make sense, but dealing with them day-to-day is derailing/demotivating/distracting. If you keep trying to have the argument, we might kick you out.
We do not believe in kicking people out, shaming them, or unfriending them for failing to achieve X goal / be Y good at the skill / follow Z standard. We're trying to do something hard, that actually matters, and so we care a lot more about figuring out how to succeed next time than we care about assigning fault and blame.
This doesn't mean you have to agree with all criticism of you, or that it has to always be a good time to hear criticism right now. It just has to be possible to say things that are critical of you without meeting an unreasonable bar.
Then you have to actually stick to that; good luck.
(The aspirant sequence (so far: Would You Work Harder In The Least Convenient Possible World?, That Which Cannot Be Poked With A Stick Is The Mind-Killer) will be arranged into some sort of sensible order once I'm done; for now it's fine to treat them as independent posts.)
Content warning: Discussion of when to tolerate mental health issues and when not to tolerate them. May be distressing for people who feel their membership of their social circles is in question due to their flaws.
This post is about a strategy I've found incredibly useful for solving some of these issues. It will be a useful strategy for some spaces, and it will be a terrible strategy for others. If it's a terrible strategy for your space, don't use it. I want to introduce it to my social scene because I think more spaces than currently do should use it, not because I think all the spaces should use it.
I'm working on being more concise, so I've got an short version up top and a long version below. I'd be interested in feedback on whether the short version worked for you, and what you thought was missing from it vs what felt extraneous in the long version.
The short version:
Some groups want to have very high standards; if you want your software company to succeed, you should only hire employees who are good at writing code and you should also probably fire them if they don't write any code. Some groups want to have very low standards: a family needs to be able to support its members through rough times, and kicking people out as soon as they're less productive than average is a recipe for anxiety and conflict.
Other groups have a kludgy compromise of mixed standards; your project might include both serious employees and part-time volunteers who have different commitment levels, your sports club might have higher standards for competitive team members than purely recreational members, or your networking groupchat might be fine with a limited amount of supporting people who are struggling but still need the average quality of interactions to stay high enough to keep people around.
When you get conflict about what the standards should be, people often have defensive reactions that can warp the group's goals or ability to track truth. "That goal didn't matter anyway" is a defensive reaction someone might have to a perceived threat that they'll be kicked out (or criticised, or valued less) because they didn't meet a goal, and that's unhelpful if the goal's actually important. "Your strategy isn't actually better than my strategy" is a defensive reaction someone might have to a perceived threat that they'll be forced to adopt a more-stressful or less-fun strategy, and that's unhelpful if the strategy is actually necessary for winning more.
One tactic for reducing conflict, which you might already be familiar with, is to completely separate the standards for entering a group and the standards for staying in a group. You can maintain the average quality of interactions/contributions by having a high bar for who gets to join, and simultaneously reduce people's anxiety about getting kicked out by having a very high bar for getting kicked out. It's rare for someone to be skilled/cooperative/thoughtful enough to meet your bar for being hired/invited and then suddenly nosedive into being useless/aggressive/spammy, and you have enough resources in your group to cope with supporting the occasional person who's going through a tougher time so long as you don't have to do that often. Committing to continuing to value/like/keep people, even if they end up needing support or making mistakes, can mean that they're significantly more willing to admit when they need support and not get defensive about mistakes they've made. This helps preserve your epistemic environment.
A tactic that fewer people are familiar with, and which I think more groups should try, is to completely separate the standards you're supposed to believe in and the standards which you get punished for not meeting. That is to say, acknowledging that you made a mistake (and that it would've been better if you hadn't) is mandatory - but so long as you can do that, we'll still like you after you make mistakes and we won't kick you out. Agreeing that meeting a high standard is possible and desirable is mandatory, and you'll get intense and immediate pushback if you say that you shouldn't or can't be expected/pushed/pressured/encouraged to work towards the group's goals - but so long as you're aspiring to achieve the goal, we're willing to support members who can't get there yet.
This is harder than it sounds. Lots of people just implicitly believe that there will definitely be social punishment for failing, and so if they fail - or if they see a goal they don't want to succeed at because it'd be too effortful or time-consuming or ego-dystonic or otherwise painful - then it's very tempting to try and redefine the world until they didn't fail. The goal was impossible anyway! It wasn't their fault! The real goal should've been this other thing that they did or can succeed at! Having goals is bad, actually! It's immoral to enforce your ideas of right and wrong on other people! Expectations are too high these days!
You can support people by really consistently following through on not punishing them for failing, until they really believe and trust that it is safe to admit to failure. Of course, sometimes you actually do need to kick people out - you can't keep an employee who repeatedly sets fire to the office, or keep someone in your social group who assaults other members - so you need very clear criteria and procedures for when that'll happen. The need for clear criteria & procedures is covered well elsewhere; this essay is just pointing out an under-utilised option for a place you can draw a line. You'll need to also draw other lines in other places, and your standard for "how bad at basketball do you have to be before you get kicked off the basketball team" can be fairly unrelated to your standard for "how fast do we kick someone off the basketball team for punching a teammate".
My shorthand for this setup is "the standard is to admit the existence of the standard" - ie. the standard (for not being kicked out, disliked, or otherwise socially punished) is to be willing to agree that a high standard (of moral conduct, skill, achievement, etc) is real and good and achievable and you ought to try to meet it, and then not dissemble about that.
Not all groups should use this setup, but I think it's a very helpful tactic for getting clarity in the mixed-standards-kludgy-compromise type of group. It lets you keep people around who don't want to perform to the group's standards, without letting them try to change the group's goals and beliefs. For example, your fitness group can include some people who think that running is way too much effort, but not allow them to evangelise this to others - so your group can still be a good place for people who want to be held accountable to their ambitious running goals.
The Long Version
The Problem: On Mixed-Standard Groups
Some groups - generally groups that are trying to achieve something specific - hold people to high standards. If you don't practise your instrument regularly, you might be kicked out of the orchestra. If you don't know your lines, your understudy might get to take your part in your community theatre play. If you suck at writing code, you'll probably lose your programming job. There are clear reasons for having and needing these standards - your company or your project won't succeed if people don't do the work - and clear mechanisms for enforcing them - such as a Performance Improvement Plan coming into play to warn you that you're in danger of being fired.
Other groups - most often social and support groups - try not to demand that people meet high standards. If you learn that your cousin got a bad performance review at work and you respond by uninviting them from family Christmas, you're being an asshole. If somebody says that they're having trouble getting out of bed today because they're experiencing a mental health issue, and your response is to kick them from your social group because you only want the most elite and productive go-getters in your Discord group chat, then people will mostly think you are mean and rude.
There are lots of downsides to enforcing high standards in your social groups, even if you really are just trying to optimise the awesomeness your group achieves and not worrying about the preferences of the people you kicked out. Your social group won't be able to function as a support system for its members if admitting your problems gets you censure rather than support. Your productive awesome members might like hanging out with their friend who isn't very good at anything, or see strengths in them in some areas which compensate for their weaknesses in others, and they might leave too if you kick that guy out. You will make lots of people paralysingly anxious.
(There are also, of course, downsides to never enforcing some standards. The first time your friend calls you in the middle of the night because they're standing on a bridge feeling suicidal, you probably drive out to get them - no questions asked - and maybe let them crash on your couch for a few days so you can keep an eye on them until the suicidal episode passes. It would be cruel - or at least not good friend behaviour - to tell them that you don't care and you're going back to sleep. The fifty-seventh time you get that call, it's pretty fair to tell them, "Nope, I need my sleep tonight, I've got work in the morning. Call the crisis line.")
And then there's the groups I think of as "mixed-standards" groups; groups which are horrible kludgey compromises between people who want to achieve something and people who want to socialise and people who want other unrelated things. Standards may be unclear and unwritten, may be different in the various underlying sub-groups in unpredictable ways, may be constantly subtly shifting, or may be in a state of constant negotiation.
Think:
Lots of rationalists and rat-adj groups are mixed-standards groups. They're social meetups that are nominally organised around EA but also care about being welcoming to non-EAs, or they're group projects which need to include both the hyper-dedicated founders and also some not-very-dedicated part-time volunteers, or they're conferences where some people are aggressively recruiting and others are just checking out the scene.
Mixed-standards groups which don't have very clear and explicit consensus about standards will find themselves having conflicts about standards; whether to raise them or lower them, how to push back against people who try to raise them or lower them in ways you don't like, people feeling hurt or scared that they're below what they perceive as the standard, people feeling frustrated that the standard is lower than they'd like.
Some people are tired of losing netball games and want to bench people who can't be bothered to show up for practice because they actually want to win, while other people are tired of feeling judged for being busy working moms who can't always make it to netball practice which is supposed to be fun and not all this pressure. Some people are grateful their community helps hold them accountable to their 500-words-a-day goal, while others complain that the pressure to constantly write and celebration of output is really toxic for them. Some people are tired of the elitists using too much jargon and others are tired of constantly having to re-explain the same concepts. Some people are tired of inviting collaborators to volunteer projects who barely do anything and still want credit, while other people are tired of feeling like they have to constantly prove their dedication in order to get invited to provide help for free.
These things are hard precisely because there isn't one side that is predictably correct. It's genuinely frustrating, when you're very good at something, to try and hold conversations about that thing in a space where people will enforce low standards. If you can't casually comment, "This esports team really should've controlled the high ground in this match," because someone will be hurt that you're assuming everyone knows that high ground is useful, or can't use the names of two or three feldspars in conversation without being told, "Your use of jargon feels really elitist," it's genuinely difficult to talk. Education isn't free and easy, and a space that is trying to be an educational space can rarely effectively also be a high-achieving project space; there are some meetings you genuinely can't invite the interns to. And yet the reason the "you're making too many assumptions and using too much jargon" is such an effective derailing/silencing accusation is because it can't just be dismissed out of hand, because sometimes it's true. Education is a skill worth developing and investing in, and some people genuinely do suck at estimating their audiences' familiarity and explaining things clearly, and those people should get better at it.
This post isn't about sketching out all the forms of this sort of conflict; it's about a specific strategy for mitigating the truth-warping downsides of standards conflict.
The subtle downsides: Warping truth and warping goals
If you put excessive pressure on people to win and achieve things, there's obvious downsides; it's often rude or mean, you'll often drive people to leave your group, you'll often fail to provide support for people who would benefit from support, etc.
If you don't put enough pressure on people to win and achieve things, there's obvious downsides to that too; you might lose your netball matches, have to tolerate bad writing, or get stuck washing others' dirty dishes. You might also be less productive because you need a little social pressure to help motivate you and keep you accountable.
The subtler (and, I think, worse) downside of low standards in a mixed-standards group is the way they can make your group's goals drift, warp your beliefs about how difficult or easy things are, or make discussions and consensus impossible. People react defensively to the perception that they're falling below a standard, or feeling a standard get raised on them, or being held to a standard they can't meet - and the ways they react are often terrible.
Some exaggerated caricatures, for ease of making the point:
Standards are a threat. If you don't meet them, then you might have to change your behaviour, or face criticism, or have people not like you, or get kicked out of a group.
Threatened people will sometimes shape up and meet the standard. Other times they'll argue that the behaviour is actually fine, or that the criticism is illegitimate, or that people should actually like them for their flaws, or that pressuring people to meet standards is toxic and controlling, or that kicking people out of groups is cruel and wrong.
Of course, sometimes people are right about all those things: it really is fine not to dust behind the fridge daily (and kind of excessive to expect your housemates to do it), someone really might criticise you in a way that is totally not true, some flaws might be bound up in a trait or strategy that also leads to strengths, some groups really are toxic or controlling or cruel, some moderators are a little trigger-happy with the banhammer, some things really should just be for fun.
But someone who's thinking "oh god I'm going to get kicked out of my makerspace for setting the shed on fire" isn't making the argument "we just don't have enough space for proper equipment ventilation - we should've invested in better insulation in the first place" because their genuine, considered, collaborative, truthseeking belief is that they could not have prevented a fire by being more careful with their welding tools. They're making that argument because the idea of everyone blaming them for being insufficiently careful is terrible and terrifying. Unfortunately, "no, the insulation and the ventilation were fine, you just really suck at welding" is a very rude thing to say, so it's very easy to let untrue things go unchallenged.
Other things can be true while also being irrelevant. Maybe you are completely correct that it'd be more fun to improvise new recipes daily, but the goal of your restaurant is to make money, and the chefs having fun is not actually supposed to be a priority; if you are incapable of sticking to cooking what's on the menu, you will no longer be employed there. Imagine how difficult it would be to make this fact clear to beginner chefs if there totally were some restaurants which were mainly focused around the chefs having fun, and chefs swapped between jobs at the just-for-fun restaurants and the money-making restaurants all the time, and it wasn't always clear from the advertising whether your restaurant was the fun-for-chefs kind or the money-making kind. It can be very, very difficult to make it clear to your just-for-fun netball player that they are a guest in your netball club, and while you love them, they are welcome only so long as they are not impeding the serious netball players from trying to win; they can be entirely correct that it's unreasonable to expect them to show up to practice on Saturday given their kids' schedules, and it does not follow that Saturday practice should be cancelled so that everyone can get some rest. They will just have to deal with their feelings about everyone else practising without them.
You can have people in your university-application support group who are looking at Ivies and others who are looking at community college, but if you can't form a consensus on questions like "what's the minimum SAT/ACT/GPA score to make an application to Harvard worthwhile?" without being derailed into a discussion of how the SAT doesn't define someone's moral worth and the community needs to be more inclusive to people from non-elite schools... then you start being tempted to form one of those snobby elitist groups that only accepts people who went to Ivies. You might totally agree that the SAT shouldn't define someone's moral worth, and still want to know the answer to how high a score you'll need to get into the school you want to go to!
Defensive reactions aren't inherently untrue or unreasonable. They are a problem when they involve making false claims, or trying to warp a group's goals away from the original goals, or preventing groups from requesting needed behaviour changes, or attacking the legitimacy and validity of succeeding or trying or wanting to succeed at all.
It's one thing if somebody reacts badly when criticised; it's a problem, but at least it's an obvious problem. If Alice tells Bob, "You suck at intercepting passes," and Bob replies, "It's not my fault I have slow reaction times! Maybe we should work on not losing the ball in the first place, Alice!" then Alice sucks at providing gentle feedback and Bob sucks at handling criticism.
Unfortunately, many people also feel indirectly threatened when you make any statements about what's good or what's bad or what standards should be - and those defensive reactions are a much more subtle problem. When Alice says, "Intercepting passes is very important, and we need to get better at it if we're going to beat the other team in our match on Saturday. Maybe it'd help if we paid more attention to the tells that someone's about to throw the ball, and called them out," and Bob feels defensive and says, "Well, I think Saturday's team is really strong and it might be better to focus on drilling some passes for long-term improvement rather than pushing ourselves too hard to win on Saturday," it's not nearly as obvious that Bob is defensively protecting himself. But, repeated over time, Bob's efforts to protect himself - whether he's protecting himself from having to face criticism he doesn't like, or whether he's trying to avoid getting kicked out, or whether he just feels uncomfortable being pressured to try harder - will pull the group's focus away from actually winning and improving.
If your group is trying to actually achieve something, you need to be able to talk about what needs to improve without very carefully caveating that you're not criticising anyone and not pressuring anyone to do more. In a mixed group, you don't need to put the goal above everything else; you can make some concessions to being a fun social group! But you do need to be able to admit that there's a goal, that it is good when people work towards the goal and bad when they act against it, that there are some things that are objectively better and winning-ier than other things, and that people who work hard towards the goal might get certain privileges in your group over people who are just there to hang out.
The most harmful dynamic, I think, is when people start not only thinking their flaws are cool but evangelising their flaws. It's socially scary to be the only non-technical person in a highly technical group, if that means that you might be lesser or might be at risk of being kicked out or might not meet expectations. It's tempting to start arguing, "You know, technical people really just don't have the same ability to understand people or art or anything with soul. Non-technical people are actually better at certain things..."
Which isn't true. Learning Python won't make you suddenly suck at music; mathematical competence is correlated with writing skill, not anticorrelated. But if we need to reassure our non-technical group member that they're still loved and accepted even though they don't know Python, it sure starts feeling tempting to say, sure, there's basically two kinds of people and they're artsy people and mathsy people and they're fundamentally equals so nobody ever has to feel bad about not knowing something, and maybe you should avoid learning any maths if you want to preserve your natural creativity...
Solution Part 1: Separate Out Admittance And Removal Standards
Let's say you care deeply about truthseeking and avoiding reality-warping incentives. How can you best capture the benefits of low standards and the benefits of high standards? The obvious strategy is to firmly separate out the standards for admittance to a group and the standards for removal from a group. You can have very high standards for who passes an interview process or tryout process, and then also have a high bar against kicking people out once they're in. (This does require being willing to kick people out if they cheated on the entrance exam!)
You can conceptualise inviting someone to your group/project/team as making a decision that you're not actually going to re-evaluate - or which you've scheduled a re-evaluation for, in six months or a year or after the championship, and you're simply not going to think about it again until then. You can conceptualise including someone as a commitment to them, to supporting them and helping them improve. Or you can just think it's good strategy to have your team/project members be focused on winning, rather than distracted by anxiety about whether they're getting kicked out.
I frequently practise "unconditional positive regard" when I'm coaching or managing: once I decide you're invited to my squad, I like you, no matter what you do or what you suck at.
I commit to you that, if I see you miss a shot, I'll always assume that it's because you had a bad day today or didn't understand that particular enemy's movement or were distracted, and not because you're fundamentally bad at aiming. This saves a lot of time on people telling me excuses like, "I know I missed that shot, but it was only because I was distracted by Jennifer yelling about the flankers," because they're defensively trying to avoid me believing that they're bad at aim (because they're scared that, if I believed that, their place on the team would be in question). We get to actually focus on the questions of what we could've done better next time without wasting time on debating whose fault anything is. It doesn't matter if it's your fault, because I still like you anyway.
Unconditional positive regard means that I might believe that you've done something stupid, but I will still like you, so I'll take an attitude of: "You weren't at practice yesterday - are you okay? Do you need help or support with anything?" rather than: "You weren't at practice yesterday... you know, if you're lazy or not committed to this team, then you should give your spot to somebody who does care..."
My husband, upon reading this draft, was immediately reminded of his experience in the American school system (where your teacher both helps you improve and also decides what your grades are) and the British school system (where your teacher mostly can't decide your grades and can only help you improve). Students whose teachers decided their grades had so much more incentive to lie. There's no point to lying that the dog ate your homework to your teacher if your grades will be the same regardless of whether your teacher thinks you're a studious homework-doer constantly beset by hungry dogs or you're a lazy slacker who doesn't study.
If failing to meet the standard isn't a threat to you, because the people around you are purely there to help you improve towards the goal and aren't deciding whether to kick you out for not meeting the standard, then you don't need to have those defensive reactions! And if your strong admittance filter successfully filters people, you get to have all the benefits of an elite group without the threat of removing people.
This worked fantastically for me running sports teams. It will probably work much less well for lots of social groups, because running a great tryout/interview process is really hard and nobody's going to do it. If you don't have the high-standards admission filter, and you also have a high bar against kicking people out, then... you're just a group that can't have any standards.
Solution Part 2: Separate Out Admittance/Removal Standards And Belief/Goal Standards
Separating admittance standards from removal standards isn't the only way you can separate out standards. Another is: be really really strict about being willing to admit that standards exist and are real and you should try to meet them, and then don't actually be strict at all about meeting the standards. That is: have astonishingly low standards for who is welcome, and astonishingly high ones for how we believe that people should act and what we will affirm people ought to do.
You can have elite standards for what we believe we should be capable of... while simultaneously not making that standard scary. We can explicitly say that people are not getting kicked out unless they meet very specific conditions and bypass carefully-communicated warnings and go through the whole Official Kicking People Out Process, and also, we can explicitly say that you are never supposed to respond to a discussion about what actions are good or bad or what our goals should be with an attempt to preserve your group status rather than to figure out the truth about those actions and goals.
That is to say:
Sometimes I express this in shorthand: "The standard is to admit the existence of the standard."
If I run an orchestra this way, my orchestra will accept members who practise their instrument every day. It will also accept members who want to practise every day, and try, but find it really difficult and usually fail - but they'll try again tomorrow. But it won't accept members who say things like, "Expecting everyone to practise every day is really unreasonable and honestly I think it's bad for you to be so focused on music at the exclusion of a social life." Those people are evangelising their flaws, and that makes it harder for everyone who wants to hold each other accountable to their shared goals.
(You do have to be careful and use good judgement; sometimes people aren't just being defensive and really do genuinely believe that practising every day is harmful, in which case maybe you need to pull out some scientific evidence about the benefits of regular short frequent practice, and maybe they'll pull out some evidence about the risks of repetitive strain injury, and you can all be truthseeking together. It's easiest to ensure this kind of thing is truthseeking if the conversation about "should we encourage people to practise every day" is kept entirely separate from any conversation about "should we kick Janet out because she never practises".)
Example 1: Aviation
The absolute best example of doing this really well, in my opinion, is the aviation industry.
The aviation industry has incredibly high standards for what they should achieve; they believe they ought to be able to send people to the sky in metal tubes powered by explosions and extremely consistently have everyone involved survive the experience, even if the engines fail. They achieve this incredibly high standard; you are very likely to survive air travel even if an engine explodes and the plane crash-lands.
Blameless post-mortems are a vital part of this success. If a pilot feels like they might go to jail if they admit to the mistake they made, they're likely to lie and try to cover up the mistake. If a pilot can just tell the inquiry exactly what they messed up, the inquiry can figure out how to design planes better so that the next pilot to almost make that mistake will be confronted with a big red "WARNING: THIS IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE" alarm.
It is not that pilots aren't punished for making flying mistakes because flying mistakes are acceptable and nobody minds enough to punish them. It is that safety is more important than punishment. Finding out how to make the plane safer for next time is more important than assigning fault or blame.
A pilot must care deeply about the safety of their passengers and strive to never make an aviation error - but they can make aviation errors, and the response is to support them in not repeating them rather than to immediately fire them. A pilot would be fired for saying, "I'm tired of being under so much pressure to maintain all these high standards. It's toxic, and it's not inclusive - not everyone can handle it. It's just not fun or sustainable for me to always do everything air traffic control says. I think there's nothing wrong with crashing occasionally..."
Example 2: Some Churches
I'll caveat that many many churches do this awfully - but some do it really well. Ozy has some great posts on why you might join a high-demand group and identifying healthy high-demand groups.
A good church will often believe that people should try to have all sorts of virtues. You should be honest all the time, be kind to everyone, help those in need, work hard, forgive people for being mean to you, stand up courageously for what you believe in, and also not do any sins. They also accept that almost nobody meets that standard, and everyone occasionally says something mean to their neighbour or gets socially pressured into something they shouldn't really have done. You're supposed to be able to get forgiveness for those sins, and then really and genuinely move on rather than continuing to beat yourself up over them.
You're also not supposed to say, "Well, being kind to everyone and never lying is really hard and I think it's unfair of God to expect that of me. I think we need to step back and re-evaluate and set some more achievable goals, like being kind to dogs and only lying to people about why I haven't met work deadlines." The standard you're supposed to aspire to is set in stone. It's non-negotiable. No amount of whining "but for some people shoplifting is a necessary coping strategy" is going to change "thou shalt not steal". You have to actually try not to steal anything... but if you do steal something, you go to confession for forgiveness, you don't get told that God hates you now and you should go try some other religion.
I'm a staunch atheist, but I'm sometimes tempted by the religious view of morality when I encounter people saying things like, "You can't force me not to lie. I might avoid lying if I feel like it, but I reject the idea that you have the authority to tell me not to. I'm a free person who can do whatever I want so long as I follow contracts I agreed to. There's no such thing as objective morality. It's actually more offensive for you to make demands of me, like your demand that I be honest, than it is for me to lie."
A group based on "the standard is to admit the existence of the standard" wouldn't kick you out for lying, but would kick you out for denying the legitimacy of any expectation that you shouldn't lie.
Admitting the existence of a standard can be hard, actually, but you can help
Requiring people to affirm a group's standards and goals is, actually, holding people to a fairly high standard in one specific sense.
It's actually hard to never get defensive. (I suck at it!) Being sensitive about your flaws is natural. Lots of us are anxious about the potential for people to dislike us or criticise us or kick us out of groups or not invite us to future groups. It's hard to kick the habit of being defensive, even if you've found yourself in a group where you're genuinely safe and don't need to be.
As far as I can tell, the best strategies for supporting people in this are all fairly unobjectionable strategies that involve being nice. This is very convenient!
For one thing, it's important to actually stick to the separation from both ends. If you sometimes say "our team really needs to improve at communication" when you want to imply "we should kick out Joe because he's quiet and bad at communicating" then Joe is correct to respond to "our team really needs to improve at communication" with fear for his spot on the team, rather than collaborative truthseeking about the team's priorities. It's really important to have clear communication around when people might actually get kicked out, and how that might happen, and what it'd look like if the process was starting.
For another thing, it's easier for people to believe that you like them if you tell them so - and when people feel secure in being liked, it is much easier for them to do emotionally painful or difficult things, like agree that they should do some things that they aren't currently doing.
It's especially useful to tell people that you like them for characteristics about them which aren't relevant to the standards you're enforcing. Telling your trivia quiz teammate that you love them for how knowledgeable they are doesn't do anything to reduce the pressure to defend the perception that they know everything that matters, which sometimes means aggressively arguing that a certain thing doesn't matter, which is how you end up with nonsense like: "Why are you getting on my case for not knowing the answer to that question about Romeo and Juliet? I don't know anything about literature because I'm not some pansy who worries about wishy-washy subjects - I study real things like science. Shakespeare sucks anyway, he's been dead for centuries and we should move on."
You can tell people things like:
This is very situational; if you're both therapists, then "you have a very calming presence" is extremely directly relevant to important standards like whether you're good at working with patients. You might sometimes need to tell someone that they're a bad therapist because they have an enraging and uncomfortable presence that sets patients on edge, and they need to fix that if they want to continue being a therapist. Complimenting a comedian on their sense of humour will usually be appreciated, but doesn't help with creating the underlying security-in-being-liked that lets them not be defensive during conversations about how to improve their comedy. On the other hand, if you have a job like air traffic control where somebody's ability to write fanfiction is entirely unrelated to their job, then telling them that you like their fanfiction helps create that fallback; even if one day they kind of suck at air traffic control, you'll still like them because they write good fanfic and cook a great paella and have a cute dog and host good chess nights and are your friend. That makes it much easier to talk non-defensively about the ways in which they kind of sucked at air traffic control today!
For a third thing, if you want to pull this off with maximum effectiveness then you have to walk the walk on the 'assuming good faith' thing. You actually have to act as though, when somebody spills pasta sauce all over the carpet, that was probably for reasons like "they ran into a genuinely-reasonably-unforeseeable circumstance, like someone moving a trip hazard into their path after they'd checked for trip hazards" or "they had a sudden medical issue that made carrying a bowl of pasta no longer feasible" or "they misunderstood some communication and thought you wanted the pasta sauce to be on the carpet" and not because they are stupid or careless or hate you. Otherwise people do, in fact, need to defend to you that they spilled pasta sauce on your carpet for reasons unrelated to being stupid or careless or hating you - because, from their perspective, it's a bad outcome if you end up believing those things!
Most people find it easy to believe that spilling pasta sauce on the carpet is bad, and we don't need to twist reality to say "well, a little bit of spilling pasta sauce on the carpet is actually good and healthy, so it'd be counterproductive to aim for perfection in never spilling pasta sauce on the carpet", and it's also easy to believe that it'd be a wild overreaction to kick someone out of their housing because they spilled pasta sauce on the carpet. The separation of 'agreeing to standards' and 'enforcing standards' is really easy here! However, it's sometimes really hard to genuinely approach people as though "they spilled pasta sauce because the sun really unexpectedly came out from behind a stormcloud and shone right in their eyes" is a more plausible explanation than "they are just really clumsy and aren't really trying to improve that". It requires many deep breaths. I don't recommend trying to approach everyone in the whole world this way, or at least not consistently and all the time; it's not just hard, it also makes you wrong a lot. I do, however, try to approach people this way if I've made a commitment to hold them in unconditional positive regard - or if we're good friends.
...And even with all of these strategies to support you, it's still hard sometimes to admit the existence of the standard. It's still sometimes emotionally rough to say "I could've been more polite to that person" instead of "I told that person to fuck off because they deserved it". It's still sometimes really really difficult to say, "Well, my first twenty strategies for improving at this quality didn't work, but I'm still open to the possibility that the twenty-first might work, or that I might naturally find this quality easier when I get a few years older, so it might go on the back-burner for now but I'd still like to be better at this," rather than, "I just can't improve at this, and it's unfair to think I should. I didn't want that stupid quality anyway!" And it's sometimes still hard to agree "I should practise my instrument every day" rather than saying "stop pressuring me into practising my instrument! It makes me want to practise my instrument less! I hate feeling pressured!"
Who should use the strategy
If the standard is to admit the existence of a standard, that's still a standard. It will exclude people who aren't emotionally capable of facing up to the reality that they are bad at some things, it would be better if they weren't bad at those things, and they should probably try to fix it. Some people don't want to change anything about themselves, some people don't think they "should" do anything except exactly what they want, some people think they are just here to have fun, and if your standard is "you must admit the existence of the standard and acknowledge its legitimacy" then you will exclude all of those people.
I think this is a fantastic standards strategy for the kind of mixed-goal groups I described earlier.
In practice, lots of groups already use the "be relaxed about meeting standards, but be strict about acknowledging that standards are real and morally binding" strategy already. Plenty of people will tolerate covering a share of the rent for a housemate who's actively looking for a job, but will immediately lose patience if their housemate instead starts saying that actually expecting everyone to contribute equally to rent is socialism.
However, because they're not explicit about it or don't really think about it, people can wait too long to start pushing back on something unacceptable - and vice versa, people can run into unexpected minefields.
So should your group use this strategy? It depends. Do you think you can do a good job of consistently, clearly pushing back against people who imply that they shouldn't be expected to have goals or try to do good things - while still being clear that you like and welcome them? Do you have a strong shared common idea of what your goals are - what is good, what does winning look like, what are the things people should really try to do? Do you think you can do a good job of separating out the kicking-people-out-for-being-bad type of conversation from the agreeing-that-people-should-be-good-and-not-bad type of conversation? Do you have an acceptable way to filter out liars and cheats who feel comfortable professing that they're trying while actually not even trying to try? Do you trust the people around you to hold you accountable for consistently truthseeking about what you ought to do, without enforcing their idea of what you should do when you genuinely disagree? If so, consider having a standard which is to accept the existence of the standard.
Things I Am Not Saying: On Criticism
Importantly: None of this is inherently about how you handle and respond to criticism.
If you require that people always respond positively to criticism, or always agree with criticism, that can create pretty unhealthy dynamics. If the only acceptable response to "I run a 5k every day - you should try it!" is "I'm sorry for not running a 5k every day, I'll try to improve at that" then people will just feel trapped by lots of unreasonable asks that they don't think achieve their goals anyway.
(I sometimes think in terms of: what is the bar that has to be met to criticise this person? Many people require that you meet a very reasonable bar, like "if you call me slurs while critiquing me then I'm not going to listen" or "I can't really take critique while I'm focused but I'm happy to hear it after the game's over" or "I'm upset right now, but I'm happy to talk about this in an hour". Other people require that you meet a very unreasonable bar, like that you say exactly the right things at all times to coddle their feelings because otherwise they'll only accept critique on fifth Sundays between 04:00 and 04:15. Some people claim they'll be happy to hear feedback tomorrow, but tomorrow something else comes up, and the good time never actually arrives. Look at how often the bar can be met in practice, rather than how theoretically easy the person claims it should be to meet.)
Admitting that a standard exists means agreeing with the goals and values of a space. In a fitness-focused group, that might mean agreeing that you want to improve your fitness. It does not require agreeing with everyone about facts.
You might validly say:
Admitting the existence of the standard means not saying:
The idea here is that a fitness group is improved by factual debate about what activities will help your fitness the most, whereas it is harmed by people who push for the group to be unable to form a consensus about fitness-improving activities and hold its members accountable for pursuing them.
It is, of course, valid to not want to improve one's fitness. It is simply not valid to be uninterested in improving your fitness and also expect a fitness group to accommodate this preference. If you choose to join a fitness group anyway because you like their T-shirts and want to flirt with them, then it is on you to not engage in truth-obscuring or goal-warping behaviours like trying to persuade people that fitness is actually silly and the group should become a coffee hangout.
Advertising what the goal is upfront is a very important part of making sure such groups aren't mistreating people. If you think you're joining a book club and then end up being pressured into running 5Ks, you have meaningfully been wronged. If you join a fitness club, then you ought to be aware that the thing that many people want from this space is pressure to run more 5Ks - and it is your own responsibility, if you don't want to run them, to assert this without derailing the rest of the group.
In Conclusion
If you want to use this strategy, you need to clearly advertise:
Then you have to actually stick to that; good luck.