= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TimS comments on How to understand people better - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (164)
If by this you mean "Alice would explode at being called a liar," then I agree.
Communication is the transfer of information from speaker to listener: while I cannot reduce intent to the explicit meaning of words in this case I can reduce actual transfer to the explicit meaning of words (and a bit extra). The man in question is likely to be literal-minded, otherwise he would have picked up on the hint. (Men tend to be more literal than women.) Alice is the one who has an easier path to avoid communication breakdown.
They are in a fight about when they talk about it, and she is the one that elevated it from discussion to fight.
This habit is not conducive to relationship success.
Communication is the transfer of information, but social conventions still exist. And those social conventions provide context so that the spoken words include implicit statements.
I'm certainly not trying to say the the conventions are efficient. And lack of communication efficiency is bad for relationships. And sometimes, the social conventions are really opaque.
But when you say someone is lying, that's an accusation that a norm has been violated. And I don't think that Alice has violated any norm (social or otherwise). She may not be trying to maximize the viability of her relationship with Bob, but that's a separate issue.
And my only point was that Bob's explicit request for Alice to say what's wrong is not really trying to understand Alice.
Finally, I want to point out that our conversation is very meta. Alice may not be interested in having this kind of conversation. Most people aren't. And when the social conventions are very opaque, this sucks for Bob if he's not good at figuring out social conventions. Further, if Alice is trying to make the convention opaque, or hiding behind to uncertainty to jerk Bob's chain, that doesn't say good things about her.
It seems like you're using Alice's perspective to identify Bob's intentions. Since they're having this fight, I don't think that's a reliable model to work off of. Bob wants to clear up his confusion, and he's confused about Alice. Alice sees Bob's attempt to clear up confusion (what's there to be confused about?*) as dominating the conversation- obviously she doesn't want to talk about it!
*Consider the emotional reaction that some women have when the man doesn't know what the issue is about- "he should know (without telling)." While the first part is spoken, the second part is clearly the message- if the important thing were knowledge transfer, she would say what the problem is!
Thanks for playing along! Notice that this has been a demonstration of social conventions, as alluded to:
It is incontestable that Alice is providing verbal content that is the opposite of the information she believes. Can that be labeled a "lie"? Well, that depends on consequences, not the definition. The label of 'lying' is one she would hotly deny- despite it being literally true- because of the subtext involved. If Alice is labeled a liar, then her status-seeking strategy (conscious or unconscious) has failed- and so she'll probably double down by exploding. The convention is for Bob to not challenge Alice on that because it rarely ends well for either of them.
Man, if there were one piece of social advice I would give to my younger self...