I’m generally in favor of public praise and private criticism, but this post really rubbed me the wrong way. To me it reads as a group of neurotic people getting together to try to get out of neuroticism by being even more neurotic at each other. Or, that in a quest to avoid interacting with the layer of intentions, let’s go arbitrarily deep on the recursion stack at the algorithmic/strategy layer of understanding.
Also really bothered by calling a series of reactions spread over time levels of meta. Actually going meta would be paying attention to the structure of the back and forth rather than the individual steps in the back and forth.
Huh, am surprised that this was your response, because I got quite a lot out of the post.
in a quest to avoid interacting with the layer of intentions
Like, I think this post has a true description of a key part of what’s going on. The key insight is that your working memory is limited to a few slots, and that if you have more you’ll be able to see a few more levels of modelling of modelling of modelling etc, and I think the descriptions are accurate portrayals of causally what happened. I think that, especially in the modern tech era, a lot of norm violations come down to having very different assumptions about background context leading to mixed signals, and having common norms for carefully and slowly making a lot of the background assumptions explicit, can lead to resolving problems that otherwise would be intractable or be resolved with a lot more violent force. You can’t say “Make everything explicit”, but this post helps set out a framework for making certain important things explicit.
I agree that there are other skills that need to be done here, but this to me feels pretty key (and not just like a few bells and whistles that are distracting from the real substance of what needs to happen).
I think the post imagines something like a multi person stack trace. In reality backwards facing introspection winds up confabulating, and there’s not limit to how many epicycles can be added with multiple parties confabulating.
Hmm. It seems like a pretty strong claim to me that the backwards facing stack-trace is purely confabulatory, or is so confabulatory that it’s not useful to understand.
I do agree confabulation can happen (moreover, I agree that confabulation is happening all the time). But my current sense is that the confabulation is… happening in a fashion that is entangled enough with reality that it usually collapses into something real-enough to be worth talking about (both in multi-person relationships and other domains).
I do find it somewhat plausible that the overall approach and stance in this article isn’t the based way to handle social conflict, but that doesn’t seem to be because the content is false, so much as it’s an unhelpful frame. (I’m currently somewhat agnostic on how helpful the frame is, and think it varies depending on the situation)
I’m generally in favor of public praise and private criticism, but this post really rubbed me the wrong way. To me it reads as a group of neurotic people getting together to try to get out of neuroticism by being even more neurotic at each other. Or, that in a quest to avoid interacting with the layer of intentions, let’s go arbitrarily deep on the recursion stack at the algorithmic/strategy layer of understanding.
Also really bothered by calling a series of reactions spread over time levels of meta. Actually going meta would be paying attention to the structure of the back and forth rather than the individual steps in the back and forth.
Huh, am surprised that this was your response, because I got quite a lot out of the post.
Like, I think this post has a true description of a key part of what’s going on. The key insight is that your working memory is limited to a few slots, and that if you have more you’ll be able to see a few more levels of modelling of modelling of modelling etc, and I think the descriptions are accurate portrayals of causally what happened. I think that, especially in the modern tech era, a lot of norm violations come down to having very different assumptions about background context leading to mixed signals, and having common norms for carefully and slowly making a lot of the background assumptions explicit, can lead to resolving problems that otherwise would be intractable or be resolved with a lot more violent force. You can’t say “Make everything explicit”, but this post helps set out a framework for making certain important things explicit.
I agree that there are other skills that need to be done here, but this to me feels pretty key (and not just like a few bells and whistles that are distracting from the real substance of what needs to happen).
Am curious to know more of your thoughts.
I think the post imagines something like a multi person stack trace. In reality backwards facing introspection winds up confabulating, and there’s not limit to how many epicycles can be added with multiple parties confabulating.
Hmm. It seems like a pretty strong claim to me that the backwards facing stack-trace is purely confabulatory, or is so confabulatory that it’s not useful to understand.
I do agree confabulation can happen (moreover, I agree that confabulation is happening all the time). But my current sense is that the confabulation is… happening in a fashion that is entangled enough with reality that it usually collapses into something real-enough to be worth talking about (both in multi-person relationships and other domains).
I do find it somewhat plausible that the overall approach and stance in this article isn’t the based way to handle social conflict, but that doesn’t seem to be because the content is false, so much as it’s an unhelpful frame. (I’m currently somewhat agnostic on how helpful the frame is, and think it varies depending on the situation)