A couple insights in response to this post overall.
The approach of building a meaning moat has difficulty with the principle that you have about five words. This, to me, is the explanation for why people do not attempt this more often. It’s certainly why I don’t attempt it more often.
In fact, I’ve had loved ones, with whom I’d expect to have more than five words, tell me that my laborious attempt to “rule out everything else” only make me seem stressed, and create an atmosphere of pressure or emergency. I do this with family members who are particularly reactive, and who I don’t think have an accurate self-perception of how reactive they are when I don’t build a meaning-moat.
Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a catch-22 here that I don’t know how to get around.
Somewhat surprisingly, the internet may have created more of a demand for navigating cultural differences than the democratization of flight. The tourism industry has developed some basic norms of hospitality that, in my experience, allow the international traveler to get what they want out of a vacation in even a very different culture with some ease. We only need mostly simple things from the residents of countries we visit.
By contrast, the internet has enabled us to interact with vastly more people, in much more intellectual depth, with people from groups within our own nation who we’d never normally interact with. This is fuelling a demand for more constraints on the architecture of digital social networks, yes, but also for more skill in navigating these newly accessible relationships with greater skill. What we might have accomplished intuitively, on rare occasions, now needs a systematic approach and some explicit theory behind it. I see this as what you’re accomplishing with your posts about communication.
For me, it’s a valuable insight to realize that, while I can be an effective communicator in one-off situations, that I don’t have a practice of systematically enhancing or practicing my communication skills. My work and hobbies are collaborative enough that I think I’d benefit from sustained, close attention paid to this topic. I’d like to see what happens if I put in the work to go beyond “functional” into “mastery.”
Yeah, I had the five-words principle in mind the whole time and couldn’t figure out how to work it in or address it. Quantum mechanics + general relativity; both of them seem genuinely true.
A couple insights in response to this post overall.
The approach of building a meaning moat has difficulty with the principle that you have about five words. This, to me, is the explanation for why people do not attempt this more often. It’s certainly why I don’t attempt it more often.
In fact, I’ve had loved ones, with whom I’d expect to have more than five words, tell me that my laborious attempt to “rule out everything else” only make me seem stressed, and create an atmosphere of pressure or emergency. I do this with family members who are particularly reactive, and who I don’t think have an accurate self-perception of how reactive they are when I don’t build a meaning-moat.
Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a catch-22 here that I don’t know how to get around.
Somewhat surprisingly, the internet may have created more of a demand for navigating cultural differences than the democratization of flight. The tourism industry has developed some basic norms of hospitality that, in my experience, allow the international traveler to get what they want out of a vacation in even a very different culture with some ease. We only need mostly simple things from the residents of countries we visit.
By contrast, the internet has enabled us to interact with vastly more people, in much more intellectual depth, with people from groups within our own nation who we’d never normally interact with. This is fuelling a demand for more constraints on the architecture of digital social networks, yes, but also for more skill in navigating these newly accessible relationships with greater skill. What we might have accomplished intuitively, on rare occasions, now needs a systematic approach and some explicit theory behind it. I see this as what you’re accomplishing with your posts about communication.
For me, it’s a valuable insight to realize that, while I can be an effective communicator in one-off situations, that I don’t have a practice of systematically enhancing or practicing my communication skills. My work and hobbies are collaborative enough that I think I’d benefit from sustained, close attention paid to this topic. I’d like to see what happens if I put in the work to go beyond “functional” into “mastery.”
Yeah, I had the five-words principle in mind the whole time and couldn’t figure out how to work it in or address it. Quantum mechanics + general relativity; both of them seem genuinely true.