It might help if you have more examples of what these looks like. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that I would need to experience personally to get it?
Good writing should convey experience, so I can’t use that as an excuse :p
It’s a little weird trying to come up with examples, because when things are working well there’s rarely strong evidence on both sides, and as a result things are rarely that surprising. For example, when I mention “Jumping off this cliff is safe” I’m thinking of a real situation… but there’s not much to say because she never didn’t believe me, so she was never afraid and I never had to “change her mind”. It wouldn’t even stand out in memory, except that I made a point of showing her that it said about her fear response.
But I’ll try not to use that as an excuse either. Questions like below do make it easier.
How do you know how much respect the other person is giving you, so that you can successfully bid for attention? Is this just a matter of experience?
Say you’ve thought things through and you’ve realized that you’re not just telling yourself that you’re “definitely totally right”, but that you actually anticipate turning out to be right, and that turning out to be wrong would be so surprising that you’re willing to eat that cost. At this point, you’re free to make strong bids for attention without reservation.
What do you anticipate happening if you do?
For example, let’s imagine what might happen in the jacuzzi situation if I had just opened with “It’s okay if your makeup washes off”, in a very sincere and not at all offhand sort of way. My anticipation is that if I had opened with that, she’d have said something like “Okay [whatever]” and turned to talk to her friend, basically blowing off my input because “Who tf is this guy?”. The reaction I’m anticipating there isn’t “Hm, I disagree. I think we should look at the danger more”, it’s “I don’t care what you think, and the fact that you’d expect me to makes me think you’re closing your eyes to negative social feedback and I hope you go away”. If I tried to ignore that feedback and continue with “Shhhhhh...”, that’d confirm what I’d expect to be her beliefs, and she’d probably get creeped out and leave. In this case it’s not just that I don’t have her attention, but that I don’t have the resources needed to even continue that negotiation.
In contrast, when I told my wife to remind me to turn off the off the oven she didn’t “Okay, whatever idiot” at me, she took me seriously enough to explain why she didn’t think that expectation would work. It wasn’t persuasive to me, so I still expected her to try. In that case it was easiest to bring her into the loop a bit and explain that I was trying something and it’s fine if she didn’t end up doing what she said, but the part I’m pointing at here is the “continued embodiment of that direction of attention, in the face of counter-bids for attending to something else”. Sometimes that leads to explicit explanations, but other times it’s entirely nonverbal. For example, when I tell my dog to sit and she doesn’t sit right away, I don’t rationalize at her why she should sit, I just continue to look at her expectantly for a few seconds until she does.
It’s partly “a matter of experience” in that it takes experience to accurately anticipate how people (or dogs) will respond to various inputs. It takes a bit of experience to anticipate how jacuzzi girl might respond if you open with “It’s okay if your makeup washes off”. If you actually anticipate her saying “Wow, thanks for informing me!” without irony, then you’re in for some surprises until you get some more experience and learn what kind of worldviews are common.
A lot of times though, it’s not so hard to correctly anticipate that if you say “Yeah, you wouldn’t want people to see what you really look like”, she’s likely to respond with something like “Are you calling me ugly!?”. The harder thing to recognize there is that it’s fine if she responds that way, because the answer is actually “no” and she’s going to believe me. Because it’s actually true, and that means I can hold that frame without flinching, which conveys unmistakable evidence that I’m really not calling her ugly.
Before opening my mouth I thought things through and made sure I was ready to face things if I were to be wrong, which meant that when my brain was looking for responses to the perceived reality I was in, it wasn’t looking for things that make sense conditional on the perception that I might be doing something offensive and wrong, but rather conditional on the perception that I wasn’t. So my bids for attention on “no” weren’t polluted by things pulling in the opposite direction.
Good writing should convey experience, so I can’t use that as an excuse :p
It’s a little weird trying to come up with examples, because when things are working well there’s rarely strong evidence on both sides, and as a result things are rarely that surprising. For example, when I mention “Jumping off this cliff is safe” I’m thinking of a real situation… but there’s not much to say because she never didn’t believe me, so she was never afraid and I never had to “change her mind”. It wouldn’t even stand out in memory, except that I made a point of showing her that it said about her fear response.
But I’ll try not to use that as an excuse either. Questions like below do make it easier.
Say you’ve thought things through and you’ve realized that you’re not just telling yourself that you’re “definitely totally right”, but that you actually anticipate turning out to be right, and that turning out to be wrong would be so surprising that you’re willing to eat that cost. At this point, you’re free to make strong bids for attention without reservation.
What do you anticipate happening if you do?
For example, let’s imagine what might happen in the jacuzzi situation if I had just opened with “It’s okay if your makeup washes off”, in a very sincere and not at all offhand sort of way. My anticipation is that if I had opened with that, she’d have said something like “Okay [whatever]” and turned to talk to her friend, basically blowing off my input because “Who tf is this guy?”. The reaction I’m anticipating there isn’t “Hm, I disagree. I think we should look at the danger more”, it’s “I don’t care what you think, and the fact that you’d expect me to makes me think you’re closing your eyes to negative social feedback and I hope you go away”. If I tried to ignore that feedback and continue with “Shhhhhh...”, that’d confirm what I’d expect to be her beliefs, and she’d probably get creeped out and leave. In this case it’s not just that I don’t have her attention, but that I don’t have the resources needed to even continue that negotiation.
In contrast, when I told my wife to remind me to turn off the off the oven she didn’t “Okay, whatever idiot” at me, she took me seriously enough to explain why she didn’t think that expectation would work. It wasn’t persuasive to me, so I still expected her to try. In that case it was easiest to bring her into the loop a bit and explain that I was trying something and it’s fine if she didn’t end up doing what she said, but the part I’m pointing at here is the “continued embodiment of that direction of attention, in the face of counter-bids for attending to something else”. Sometimes that leads to explicit explanations, but other times it’s entirely nonverbal. For example, when I tell my dog to sit and she doesn’t sit right away, I don’t rationalize at her why she should sit, I just continue to look at her expectantly for a few seconds until she does.
It’s partly “a matter of experience” in that it takes experience to accurately anticipate how people (or dogs) will respond to various inputs. It takes a bit of experience to anticipate how jacuzzi girl might respond if you open with “It’s okay if your makeup washes off”. If you actually anticipate her saying “Wow, thanks for informing me!” without irony, then you’re in for some surprises until you get some more experience and learn what kind of worldviews are common.
A lot of times though, it’s not so hard to correctly anticipate that if you say “Yeah, you wouldn’t want people to see what you really look like”, she’s likely to respond with something like “Are you calling me ugly!?”. The harder thing to recognize there is that it’s fine if she responds that way, because the answer is actually “no” and she’s going to believe me. Because it’s actually true, and that means I can hold that frame without flinching, which conveys unmistakable evidence that I’m really not calling her ugly.
Before opening my mouth I thought things through and made sure I was ready to face things if I were to be wrong, which meant that when my brain was looking for responses to the perceived reality I was in, it wasn’t looking for things that make sense conditional on the perception that I might be doing something offensive and wrong, but rather conditional on the perception that I wasn’t. So my bids for attention on “no” weren’t polluted by things pulling in the opposite direction.