I’m intrigued by the explicit unrolling in contrast to circling. I wonder how much circling is an instance of developing overpowered tools on weird partly-orthogonal dimensions (like embodiment) because you haven’t yet discovered the basic simple structure of the domain.
Like, a person might have a bunch of cobbled together hacks and heuristics (including things about narrative, and chunking next actions, and discipline) for maintaining their productivity. But a crisp understanding of the relevant psychology makes “maintaining productivity” a simple and mostly effortless thing to do.
Or a person who spends years doing complicated math without paper. They will discover all kinds of tricks for doing mental computation, and they might get really good at these tricks, and building that skill might even have benefits in other domains. But at the end of the day, all of that training is blown out of the water as soon as they have paper. Paper makes the thing they were training hard to do, easy.
To what extent is Circling working hard to train capacities that are being used as workarounds for limited working memory and insufficient theoretical understanding the structure of human interaction?
(This is a real question. My guess is, “some, but less than 30%”.)
A lot of my strategies for dealing with situations of this sort are circling-y, and I feel like a lot of that is superfluous. If I had a better theoretical understanding, I could do the thing with much more efficiency.
For instance, I exert a lot of effort to be attuned to the other person in general and to be picking up subtle signs from them, and tracking where they’re at. If had a more correct theoretical understanding, a better ontology, I would only need to be tracking the few things that it turns out are actually relevant.
Since humans don’t know what those factors are, now, people are skilled at this sort of interaction insofar as they can track everything that’s happening with the other person, and as a result, also capture the few things that are relevant to the underlying structure.
I suspect that others disagree strongly with me here.
Circling is working on a similar problem, and training capacities that are used as workarounds: This feels true to me.
I think this even more visible in the circling-variant called “T-Group,” where people tell a short narrative on why they think they’re having a described emotional reaction. Very frequently, the explanations encapsulate 1-2 layers of meta, or explicitly gesture at certain/uncertain pieces of common knowledge.
(ex: Joe is responding to Jane’s response and feels U, Jane is responding to Jane’s interpretation of Joe’s response to Jane and feels V. Albert notes X, models that Betty would be troubled by X, and feels concern that there might not be common knowledge of this. Betty believes that there is common knowledge of X, and that everyone feels wary about it. Betty queries if anyone disagrees with that interpretation. Carrie notes that she hadn’t initially been aware of X, but is now aware of X, and feels sad and a little scared.)
When I look at it this way, it becomes even clearer why T-Group comes with an exhortation to always include the experiencer as an object in your sentence (“I feel”, “I make it mean”, “I infer”). If the next person is going to do meta on your meta, it helps if they don’t need to recalculate out the layer representing “you,” and it’s useful to explicitly differentiate between yourself and common knowledge.
(Actually, the more I think about it, the more T-Group looks like a hybrid between circling and explicit modeling. And the fact that they work well together suggests to me that not everything in the circling skillset gets eclipsed when you switch to explicit-modeling.)
...huh. I guess I know of one particular variety, and that variety is very self-contained and circling-adjacent (I almost could have called it “Narrative Circling”, if that didn’t seem like such a contradiction-in-terms). But from the wiki article, T-Group appears to refer to a more nebulous and broad category of things, some of which seem not nearly so self-contained.
The thing I had run into functioned basically as described here (scroll down for the written description). This read to me as clearly cicling-adjacent, and I didn’t think all that hard about where it had come from.
The wikipedia description struck me as surprisingly uninformative about the details of the practice itself. But from poking around a bit on the internet just now… I get the impression that T-Group can refer to something similar to what I described, but can also be used to refer to something close to an experimental leadership/decision-making structure that uses the “T-Group” as part of their intragroup conflict-resolution method?
I knew that the variety I had run into was a bit homebrew, and probably had aspects of circling bred into it. I don’t think I appreciated just how different it could be from other people’s usage of/context for the term. That said, I do see some signs of shared lineage.
The techniques feel related, and the facilitating ethos of awareness, learning, honesty, and goallessness feels similar. But the variety I ran into felt more tightly-defined and compartmentalized, and I was mostly doing it with strangers.
I admit that with a high bar of trust and decently committed participants, I could actually see it working well as a social-information-gathering method? But the idea of being dragged into doing it with coworkers, or of treating it like a primary conflict-resolution technique, seems quite troubling to me.
I’m intrigued by the explicit unrolling in contrast to circling. I wonder how much circling is an instance of developing overpowered tools on weird partly-orthogonal dimensions (like embodiment) because you haven’t yet discovered the basic simple structure of the domain.
Like, a person might have a bunch of cobbled together hacks and heuristics (including things about narrative, and chunking next actions, and discipline) for maintaining their productivity. But a crisp understanding of the relevant psychology makes “maintaining productivity” a simple and mostly effortless thing to do.
Or a person who spends years doing complicated math without paper. They will discover all kinds of tricks for doing mental computation, and they might get really good at these tricks, and building that skill might even have benefits in other domains. But at the end of the day, all of that training is blown out of the water as soon as they have paper. Paper makes the thing they were training hard to do, easy.
To what extent is Circling working hard to train capacities that are being used as workarounds for limited working memory and insufficient theoretical understanding the structure of human interaction?
(This is a real question. My guess is, “some, but less than 30%”.)
A lot of my strategies for dealing with situations of this sort are circling-y, and I feel like a lot of that is superfluous. If I had a better theoretical understanding, I could do the thing with much more efficiency.
For instance, I exert a lot of effort to be attuned to the other person in general and to be picking up subtle signs from them, and tracking where they’re at. If had a more correct theoretical understanding, a better ontology, I would only need to be tracking the few things that it turns out are actually relevant.
Since humans don’t know what those factors are, now, people are skilled at this sort of interaction insofar as they can track everything that’s happening with the other person, and as a result, also capture the few things that are relevant to the underlying structure.
I suspect that others disagree strongly with me here.
(Crossposted from here)
Circling is working on a similar problem, and training capacities that are used as workarounds: This feels true to me.
I think this even more visible in the circling-variant called “T-Group,” where people tell a short narrative on why they think they’re having a described emotional reaction. Very frequently, the explanations encapsulate 1-2 layers of meta, or explicitly gesture at certain/uncertain pieces of common knowledge.
(ex: Joe is responding to Jane’s response and feels U, Jane is responding to Jane’s interpretation of Joe’s response to Jane and feels V. Albert notes X, models that Betty would be troubled by X, and feels concern that there might not be common knowledge of this. Betty believes that there is common knowledge of X, and that everyone feels wary about it. Betty queries if anyone disagrees with that interpretation. Carrie notes that she hadn’t initially been aware of X, but is now aware of X, and feels sad and a little scared.)
When I look at it this way, it becomes even clearer why T-Group comes with an exhortation to always include the experiencer as an object in your sentence (“I feel”, “I make it mean”, “I infer”). If the next person is going to do meta on your meta, it helps if they don’t need to recalculate out the layer representing “you,” and it’s useful to explicitly differentiate between yourself and common knowledge.
(Actually, the more I think about it, the more T-Group looks like a hybrid between circling and explicit modeling. And the fact that they work well together suggests to me that not everything in the circling skillset gets eclipsed when you switch to explicit-modeling.)
T-Group stuff sounds interesting. Does this Wikipedia article refer to the same thing you were talking about?
...huh. I guess I know of one particular variety, and that variety is very self-contained and circling-adjacent (I almost could have called it “Narrative Circling”, if that didn’t seem like such a contradiction-in-terms). But from the wiki article, T-Group appears to refer to a more nebulous and broad category of things, some of which seem not nearly so self-contained.
The thing I had run into functioned basically as described here (scroll down for the written description). This read to me as clearly cicling-adjacent, and I didn’t think all that hard about where it had come from.
The wikipedia description struck me as surprisingly uninformative about the details of the practice itself. But from poking around a bit on the internet just now… I get the impression that T-Group can refer to something similar to what I described, but can also be used to refer to something close to an experimental leadership/decision-making structure that uses the “T-Group” as part of their intragroup conflict-resolution method?
I knew that the variety I had run into was a bit homebrew, and probably had aspects of circling bred into it. I don’t think I appreciated just how different it could be from other people’s usage of/context for the term. That said, I do see some signs of shared lineage.
The techniques feel related, and the facilitating ethos of awareness, learning, honesty, and goallessness feels similar. But the variety I ran into felt more tightly-defined and compartmentalized, and I was mostly doing it with strangers.
I admit that with a high bar of trust and decently committed participants, I could actually see it working well as a social-information-gathering method? But the idea of being dragged into doing it with coworkers, or of treating it like a primary conflict-resolution technique, seems quite troubling to me.