After reflecting a little bit, I think that I do in fact take words at face value far too often. My next thought was that it takes effort to read between the lines, and I’m not sure whether that effort is usually worth it. It definitely is in some situations, such as the examples in this post, but I think that there are a lot more minute situations that occur in daily life where it wouldn’t be worth it to constantly pause and try to read between the lines, so I’m not sure if it would make sense to up your default level of reading between the lines.
Here’s an example. I wanted to bet on the Miami Heat to win the championship and asked a friend to place the bet for me. He responded with this link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.actionnetwork.com/news/legal-sports-betting-united-states-projections. I clicked it. He lives in Arkansas, and I saw that it’s legal in Arkansas. I responded to his text by joking around about how long it took me to find Arkansas on the map. We went back and forth joking about that. Then I asked him to let me know when he places the bet so I could Venmo him. He said, “Did you read the article?” Then I read it more closely and saw that in Arkansas you can only bet in person, and we previously had talked about how that wouldn’t be worth the time.
In retrospect, I do feel a little silly about it. He wouldn’t have texted me that link just to show me that sports betting is legal in Arkansas. I mean it’s possible, but probably pretty unlikely. So if I stopped and thought about it I would have been able to figure out what he was really telling me: that he wasn’t able to place the bet. But as a general rule I don’t think that it would be worth my effort to try to read between the lines in similar situations, and nothing really stood out to me about this situation in particular to indicate that I should violate that general rule, so I don’t think I have any regrets.
One thing that makes me hesitate is that perhaps reading between the lines is a skill that can be developed, and so after doing it a lot it wouldn’t take much effort to apply. Which would probably make the long term calculus of reading between the lines worthwhile even if the immediate calculus isn’t. Something similar is the skill to think about the incentives that someone faces. I’ve slowly built that up and I’m at the point where it pops out to me pretty quickly.
One thing that does seem very clear to me is that it’d make sense to learn to notice situations where you should spend the effort trying to read between the lines. The dishes situation was a good example of that. The more general situation would be “when someone expresses anger towards me”. I think in that general situation it makes sense to pause and spend time trying to read between the lines.
After reflecting a little bit, I think that I do in fact take words at face value far too often. My next thought was that it takes effort to read between the lines, and I’m not sure whether that effort is usually worth it. It definitely is in some situations, such as the examples in this post, but I think that there are a lot more minute situations that occur in daily life where it wouldn’t be worth it to constantly pause and try to read between the lines, so I’m not sure if it would make sense to up your default level of reading between the lines.
Here’s an example. I wanted to bet on the Miami Heat to win the championship and asked a friend to place the bet for me. He responded with this link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.actionnetwork.com/news/legal-sports-betting-united-states-projections. I clicked it. He lives in Arkansas, and I saw that it’s legal in Arkansas. I responded to his text by joking around about how long it took me to find Arkansas on the map. We went back and forth joking about that. Then I asked him to let me know when he places the bet so I could Venmo him. He said, “Did you read the article?” Then I read it more closely and saw that in Arkansas you can only bet in person, and we previously had talked about how that wouldn’t be worth the time.
In retrospect, I do feel a little silly about it. He wouldn’t have texted me that link just to show me that sports betting is legal in Arkansas. I mean it’s possible, but probably pretty unlikely. So if I stopped and thought about it I would have been able to figure out what he was really telling me: that he wasn’t able to place the bet. But as a general rule I don’t think that it would be worth my effort to try to read between the lines in similar situations, and nothing really stood out to me about this situation in particular to indicate that I should violate that general rule, so I don’t think I have any regrets.
One thing that makes me hesitate is that perhaps reading between the lines is a skill that can be developed, and so after doing it a lot it wouldn’t take much effort to apply. Which would probably make the long term calculus of reading between the lines worthwhile even if the immediate calculus isn’t. Something similar is the skill to think about the incentives that someone faces. I’ve slowly built that up and I’m at the point where it pops out to me pretty quickly.
One thing that does seem very clear to me is that it’d make sense to learn to notice situations where you should spend the effort trying to read between the lines. The dishes situation was a good example of that. The more general situation would be “when someone expresses anger towards me”. I think in that general situation it makes sense to pause and spend time trying to read between the lines.