THT #8
Scattered small posts from 2022
2022 has been the weirdest and most chaotic year of my life. Lots of traveling to spend time with internet strangers. Starting a small business. Moving apartments and furnishing an old office to be my new living space. Spending an extended period of time helping someone through a psychotic break++. Losing hope in people. Finding it again. I hope to write about it all soon.
In the meantime, here’s a bunch of smaller things I’ve written over the year that didn’t end up in this newsletter. Many of these posts came from a group blogging experiment my friends and I tried. I also Made a Thing.
Hazardous Advice (link)
You can now pay me to give you bad surreal advice. It’s hilarious, check it out. Probably the most fun thing I’ve made this year.
Writing
Self-Deception
I’ve been writing about the mechanics of self-deception and introspection on and off for years and probably have over 20,000 unpublished words on the topic. This year I’ve managed to slice off a few bite-sized nuggets from this giant theory and put them on paper. I care about this topic for 2 reasons: the first is better understanding how to unravel knots in my own mind, the second is that deeply understanding how self-deception works seems necessary to be able to think and talk clearly about interpersonal conflict.
The degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered (link)
tl;dr there are real costs to a divided mind.
The ecological niche(s) of self-deception (link)
tl;dr what functions does self-deception serve? What sorts of contexts is it a narrow local adaption to? Normally I see people pick just one story about this, I know at least three good ones.
The “point” of a mechanistic theory of self-deception (link)
tl;dr most theories about self-deception are about why people self-deceive, not how they do so. This is a problem for anyone interested in investigating how their own mind is divided.
Disavowed Desire leads to Abstracting Desires, capping your ability to get what you want (link)
tl;dr when you disavow a desire you have you can’t be too good at getting the thing otherwise it will be obvious to you and others what you want. Concrete desires will get laundered through abstract desires, which are much less useful for navigating complex situations.
Language and Communication
Good progress on figuring out how to talk about implication and insinuation, various small expansions on the idea of words that act as labels for decision rules.
A more honest way to argue for the meaning of words (link)
tl;dr Yes “meaning is what you can get away with”. No I don’t have to let you get away with anything. Yes I can argue we should use particular meanings for words. No I don’t have to only appeal to “that’s just objectively what this word means”.
Excerpts from “Self and Others” on Ambiguity, Implication, and Double Binds (link)
tl;dr Quotes from R. D. Laing
Implication vs Insinuation (link)
tl;dr Implication (in the Gricean sense) is the substrate of all communication, can’t be avoided, and there wouldn’t be much reason to trying. Insinuation is leaving key parts of your communication implicit and refusing to make them explicit if someone asks for clarification on what you mean. Insinuation is not unavoidable, and social contexts that rely heavily on it have lots of bad qualities to them.
Euphemism treadmills and “Communication finds a way” (link)
tl;dr People will use the language they have available to express what they care about expressing, regardless of the original intent behind the language.
“Weaponized” words are imbalanced decision rules (link)
tl;dr A word can be considered “weaponized'“ when it’s an is/ought alloy with a very severe “ought” and a vague expansive “is”.
Misc
“Anti-anti-normativity alliance” starter pack (link)
tl;dr a best-of/starter-pack for the blogs of four friends who have some of the best writing I’ve found describing certain destructive social dynamics.
The game of mao is a prototype for getting hazed into a social order (link)
tl;dr Many games are play practice for adult activities. The card game mao practices the movements of getting hazed into a social order. Examining the exaggerated dynamics of the game illuminate aspects of how socialization works.
Riffing on “Non-naive trust dancing” (link)
tl;dr Malcolm Ocean has a frame for talking about one core capacity needed for robust win-win relationships. I riff on some of his exposition.
That’s all! Stay warm and Stay lucky.