(Part of why the two-ness of guess vs. ask always bothered me is that it didn’t allow for what comes next.)
Bailey tracks zero echoes, and Cameron tracks one.
Dallas tracks two. “If I say X, they’ll probably feel A about it. But they know that, and they know that I know that, and thus their X→A pattern creates pressure on me that makes it hard for me to give my honest opinion on the whole X question, and I have some feelings about that.”
(Maybe Dallas tries to change the other person’s X→A pattern, or maybe Dallas just lets the other person’s X→A pattern influence their behavior but feels kind of resentful about it, or maybe Dallas stubbornly insists on X’ing even though the other person is trying to take Dallas hostage with their emotional X→A blackmail, etc.)
Elliott, on the other hand, grew up around a bunch of people like Dallas, and is tracking three echoes, because Elliott has seen how Dallas-type thinking impacts the other person.“If I say X, they will respond with A, and we all know that the X→A pressure causes me to feel a certain way, and they probably feel good/bad/guilty/apologetic/whatever about how this is impacting my behavior.”
This is pretty funny and entertaining. And I want to make it even more fun! You don’t necessarily need to worry about tracking an infinite number of echoes. Let’s assume that you can track any echo to within λ<1 accuracy. Even if you know someone very well, you can’t read minds. So say for the sake of argument right now that λ<0.5 as an example.
Then, sweeping a bunch of stuff under the rug, a simple mathematical way to model the culture would be a power series:
f=f0+Aλ+Bλ2+Cλ3+...
Where A,B,C,... are your predictions for how your conversation partner will respond for that particular echo.A,B,C,... are not going to be real numbers, they will be some distribution/outer product of distributions, but the point is that because λ<1 this series should converge. Cultures where λ is higher will be more “nonlinear.”
Don’t feel obligated to respond to this comment…
This is pretty funny and entertaining. And I want to make it even more fun! You don’t necessarily need to worry about tracking an infinite number of echoes. Let’s assume that you can track any echo to within λ<1 accuracy. Even if you know someone very well, you can’t read minds. So say for the sake of argument right now that λ<0.5 as an example.
Then, sweeping a bunch of stuff under the rug, a simple mathematical way to model the culture would be a power series:
f=f0+Aλ+Bλ2+Cλ3+...
Where A,B,C,... are your predictions for how your conversation partner will respond for that particular echo.A,B,C,... are not going to be real numbers, they will be some distribution/outer product of distributions, but the point is that because λ<1 this series should converge. Cultures where λ is higher will be more “nonlinear.”