There’s a lot here, and I’ve put in a lot of work writing and rewriting. After failing for long enough to put things in a way that is both succinct and clear, I’m going to abandon hopes of the latter and go all in on the former. I’m going to use the minimal handles for the concepts I refer to, in a way similar to using LW jargon like “steelman” without the accompanying essays, in hopes that the terms are descriptive enough on their own. If this ends up being too opaque, I can explicate as needed later.
Here’s an oversimplified model to play with:
Changing minds requires attention, and bigger changes require more attentions.
Bidding for bigger attention requires bigger respect, or else no reason to follow.
Bidding for bigger respect requires bigger security, or else not safe enough to risk following.
Bidding for that sense of security requires proof of actual security, or else people react defensively, cooperation isn’t attended to, and good things don’t happen
GWS took an approach of offering proof of security and making fairly modest bids for both security and respect. As a result, the message was accepted, but it was fairly restrained in what it attempted to communicate. For example, GWS explicitly says “I do not expect that I would give you the type of feedback that Jennifer has given you here (i.e. the question the validity of your thesis variety).”
Jennifer, on the other hand, went full bore, commanding attention to places which demand lots of respect if they are to be followed, while offering little in return*. As a result, accepting this bid also requires a large degree of security, and she offered no proof that her attacks on Duncan’s ideas (it feels weird addressing you in the third person given that I am addressing this primarily to you, but it seems like it’s better looked at from an outside perspective?) would be limited to that which wouldn’t harm Duncan’s social standing here. This makes the whole bid very hard to accept, and so it was not accepted, and Duncan gave high heat responses instead.
Bolder bids like that make for much quicker work when accepted, so there is good reason to be as bold as your credit allows. One complicating factor here is that the audience is mixed, and overbidding for Duncan himself doesn’t necessarily mean the message doesn’t get through to others, so there is a trade off here between “Stay sufficiently non-threatening to maintain an open channel of cooperation with Duncan” and “Credibly convey the serious problems with Duncan’s thesis, as I see them, to all those willing to follow”.
Later, she talks about wanting to help Duncan specifically, and doesn’t seem to have done so. There are a few possible explanations for this.
1) When she said it, there might have been an implied “[I’m only going to put in a certain level of work to make things easy to hear, and beyond that I’m willing to fail]”. In this branch, the conversation between Duncan and Jennifer is going nowhere unless Duncan decides to accept at least the first bid of security. If Duncan responds without heat (and feeling heated but attempting to screen it off doesn’t count), the negotiation can pick up on the topic of whether Jennifer is worthy of that level of respect, or further up if that is granted too.
2) It’s possible that she lacks a good and salient picture of what it looks like to recover from over-bidding, and just doesn’t have a map to follow. In this branch, demonstrating what that might look like would likely result in her doing it and recovering things. In particular, this means pacing Duncan’s objections without (necessarily) agreeing with them until Duncan feels that she has passed his ITT and trusts her intent to cooperate and collaborate rather than to tear him down.
3) It could also be that she’s got her own little hang up on the issue of “respect”, which caused a blind spot here. I put an asterisk there earlier, because she was only showing “little respect” in one sense, while showing a lot in another. If you say to someone “Lol, your ideas are dumb”, it’s not showing a lot of respect for those ideas of theirs. To the extent that they afford those same ideas a lot of respect, it sounds a lot like not respecting them, since you’re also shitting on their idea of how valuable those ideas are and therefore their judgement itself. However, if you say to someone “Lol, your ideas are dumb” because you expect them to be able to handle such overt criticism and either agree or prove you wrong, then it is only tentatively disrespectful of those ideas and exceptionally and unusually respectful of the person themselves.
She explicitly points at this when she says “Duncan is a special case. I’m not treating him like a student, I’m treating him like an equal”, and then hints at a blind spot when she says (emphasis her own) “who should be able to manage himself and his own emotions”—translating to my model, “manage himself and his emotions” means finding security and engaging with the rest of the bids on their own merits unobstructed by defensive heat. “Should” often points at a willful refusal to update ones map to what “is”, and instead responding to it by flinching at what isn’t as it “should” be. This isn’t necessarily a mistake (in the same way that flinching away from a hot stove isn’t a mistake), and while she does make other related comments elsewhere in the thread, there’s no clear indication of whether this is a mistake or a deliberate decision to limit her level of effort there. If it is a mistake, then it’s likely “I don’t like having to admit that people don’t demonstrate as much security as I think they should, and I don’t wanna admit that it’s a thing that is going to stay real and problematic even when I flinch at it”. Another prediction is that to the extent that it is this, and she reads this comment, this error will go away.
I don’t want to confuse my personal impression with the conditional predictions of the model itself, but I do think it’s worth noting that I personally would grant the bid for respect. Last time I laughed off something that she didn’t agree should be laughed off, it took me about five years to realize that I was wrong. Oops.
There’s a lot here, and I’ve put in a lot of work writing and rewriting. After failing for long enough to put things in a way that is both succinct and clear, I’m going to abandon hopes of the latter and go all in on the former. I’m going to use the minimal handles for the concepts I refer to, in a way similar to using LW jargon like “steelman” without the accompanying essays, in hopes that the terms are descriptive enough on their own. If this ends up being too opaque, I can explicate as needed later.
Here’s an oversimplified model to play with:
Changing minds requires attention, and bigger changes require more attentions.
Bidding for bigger attention requires bigger respect, or else no reason to follow.
Bidding for bigger respect requires bigger security, or else not safe enough to risk following.
Bidding for that sense of security requires proof of actual security, or else people react defensively, cooperation isn’t attended to, and good things don’t happen
GWS took an approach of offering proof of security and making fairly modest bids for both security and respect. As a result, the message was accepted, but it was fairly restrained in what it attempted to communicate. For example, GWS explicitly says “I do not expect that I would give you the type of feedback that Jennifer has given you here (i.e. the question the validity of your thesis variety).”
Jennifer, on the other hand, went full bore, commanding attention to places which demand lots of respect if they are to be followed, while offering little in return*. As a result, accepting this bid also requires a large degree of security, and she offered no proof that her attacks on Duncan’s ideas (it feels weird addressing you in the third person given that I am addressing this primarily to you, but it seems like it’s better looked at from an outside perspective?) would be limited to that which wouldn’t harm Duncan’s social standing here. This makes the whole bid very hard to accept, and so it was not accepted, and Duncan gave high heat responses instead.
Bolder bids like that make for much quicker work when accepted, so there is good reason to be as bold as your credit allows. One complicating factor here is that the audience is mixed, and overbidding for Duncan himself doesn’t necessarily mean the message doesn’t get through to others, so there is a trade off here between “Stay sufficiently non-threatening to maintain an open channel of cooperation with Duncan” and “Credibly convey the serious problems with Duncan’s thesis, as I see them, to all those willing to follow”.
Later, she talks about wanting to help Duncan specifically, and doesn’t seem to have done so. There are a few possible explanations for this.
1) When she said it, there might have been an implied “[I’m only going to put in a certain level of work to make things easy to hear, and beyond that I’m willing to fail]”. In this branch, the conversation between Duncan and Jennifer is going nowhere unless Duncan decides to accept at least the first bid of security. If Duncan responds without heat (and feeling heated but attempting to screen it off doesn’t count), the negotiation can pick up on the topic of whether Jennifer is worthy of that level of respect, or further up if that is granted too.
2) It’s possible that she lacks a good and salient picture of what it looks like to recover from over-bidding, and just doesn’t have a map to follow. In this branch, demonstrating what that might look like would likely result in her doing it and recovering things. In particular, this means pacing Duncan’s objections without (necessarily) agreeing with them until Duncan feels that she has passed his ITT and trusts her intent to cooperate and collaborate rather than to tear him down.
3) It could also be that she’s got her own little hang up on the issue of “respect”, which caused a blind spot here. I put an asterisk there earlier, because she was only showing “little respect” in one sense, while showing a lot in another. If you say to someone “Lol, your ideas are dumb”, it’s not showing a lot of respect for those ideas of theirs. To the extent that they afford those same ideas a lot of respect, it sounds a lot like not respecting them, since you’re also shitting on their idea of how valuable those ideas are and therefore their judgement itself. However, if you say to someone “Lol, your ideas are dumb” because you expect them to be able to handle such overt criticism and either agree or prove you wrong, then it is only tentatively disrespectful of those ideas and exceptionally and unusually respectful of the person themselves.
She explicitly points at this when she says “Duncan is a special case. I’m not treating him like a student, I’m treating him like an equal”, and then hints at a blind spot when she says (emphasis her own) “who should be able to manage himself and his own emotions”—translating to my model, “manage himself and his emotions” means finding security and engaging with the rest of the bids on their own merits unobstructed by defensive heat. “Should” often points at a willful refusal to update ones map to what “is”, and instead responding to it by flinching at what isn’t as it “should” be. This isn’t necessarily a mistake (in the same way that flinching away from a hot stove isn’t a mistake), and while she does make other related comments elsewhere in the thread, there’s no clear indication of whether this is a mistake or a deliberate decision to limit her level of effort there. If it is a mistake, then it’s likely “I don’t like having to admit that people don’t demonstrate as much security as I think they should, and I don’t wanna admit that it’s a thing that is going to stay real and problematic even when I flinch at it”. Another prediction is that to the extent that it is this, and she reads this comment, this error will go away.
I don’t want to confuse my personal impression with the conditional predictions of the model itself, but I do think it’s worth noting that I personally would grant the bid for respect. Last time I laughed off something that she didn’t agree should be laughed off, it took me about five years to realize that I was wrong. Oops.