Hey Martin,
A lot of your comment actually sounds pretty familiar to me.
The main suggestion I have based on what you wrote is to pick a small number of specific things you'd like to do differently, then gradually practice those in some conversations, treating it explicitly as practice that you will need to do for a while, not as a magic fix that you'd be able to implement perfectly if only you were a good enough person.
To unpack that:
Oh huh, that's interesting. I was expecting people to resonate less with the horse examples than I do, but it sounds like you don't find them helpful whatsoever, which I find kind of surprising.
In the specific case of horses, I think my intuition that they can provide helpful info about humans would probably be hard to explain from scratch - it's based on a lot of small examples of me comparing and testing things in my own experience.
More generally though, I'm curious if you find people talking about our "reptile brain" or "monkey brain" to be similarly useless? I agree with you that chimps are a better approximation of humans than... (read more)
Yes, agree. Said, if you didn't read it before, you may also want to read the long quote I posted from the book where I got this concept - in the quote, Harry's trying to convey to the filly (completely truthfully) that she is not in danger and he is not going to hurt her.
(To preempt the obvious objection that he's only doing that so that later he can dominate and exploit her, I say yes, good job being cynical, but I really strongly claim that that's not how this school of horsemanship works. The best recommendation I have if you're still skeptical is to watch the documentary "Buck", which I linked to in the notes after the post. An 80/20 of that might be to watch some of the trailers on YouTube.)
Good question - not totally sure. One thought is that in the status-signaling game, making yourself small is one way of countersignaling high status? I don't think it's the only way, and I don't think it's the only effect of being small, but that's my quick take on how the concepts interact.
See my response to PeterBorah above - the main thing that comes to mind for me is how overall comfortable you seem with the situation. Agree with Benquo's comment as well.
Yeah, I love the concept of holding space. If I wanted to fit it into this framework, I'd say that holding space for person A is 1) making yourself small, then 2) making clear that the space you've left belongs to person A. Like, you're not just withdrawing into yourself, or leaving more space for anyone in the group to talk. I think 2) is a separate skill from what's discussed in this post, though.
So I guess tl;dr I think being small is necessary-but-not-sufficient to hold space. Thoughts?
100% agree that status and size are intertwined. Depending on how strongly you mean it, I think I disagree with "both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status"? I certainly disagree that relatively lower-status people shouldn't try noticing or moving.
For example, I think one straightforward and beneficial application of detangling these concepts is for people (of whom, like mingyuan in their other reply to you, I've met plenty) who spend a lot of their social lives unintentionally make themselves bigger than appropriate for their status. The beneficial outcome here isn't "they realize they should be smaller and make themselves so, good riddance" - it's something... (read more)
Totally.
Oh yeah nice, little kid being brash is a great low/big. We haven't met in person so I have no way of verifying your description of yourself, but it sounds reasonable to me.
Disclaimers:
This is great! Very related to Open Philanthropy's concept of reasoning transparency, especially the section on how to indicate different kinds of support for your view.
I vividly remember learning about this within my first few weeks working at GiveWell: when I submitted an early draft of some research on malaria, my manager took one look at the footnotes and asked me to redo them. "Don't just find some serious-looking source - what actually led you to make the claim you're footnoting?" I was mindblown, both that this was such a novel thing to do and that I hadn't even really noticed I wasn't doing it.