Epistemic status: Original work, explanation of a mental model that I developed for a few years that brings together knowledge from existing fields.
Is all communication manipulation? I hear this sentiment frequently expressed and want to explain in this article that there’s nonmanipulative communication by using protein folding as an intuition pump.
It is common knowledge within molecular biology that proteins fold into their native state. That native state is the folded shape that possesses a minimum of free energy. Finding global minima is however a hard problem. For bigger proteins, it's at the time of writing - still impossible to calculate the shape.
Even in vivo protein folding is a hard problem. Cells are densely packed with many different molecules that push against each other. Frequently, resources are wasted when a protein misfolds into a shape that's not its native state.
Nature is clever and developed a way to help proteins fold into their native state. Cells produce chaperones. A chaperone surrounds an unfolded protein to protect it from outside influences to help the protein to fold into its native state. A chaperone doesn't need to know the native state of a protein to help the protein fold into that state. Instead of manipulating the protein like a sculpture, it holds space for a protein to be safe from outside influences, while it folds into its native form.
This allows a chaperone that works in an uncomplicated way to achieve a result that very complex machine learning algorithms currently don't achieve. The machine learning algorithm tries to figure out the best way for the protein to fold while the chaperone just lets the protein find this way by itself.
The psychologist Carl Rogers advocated that good psychologists act in the same way nonmanipulative with their patients. In his view, it's not the job of the therapist to solve the problem of their patient by manipulating the patient into a healthy form. A good therapist isn’t like ta sculptor sculpts a sculpture. The job of the therapist is rather to hold a space for the patient in which the patient is safe from certain forces that prevent the patient from finding their healthy authentic native state.
I don't intend to argue for nonmanipulative communication from a moral perspective. In cases where you know how to fix the problem of the person you are talking with and are confident that the other person will follow your advice, go ahead. If you don't know what will help a person, taking a nonmanipulative approach is often more effective than giving the person advice that they have already heard a dozen times.
If you tell an obese person that they should lose weight again, you add additional stress which can make it harder for them to think about the issue. In the Rogerian model effective change isn't about creating enough pressure by telling the obese to lose weight till they finally get it. For an obese person who feels shame for being obese, it can be hard to clearly think about the issue when they are alone. Providing the person a space where they can speak about their challenges in a way where they aren't feeling judged can help them to make progress for themselves.
There's a mystic quality to being nonmanipulative. Even Carl Rogers, who proposed the ideal, that all interactions should be nonmanipulative, sometimes fell short of it. For practical purposes it's often more useful to do what makes sense in the moment and what helps the other than to live up to an ideal of being perfectly nonmanipulative.
On the other hand, having a mental model of what it means to be nonmanipulative can be very helpful to understand communication practices like Rogerian psychotherapy, Gestalt Therapy and Circling.
I invite you to explore communicating in a way that holds the space for others to find themselves.
Your title and opening sentences make me think you want to convey the idea that the phrase "non-manipulative communication" means exactly what the literal words the phrase is made up of mean. I do not think you made the case that that is so.
These sentences seem to be trying to put tension between the machine learning algorithm and the chaperone. However, it is not clear to me that the result achieved by the chaperone is the same as the result machine learning algorithms attempt to achieve.
Does the chaperone "know" in what way the protein folded itself? Can we interrogate the chaperone to learn about the protein? I think not. Neither the chaperone nor the protein has an inkling about the other...nor could they even if we grant them magical sentience or agency.
A physical process that emulates the result a ML algorithm is going for would seemingly encompass much more than just the chaperone. To me, if you really wanted to analogize chaperones to something somewhat apropos, it seems to be more analogous to some small component of some ML algorithm than it is to the ML algorithm itself.
Unlike humans, when it comes to agency and intent, the protein and chaperone do not have any.
For these reasons, this does not seem like an intuition pump that gets me to an understanding of the type of communication you're talking about and I do not think you've made an argument that "non-manipulative communication" is non-manipulative. I think you completely sidestepped what your opening seems to promise an elucidation of.
I want to note that I haven't made any claims about whether or not "non-manipulative communication" actually is or is not a literally correct phrase. I've given almost no thought to it, which is why I was interested to read this post when I saw the headline on my RSS feeds.
The following is more of an aside or addendum that is unrelated to the previous part of my comment:
Even if all communication actually is manipulative, we may want to, almost tautologically, define the phrase to mean the type of communication you're describing. This is sometimes a useful thing to do. I agree that the type of communication you describe is good and useful and something we should have in our toolbox.
I actually think I've got a pretty good grasp on what is meant by "non-manipulative communication", and I think it's an important and useful mode of communication for humans. As already mentioned, I've not really given the subject any thought, but as of right now, I don't think that phrase is a literally correct usage of the words "non-manipulative" and "communication".
I also think that's OK.
I'll make this last comment to clarify my position and if you want to reply, I'll let you have the last word (I say this with sincerity and not in a passive-aggressive manner!)
First of all, I feel like you're continuing to defend the idea of nonmanipulative communication. To make it clear, I'm not questioning whether it exists or is useful or anything at all. I'm questioning the idea that the chaperone-protein analogy is actually analogous to any sort of communication.
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