I think I agree with ~everything in your two comments, and yet reading them I want to push back on something, not exactly sure what, but something like: look, there’s this thing (or many things with a family resemblance) that happens and it’s bad, and somehow it’s super hard to describe / see it as it’s happening.… and in particular I suspect the easiest, the first way out of it, the way out that’s most readily accessible to someone mired in an “oops my internal organs are hooked up to a vampiric force” situation, does not primarily / mainly involve much understanding or theorizing (at least given our collective current level of understanding about these things), and rather involves something with a little more of “wild” vibe, the vibe of running away, of suddenly screaming NO, of asserting meaningful propositions confidently from a perspective, etc. And I get some of this vibe from the OP; like part of the message is (what I’m interpreting to be) the stance someone takes when calling something “frame control” (or “gaslighting” or “emotional abuse” or “cult” or what-have-you).
Which, I still agree with the things you say, and the post does make lots of sort-of-specific, sort-of-vague claims, and gives good data with debatable interpretation, and so on. But there’s also this sort of necessarily pre-theoretic theoretic action happening, and I guess I want to somehow have that [hypothesis mixed with judgement mixed with action] be possible as well, including in the common space. (Like, the action is theoretic in that you’re reifying some pattern (e.g. “frame control”). It’s almost necessarily pre-theoretic, in the sense that you don’t even close to fully understand it and it’s probably only very roughly joint-carving, because the pattern itself involves making you confused about what’s happening and less able to clearly understand patterns. It’s an action, a judgement that something is really seriously wrong and you need to change it, a mental motion that rejects something previously accepted, that catapults you out of a satisficing basin; and you’re doing this action in a way that somewhat strongly depends or is helped by the non-joint-carving unrefined concept, like “this thing, IDK what it is really, but it’s really bad and I have to get out of it, and after escaping I’ll think about it more”.)
I see you your comments as partly rejecting, or at least incidentally pushing against, this sort of action: to “do it in a way that telegraphs the early-stage-ness” is, when speaking from a pre-theoretic standpoint, in tension with the vibe/action of sharply reclaiming one’s own perspective even when that perspective is noticeably incoherent (“something was deeply wrong, I don’t know what”). Like, it’s definitely a better artifact if you put in the right epistemic tags that point towards uncertainty, places to refine and investigate, etc.; but that’s harder to do and requires the author to be detailedly tracking a more complicated boundary around known and unknown, in a way that’s, like, not the first mental motion that (AFAIK) has to happen to get the minimum viable concept to self-coordinate on a narrative that says the thing is bad. Internally coordinating on a narrative that X-whatever-it-is is bad, seems important if you’re going to have to first push against X in big ways, before it’s very feasible to get a better understanding of X. (There’s bucket errors here, and it could be helpful to clarify that; but that’s maybe sort of the point: someone who’s been given a heavy dose of frame control is bucket-errored such that they doubt the goodness of holding their own perspective in part because it’s been tied up with other catastrophic things such as disagreeing with their social environment without having a coherent alternative or a coherent / legible grounds for disagreeing.)
I think I agree with ~everything in your two comments, and yet reading them I want to push back on something, not exactly sure what, but something like: look, there’s this thing (or many things with a family resemblance) that happens and it’s bad, and somehow it’s super hard to describe / see it as it’s happening.… and in particular I suspect the easiest, the first way out of it, the way out that’s most readily accessible to someone mired in an “oops my internal organs are hooked up to a vampiric force” situation, does not primarily / mainly involve much understanding or theorizing (at least given our collective current level of understanding about these things), and rather involves something with a little more of “wild” vibe, the vibe of running away, of suddenly screaming NO, of asserting meaningful propositions confidently from a perspective, etc. And I get some of this vibe from the OP; like part of the message is (what I’m interpreting to be) the stance someone takes when calling something “frame control” (or “gaslighting” or “emotional abuse” or “cult” or what-have-you).
Which, I still agree with the things you say, and the post does make lots of sort-of-specific, sort-of-vague claims, and gives good data with debatable interpretation, and so on. But there’s also this sort of necessarily pre-theoretic theoretic action happening, and I guess I want to somehow have that [hypothesis mixed with judgement mixed with action] be possible as well, including in the common space. (Like, the action is theoretic in that you’re reifying some pattern (e.g. “frame control”). It’s almost necessarily pre-theoretic, in the sense that you don’t even close to fully understand it and it’s probably only very roughly joint-carving, because the pattern itself involves making you confused about what’s happening and less able to clearly understand patterns. It’s an action, a judgement that something is really seriously wrong and you need to change it, a mental motion that rejects something previously accepted, that catapults you out of a satisficing basin; and you’re doing this action in a way that somewhat strongly depends or is helped by the non-joint-carving unrefined concept, like “this thing, IDK what it is really, but it’s really bad and I have to get out of it, and after escaping I’ll think about it more”.)
I see
youyour comments as partly rejecting, or at least incidentally pushing against, this sort of action: to “do it in a way that telegraphs the early-stage-ness” is, when speaking from a pre-theoretic standpoint, in tension with the vibe/action of sharply reclaiming one’s own perspective even when that perspective is noticeably incoherent (“something was deeply wrong, I don’t know what”). Like, it’s definitely a better artifact if you put in the right epistemic tags that point towards uncertainty, places to refine and investigate, etc.; but that’s harder to do and requires the author to be detailedly tracking a more complicated boundary around known and unknown, in a way that’s, like, not the first mental motion that (AFAIK) has to happen to get the minimum viable concept to self-coordinate on a narrative that says the thing is bad. Internally coordinating on a narrative that X-whatever-it-is is bad, seems important if you’re going to have to first push against X in big ways, before it’s very feasible to get a better understanding of X. (There’s bucket errors here, and it could be helpful to clarify that; but that’s maybe sort of the point: someone who’s been given a heavy dose of frame control is bucket-errored such that they doubt the goodness of holding their own perspective in part because it’s been tied up with other catastrophic things such as disagreeing with their social environment without having a coherent alternative or a coherent / legible grounds for disagreeing.)I liked both the points Anna made in her previous comment, and TekhneMakre’s comment here.