At odds with the unavoidable meta-message
11Haiku
3Raemon
9Gordon Seidoh Worley
4Raemon
-1Gordon Seidoh Worley
2Raemon
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
2plex
6Gordon Seidoh Worley
3plex
2Raemon
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
2Raemon
5Gordon Seidoh Worley
4Raemon
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
3kbear
2Ruby
7Kaj_Sotala
6Raphael Roche
1kbear
1[anonymous]
New Comment
I once had a codependent friendship in which there was a pressure to keep messages short, speak in reference and metaphor, and not explain at length what I meant. For this and other reasons, that relationship was toxic and frequently emotionally painful.
After that friendship ended, I read only the first few chapters of the excellent book Codependent No More, and I was abruptly and permanently cured. That isn't how that normally works; it's usually "once codependent, always codependent," like alcoholism. But it turned out my problem was fundamentally a lack of knowledge and understanding. I straight-up did not know that I was not responsible for other people's feelings. Gaining that understanding was curative.
This is relevant to @Gordon Seidoh Worley's and @Raemon's conversation. It is good to be thoughtful. It is bad to take upon yourself the full weight of other people's response to you. Do be considerate. Don't manage other people's feelings. I'm not good at articulating the difference, but that book is the ultimate work on the subject.
The other message I want to convey here is on the opposite, positive end: It is good to get practiced at tactfully and efficiently explaining yourself, asking for clarification, expressing vulnerability and anxiety about a communication, etc., all with appropriate proportionality, and especially with people you are close to. Bad communication is usually fixed by subsequent good communication, and rarely so by less communication.
My partner and I have intentionally cultivated space for a rich and easily accessible meta-conversation, which we can jump into at any time with cues like "Put what I'm about to say in a bubble," (i.e. "I have a potentially dangerous thought that I'm not sure I fully endorse, but it feels like there's something important in there that I ought to share, and I am asking not to be judged for it or for it to go onto the permanent record while I work it out with you in real time") or "Can I ask an anxiety question?" (i.e. "I have social anxiety about something between us, and I would like to express it without implying that you have done something wrong to cause this anxiety"). Other than love (mutual, deep, genuine good intention toward each other), I believe the meta-conversation is the single most impactful innovation that has allowed our relationship to be abnormally healthy over the long run.
I was responding locally to some gworley's arguments that didn't make sense to me, but, to be clear I do roughly endorse this comment.
I agree with "don't take upon yourself the full weight of other people's response to you".
A few random things I think:
- if someone hasn't yet bought into having a big ol' conversation, it's generally better to start with something short that's succinctly communicates the gist of the issue and checks if now's a good time for a big ol' conversation
- if you're having a somewhat triggered or anxious or slightly-annoyed conversation over text, and finding yourself wanting to write very long messages, it's often better to shift towards in-person convo. One of the failure modes is that you don't actually need all those caveats and qualifiers, you maybe need... like, 1 out of 5 of them, to avoid being misunderstood. If you're having a realtime convo, it's much more natural to just say the short version and then quickly back up and qualify things if your interlocutor reacts poorly or seems to not get it.
- (meanwhile, if you write out all 5/5 qualifiers, you end up burying the real substance in noise that's harder to read)
- (if you're mostly writing for the benefit of other people, this is maybe not relevant, depends on the situation though)
- if you never end up expressing complex nuanced thoughts, something else is probably going wrong.
- I also find it valuable to say "can I share a dangerous/confused/anxious thought?" with my partner.
2There's also a meta-meta-message behind the messages to avoid sending the meta-message, and it's "I can control how other people experience me". Let go of that, and you'll be free to just send messages, no matter what the meta-message is.
This... seems ripe for just being worse at social interactions? Obviously how you present yourself affects how people perceive you? I can totally control how people perceive me by choosing, say, whether or not to yell racial slurs at them for no reason. Why is this any different?
(I agree there is something to "be comfortable/confident/non-anxious about trying to control things" having a lot of good flow-through effects but that doesn't mean there are no consequences to having any particular communication style)
Obviously how you present yourself affects how people perceive you?
Yes, of course.
I can totally control how people perceive me by choosing, say, whether or not to yell racial slurs at them for no reason.
This is factually false. You have zero control over how someone perceives you, no matter what you do. You instead have a model that predicts how they will respond and you can use that model to review a set of predicted outcomes and choose the actions that predict the best outcomes, but that's substantially different from controlling how someone else perceives you.
You have to actually say something to find out how they will respond, and even then you will only get a noisy signal about their actual experiences.
What are the benefits from defining control in the way you're doing here, instead of using it to mean "using your mental model to predict how someone will respond and then review predicted outcomes and choose actions based on those outcomes?"?
Is there any sense in which anyone controls anything given this framework?
I think you would be more clear here if instead of saying "you don't have control", you said whatever thing you think goes better if you're orienting the way you are imagining orienting.
This feels similar to saying "just be yourself!" to someone trying to get better at dating, which is maybe true in some sense but mostly a useless sazen without more connecting dots.
Is there any sense in which anyone controls anything given this framework?
Indeed, no, which is the point. The very idea of "control" is the result of making confused metaphysical assumptions about causality, but I admit that talking as if we have "control" of our own actions is usually useful, as in we only have control over what we do, not what others do.
I think you would be more clear here if instead of saying "you don't have control", you said whatever thing you think goes better if you're orienting the way you are imagining orienting.
My original comment is reacting to what I view as the framing of this post, which I read as supposing a belief that maybe we can make a conversation go right if we just say the right things. Now it might be that if you say certain things another person will react in the way that you want, but the level of influence here is not strong enough that gaming it out in great detail is likely to be useful. We even see this in Ruby's story, where he ties himself up in knots only to get back an "lol i do the same thing" message that defuses the tension.
Instead we can say things, see what happens, and become better over time at saying things that result in the effects that we want. Getting caught up in the meta-message is letting reason run ahead of evidence. You might read my original comment as advice to be brave enough to just say things and learn from the saying and not worry too much about making mistakes, as most people most of the time are unlikely to make truly catastrophic mistakes.
Agree that the thing you're mapping the word control to is metaphysically confused, and expect some people's fuzzy notion of what the word means can have the issues you point to.
However, since there are far fewer words than structures/concepts we might want to use words for, I have a strong preference for mapping the scarce words to structures that are not metaphysically confused, rather than mapping them to ~useless metaphysically confused structures.
I make a bid for "define the word 'control' as an actually useful to be able to speak about thing[1], then point out the way this diffs with people's kinda wonky notion of control and how some other definitions have metaphysical confusion so we shouldn't use them".
- ^
probably the cybernetics people have some well nailed down definitions of a pretty useful structure to have short message length referents to.
What does "control" mean here other than "determine the behavior of", and a person cannot fully determine the behavior of another person. To say we can control someone is to be confused about how the world works. We can only exert some influence, and we have fairly limited capacities for modeling the effect of that influence (yes, we are better at modeling that influence than other animals are, but still quite limited).
Yeah, I define control to be influence which will continue even if the source pushes in another direction. It feels useful to differentiate between "I have influence on my friend by mentioning we could go out, but will just drop it if it looks like he doesn't want to" and "I am explicitly planning to go out, and even if he tries not to, I will keep generating attempts to try and make him go out, attempting to control the variable of whether we go out".
You're absolutely right that the notion of control as you define it is confused[1], but this strikes me as reason to not use that definition and throw away an entire word.
For an example of why this word is useful, Control vs Opening compares some fairly toxic things that come out of control. I imagine in your ontology, you could map plex!control to gordon!attempted-forced-influence, but it seems like an important enough thing that I want a single word for it.
(I am arguing about definitions, but literally purely about them in the sense of "hey i want a word for this, this word can be used to mean something important")
- ^
outside of weird simple physics/math environments, at least
Do you not think it's worth effort to avoid being rude, or unintentionally aggro in other ways? The arguments you're saying here still feel like they prove way too much.
No, it's totally worth it to be polite or otherwise execute a communication strategy that in expectation satisfies your concerns. There's no reason that needs to include what I might uncharitably call a neurotic fixation on how another person is going to perceive you, or what I would more charitably describe as an attempt to control how others think and feel about you.
"a neurotic fixation on how another person is going to perceive you"
This line at least communicates anything at all (whereas the control one still feels basically irrelevant semantics to me), but, it still doesn't do anything to justify why "writing a giant wall of text" is bucked under "neurotic" instead of "practical strategy."
It sounds like what you are actually saying, translated into stuff that I care about, is that "you are incorrect that a large number of people will predictably respond negatively to this." Or, do you think that's correct, but, still incorrect to care?
It sounds like what you are actually saying, translated into stuff that I care about, is that "you are incorrect that a large number of people will predictably respond negatively to this." Or, do you think that's correct, but, still incorrect to care?
I'm not saying large numbers of people will respond negatively or not. For example, sometimes I need to send a wall of text when having a technical discussion because many words are the only way to be precise.
I'm instead saying the mind that cooks up the wall of text strategy is the mind that believes it can exert more exacting control of another person's thoughts than is generally possible. Pithily, I would say you can't control another person. Less pithily, I'd say the level of influence you have to direct the behavior of another person via a wall of text is fuzzy enough that you are tricking yourself into being trapped in a local maxima by doing so (and this usually happens by projecting one's perceived control of one's own thoughts into a believe that by controlling the counterfactual model in your head you can control the world) and you should abandon this strategy for one that let's you just interact with the world and see what happens rather than blowing past the limits of the precision of your model.
I'd like it if you just taboo'd all abstractions and value judgments and just describe the physical situations and consequences you expect to see in the world.
This still feels like someone who has some kind of opinion about an abstract level that I still haven't been persuaded is a useful abstraction. We can tap out of the convo here, but, like, the last few rounds felt like you were repeating the same things without actually engaging with my cruxes.
(like, when you talking about "assuming you have control..." can you describe that the sort of naturalist way Logan Strohl would probably describe it, and like what predictions you make about what physically will happen to people doing that thing vs other nearby things?)
Sure, dropping it seems fine. I'm a bit hesitant to address your points too directly because I anticipate the conversation would require something like explaining our entire worldviews and me trying to convince you of mine, so I've been doing something more like just explaining my worldview as I see it as relevant to the points here in the hopes that it gets you to see what I'm pointing at, but if that's not working no reason to continue since I'm not excited right now about making time to explain the whole thing.
1faith vs acts. Raemon seeks salvation through their actions. what use is faith if it does not lead to proper behavior? Gordon finds salvation through faith alone. good acts cannot be trusted if they are not rooted in proper belief.
11I think they also mix between a broader metaphysical claim and claim about practical strategy that could be made without the metaphysical claim.
1My guess is that even if you weren't carrying around an explicit belief in your head that word count = emotional intensity, you tacitly have it and if you received an unusually lengthy email or text from your partner/friend/boss, then you'd have the reaction oh f***, something *is* up.
For what it's worth, I don't think I have this. Certainly there are circumstances that would prime me to interpret a long message this way, such as if our history had been adversarial. But without those, my default emotional reaction seeing a long message would be "Oh they put in the time and effort to tell me something in a lot of detail? Yay, I feel cared for!"
1The guys at my insurance company must be very emotionally engaged given the length of their contracts!
Jokes aside, I found your post insightful and will from now on give more consideration to this side effect.
1it definitely sounds like if everyone followed the reasonable norms you suggest it would have saved you awkwardness around your ex!
My communication rule is "using lols to soften your too long message, doesn't really work and I can't explain why."