Communication cultures

Good to be aware of some dimensions:

Once you and a friend have identified yourself on opposing ends of these dimensions, it could be good for both of you to talk about these dimensions one at a time, talk about how to interpret each other and formulate yourselves given that know you're on opposite ends.

Decoupling/contextualizing🔗

(www.greaterwrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms)

Not entirely useful concept for all things – see www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling.

But I think the concept remains useful for two friends to take into mind when they have a possible misunderstanding.

Suppose you're habitually a contextualizer and I'm a decoupler. When I say something that sounds deplorable to you, and this surprises you as it doesn't fit your image of who I am as a person, you might take a ste[p back and reconsider whether I meant to say what you thought you heard.

Maybe I said that blue-eyed people commit more murders and didn't want to imply anything with it, but you can't understand why I'd bother to say this at all if I didn't want to imply anything. What's the use of random statements without discussion, right?

But what I might be doing is setting things up for posing a question in a few minutes, and I don't want to discuss all possible tangents off this one statement now – I'm just checking that we agree on the background facts so we can discuss the question fruitfully.

From this thought experiment already, a lesson for me could be to clarify that I'm doing this. Especially with people I know are contextualizers.

But my mode of operation is that I'm permanently doing this, figuring out the truth of any statement for its own sake. I feel it's useful because we might be building something bigger, approaching some undefined insight we either don't know we could have, or we only have a certain vague awareness of its general shape – a sense of possibility, an incomplete cake-in-the-making – and any one truth may or may not come into relevance for discovering it. It's a bit of a challenge to me not to always assume that others are like me, that they will be game with, and interested in, evaluating the truth of any statement in isolation no matter its apparent relevance to anything.

As for when I hear you say something that sounds strange to me (or wrong or irrelevant to the central point), I can also step back, remember that you're a contextualizer, and try to sense what you're actually wanting to communicate, defocusing from the logical structure of your sentence (switch "Simulacrum level").

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Created (2 years ago)