I think if you frame it as “every transaction and relationship has elements of cooperation and competition, so every communication has a need for truth and deception.”, and then explore the specific types of trust and conflict, and how they impact the dimensions of communication, we’d be in excellent-post territory.
The bounds of understanding in humans mean that we simply don’t know the right balance of cooperation and competition. So we have, at best, some wild guesses as to what’s collateral damage vs what’s productive advantage over our opponents. I’d argue that there’s an amazing amount of self-deception in humans, and I take a Schelling Fence approach to that—I don’t understand the protection and benefit to others’ self-deception and maintained internal inconsistency, so I hesitate to unilaterally decry it. In myself, I strive to keep self-talk and internal models as accurate as possible, and that includes permission to lie without hesitation when I think it’s to my advantage.
I think if you frame it as “every transaction and relationship has elements of cooperation and competition, so every communication has a need for truth and deception.”, and then explore the specific types of trust and conflict, and how they impact the dimensions of communication, we’d be in excellent-post territory.
The bounds of understanding in humans mean that we simply don’t know the right balance of cooperation and competition. So we have, at best, some wild guesses as to what’s collateral damage vs what’s productive advantage over our opponents. I’d argue that there’s an amazing amount of self-deception in humans, and I take a Schelling Fence approach to that—I don’t understand the protection and benefit to others’ self-deception and maintained internal inconsistency, so I hesitate to unilaterally decry it. In myself, I strive to keep self-talk and internal models as accurate as possible, and that includes permission to lie without hesitation when I think it’s to my advantage.