I think I came across as more disparaging to codes of conduct and those kinds of things than I meant to — they certainly have a place. One example where you’d

I think I came across as more disparaging to codes of conduct and those kinds of things than I meant to — they certainly have a place. One example where you’d want one, where everyone has high social skills, is during a negotiating summit: you want to clearly define the boundaries of when and where are appropriate to negotiate, not because people would be offended, but because people have different (valid) expectations and it helps to established a shared set of norms upfront, to ease the contentiousness later. If I tried to do the same for my friends negotiating where to eat tonight, they’d all pretty quickly agree the answer was somewhere I wasn’t. I think it has more to do with the scale and conflict inherent in the gathering, rather than social aptitude, per se. The smaller and more aligned the group, the less useful formal process is.