If you ask a so-inclined speaker to tell a story, they'll string along a series of words. Perhaps they'll talk about a deer they saw in San Francisco. Dear God! They'll exclaim, what is a deer doing here? You're miles from the forest. The jungle you're in is concrete. Downtown in a city is no place for you. To your surprise, the deer prances up to you with his head held up as if he is used to wearing a monocle. Good day sir. The deer is shouting at you. Mind your own business. You stare at his small backpack. Clearly, this deer is no professional bedazzler. The beads are trying to be in a line, but it meanders and breaks and doubles up. This is no place for a deer! Though he hardly hears you, eyeing your eyeing of his bag. Get away from my honey. The deer steps back, watching you as he takes one step back and then another, each time a little more sure he is getting away. Hey, hold on! Honey? You have honey in that bag? You can't have any of it! The deer bobs back and forth as he turns his eyes to you and then to his bag and then to the long hill he is backed into. Why do you have honey? The deer darts away, and you are left there alone wondering.
Maybe one day, we'll find out why he has honey. That is, one day, I'll let you know, but I want to focus primarily on the structure of this story. It's a linear depiction of a series of events. Most people will tell you a story, and they will see the events, but they will stop there. They don't consider how human beings use stories in order to interpret events. I would like to reimagine a story, not as a series of linear events but as a wall that we use. It's a series of veritable axioms that bottoms out a search for propositional knowledge. It's a tool to prune branches. When we accept a story, when we accept a narrative, we cease to question it, and it becomes the basis for further understanding. Now, in the case about this deer story, it allows us to answer questions in this abstract fairytale universe. For instance: what is the deer wearing? Some kind of bedazzled satchel. That is a direct answer to a question. We don't have to look any further: there lies a wall. It gets more interesting when we ask, well what is the deer afraid of? The answer: that we are going to steal from it. Now, the story doesn't tell this directly, but from cultural context and descriptions of the deer's hesitation, we are more or less safe to make this assumption. In the mythical land of Deer-honey-exchangia, where people tend to mix their honey with deer that they encounter, the same story would lead us to believe that the deer was afraid that we would mix our inferior honey with their elite regal honey.
Now, in the case of Carl (the deer), the narrative is detached from reality. Because we know deer don't talk, we have already accepted a fantastical frame. Because of this detachment, we might accept in the context of the story anything that may happen. We also know immediately that the story doesn't contain much useful information about the real world. As such, the amount of decisions or understandings or statements we can make which bottoms out on the facts presented in this story are very limited. Short stories or parables are often used to demonstrate points in the abstract. For instance, due to its construction, the boy who cries wolf teaches us a wall of consequences. Using this analytical framework for narratives, when we think about crying out for attention, we are struck by the visceral image of wolves eating the boy, and so we can modify our behavior based on this cutting point or wall.
Carl's narrative so far is very inconsequential. The boy who cries wolf may have real life consequences, but we tell the story to children because we believe those consequences are good. A child may not get eaten, but there are many situations where it's important to be serious about serious issues. It's generally good to be taken seriously. This narrative promotes it, and we can all take examples from our own experiences where a joke had sour consequences. The most consequential narratives are those we use to tell stories about ourselves and about things in our lives. This is so tied up in the way human cognition works, we can model human beings with their narratives. Minds can be modeled as machines which have some set of understandings and overtime modify those understandings. The exact process and encoding which underpin this are unknown. Of course, narratives are an emergent phenomena, and so modeling people with them is an inherently incorrect but useful narrative. One example of a more in-depth attempt to model people in a falsifiable way along these lines is Attention Schema Theory (aside: I reject qualia and Platonic realism).
Some of the most important narratives are stories we tell about ourselves. With "I am brave", we create a wall so that when something which scares us crosses our paths, we don't shrink back in fear. We think to ourselves that we are brave, and if we have truly adopted this narrative, then we stop there and no longer think about running away. Some narratives we have no easy control over ("I am 5 foot 11 inches"). These are factful narratives because they come with an implied basis for comparison. Some narratives are relative ("I am tall"). These tell about things in relation to other things. Though, in this case, we have a choice for how to encode the information. One option is "other people are shorter than me." Another option is "people look up to me." These increasingly roughly represent the same basic idea, but what has changed is how we might use this information to interpret the world around us. In the first case, there is a belief in ourselves. In the other two cases, there is a disbelief in others.
What I would like to share here is how my perspective on narratives (and conversations, which are related) has changed since I have started this blog. Actually, one of my original goals in creating this blog was to build up a description of TOMCOM, which I describe briefly below. Though, this framework is generic enough to encode Carnegie, Machiavelli, and a sundry of self-help communication ideas and frameworks, it is focused on secondary effects, and as such, it is no substitute for direct analysis of content. It is only useful to consider when you already have a very good handle on direction. Then, I read the book Crucial Conversations, and it opened up a new direction in my mind about how to approach a conversation. It's framework is very practical, problem-focused, and actionable. Finally, I will revisit the above description of how to think about the structure of narratives, and I will share a quote from yet another Nietzsche book that connects this thread to my overarching goal: to seek but not to find.
When two people agree, like some twins do, a conversation can sound like two friends trading turns reading a soliloquy. When there is a disagreement, the conversation can always be collapsed into a single story (in the worst case, a disjunctive one). A given conversation may contain multiple interleaved threads at multiple layers, but it is nevertheless a story being told by two or more people. When we consider a conversation, we're considering a process which creates a narrative. As such, an analysis of a conversation is inherently an analysis of a narrative, and an analysis of a narrative is a holistic analysis of a conversation. So, when considering a story or a narrative, consider riding this isomorphism out of domain-dependent thinking. These can also be layered: the story about Carl overall is a narrative, and it contains a conversation, which can be viewed as a shared narrative.
This name is still provisional, but as-is, it is a short (I love this Chinglish word) of Theory Of Mind COMmunication. All I mean by this concept is that an individual models you by all the things you have ever said to them (on top of a backdrop of stereotypes they have for you). So, if you tell someone 'no' over and over, they won't even bother to ask you a question. As soon as they are about to ask, their mental model of you will tell them 'no' for you. There is so much domain-dependent psychological advice that can be summed up like this. For instance, in a creative environment, positivity promotes more creativity. When people believe that what they will say will be accepted, they will be more open to sharing it. Another example, this model encodes the need for consistency in training. So, the idea of how to use TOMCOM is, when you say something, imagine all similar questions are considered and answered in the same way. If you want someone to learn in a classroom, don't punish stupid questions at first. The cost of disinteresting individuals in learning is much higher than suffering the head of theorized gaslighting.
The model someone builds of us is equivalent to the one we are up to miscommunication. So, an inverted way to analyze TOMCOM is by imagining conversations with people with certain perspectives. To start with the most basic perspectives/strategies, consider:
Imagine Positive Penny having a conversation with Negative Nancy. It might go like this:
Given these consistent strategies, Penny will learn in no time that Nancy is discouraging, and she will probably find someone new to talk to (or in the unfortunate case if Penny is weak-willed, then she may give up, being able to say nothing right). Nancy may be sharing nitpick information that may be useful or help Penny communicate more clearly to others, but it's secondary to Penny's stated goal. Also, because Penny has not disagreed at all, Nancy will not learn how unhelpful she is being. If Positive Penny has a conversation with Positive Penelope, they may be very constructive, but without anyone to introduce a negative statement, they risk adopting a frame which diverges from reality and won't be questioned. If Negative Nancy has a conversation with Negative Nelly, it will quickly divulge into an argument, and they will most likely stop talking to each other.
You probably could have said these were stupid strategies without having to go through the motions of imagined conversations. Though, the idea is to build off of these simplistic strategies more and more complex strategies. I tried plugging in such strategies to generate conversations with GPT-3 between imagined people with imagined conversation strategies, but I quickly ran into a problem, the tech is good, but it's not there yet. Individuals following these strategies in conversations would make statements in direct opposition to their previously stated positions. "I want to get a car" became "I don't want to get a car" later in the conversation. As text-generation becomes more sophisticated, I believe we could use such a strategy to write a computer program which condenses its knowledge of how to converse into a series of rules.
Regardless, in the case of these specific strategies, consider how semantic building (agreeing) vs cutting (disagreeing) affects the flow of a conversation. If you focus on things you agree with, those can become larger and larger. For instance, if someone says "I think we should go to the beach" you don't have to dissuade them by saying "it's cold". You could let them know what they've gotten right. You could say "I would love to get out of the house." If you communicate what is pleasing to you first, you may not have to tear down any idea, you can focus on taking the good ideas and building with them. If one side is being negative, all the creative and solution space must be explored by the person offering positive statements.
Anyway, at this time, I kind of got bored with this idea. You can analytically talk about building or cutting, but there is really no value framework here that might help you decide which option to take. It's useful to be aware of this dynamic, because it definitely exists. Especially you want to be weary of cutting down everything, without realizing it. There is even a stereotype for engineers making this mistake. However, without the tech to automate some of this research, I quickly got bored imagining conversations.
If you are trying to learn how to negotiate, I can recommend Getting to the Yes (orienting yourself) or Never Split the Difference (I call it intro to language judo), but for where I was at this point, Crucial Conversations takes the cake. Instead of focusing on a conversation at the local level (agree, disagree, and so forth), it focuses on conversations from the relationship level in. By focusing on your willingness to help an individual (for example, someone struggling to start at a new job) you can directly let them know that you want them to succeed. Giving them advice, no matter how good it is, can be taken as criticism. Pay attention to assuming someone knows you are on their side. Be on their side first, then you can make conversation cuts.
Another big topic in this book is focusing on more factful narratives. It specifically describes breaking down narratives you have (such as "my aunt is evil") into the facts you are using to make up this story ("my aunt yelled at my children"). That is, if we are considering a narrative to be a wall, only hide the things behind it that you need to. Don't let axioms or propositions you are interested in obscure a truth you might want to see. Make sure your narrative doesn't discount other possibilities. Think if the story you are telling diverges from reality. If you already discount an individual, you'll forgo the cooperative advantage.
Conversing well or sharing an idea clearly robs people of the ability to think critically and understand deeply. If a writer solves all problems for a reader, is there anyone reading? For this, I have no answer, except, you can only change yourself.
In The Joyous Science, Nietzsche suggested "When a man arrives at the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes a 'believer'; conversely, we could imagine a delight in and capacity for self-determination, a freedom of will, by which a spirit bids farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, being proficient in hanging on to thin ropes and possibilities, and even in dancing on the brink of the abyss. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." Personally, I prefer the metaphor of clouds over thin ropes. Being lost in the fog without needing clouds. In either case, we must be conscious first and foremost of the narratives we do take. Without any story at all, asked to tie your shoe, you will fall down an abyss. So, we cannot run away from stories entirely, but we should not forget that we can and do choose them, and in a conscious effort here, we may tango yet.