Frustrated Demiurge @frustrateddemiurge - Tumblr Blog

A Self-Respect Feedback Loop

(It's only a model)

Okay! This is something I've been trying to explain for awhile, but I think I have a handy chart for it now.

Here's how it works:

A person can actually regulate how much self-respect they feel, and show. Other people will reward them for having more self-respect, up to a point.

Then they start pushing back.

BUT, each of these "pushbacks" is a temporary dip in the "self-respect to positive feedback" curve. You just have to have enough self-control, or willpower, or "grit", or "spoons", or whatever, to keep pushing through and powering more and more self-respect while people attack you for having it, until you break through into the next upswing of the curve.

The thing is, a lot of self-control/willpower/grit/spoons/etc. is powered by people not treating you like shit.

It seems like there are actually three different dips that occur, each with a wider gap than the last.

Some people try to push up into a gap, discover they don't have enough willpower to escape to the far side of the dip, give up, and fall back into the previous sustainable peak.

Those that can't even make it past the first peak are losers - people that everyone can tell can't even get their basic needs met. They make it obvious that they have needs when they're in the "needy" dip, but never manage to show enough self-respect for anyone else to feel like their needs matter.

Those that can't make it past the second peak are doormats - people who can't enforce their boundaries or reasonably request basic fairness. They make it obvious that that they object to the situation they're in when they push themselves into the "entitled" dip, but never manage to show enough self-respect for anyone else to feel like respecting those boundaries or requests.

Those that can't make it past the third peak are the vast majority of the human population - people who can't pull off the Steve Jobs level of demanding other people's resources and time and just getting it. They make it obvious that that they want more - or even think they deserve more - when they push themselves into the "arrogant" dip, but never manage to show enough self-respect for anyone else to feel like following them into the breach.

There are a few people have their goal and identity set on being in a particular peak, higher than the one they're on, and keep pushing and pushing and pushing even though they don't have enough grit to quite make it to the other side. These people end up permanently in the "needy", "entitled", or "arrogant" dip instead of hanging out in a mutually sustainable, but lower-achieving plateau. People tend to not like them very much, because constantly fighting through a dip that you can't break through is exhausting for EVERYONE.

ALSO, note that this model isn't precise, and is probably multi-dimensional - there are some people that are "winners" in the field of business, "losers" in the field of relationships, and "regular guys" in the field of friendships.

Now, here's a thing that I keep trying to communicate, that might be a bit controversial:

It's totally normal to push back on people in the 'needy' / 'entitled' / 'arrogant' valleys. This is just how humans ARE.

BUT - when you have someone that your gut says is needy, or entitled, or arrogant, but that your analytical mind says should be WAY COOLER than they feel, you can actually *CHOOSE* to help them out of the valley.

You can - as weird as it feels - DECIDE to ignore the sense that they're being needy, or entitled, or arrogant, and just give them a chance. Treat them as if they had already earned the respect they're bidding for. Don't do so because you are somehow "bad" for "mistreating" them! You've been demanding a perfectly reasonable costly signal of competence before you reward someone the respect they're bidding for. BUT, realize that those demands are coming from a part of your brain that is far, far older than your prefrontal cortex, and it MIGHT not be tuned to properly understand signals of competence relevant in the modern world, and you MIGHT want to use that awesome prefrontal cortex to adjust your intuitive priors.

You shouldn't do this for EVERYONE - most people, your intuitive priors are actually probably pretty okay. But some people you can look at and say "man she'd be amazing if she wasn't so insecure" - and then *decide* to help with the insecurity by... just ignoring it.

Random Angsty Poetry From Yours Truly

Let me fix that for you. Just a turn of the wrench, And you're gonna take off like a rocket. Trust me, I'm an engineer.

Don't you mind my lame foot, Or my soot-stained face, Eyes scrunched and squinting to see past my nose: I never wanted to be an astronaut.

That's gonna be your job. All I want is: Let me catch you safe, And tell me what Heaven was like when you get back. --- The water's cold, baby. The sun glistens off the enticing waves The seagulls cry a shrill but pleasant welcome The seaweed undulates like a beckoning lover But the water's cold, baby. Offshore, the otters play their cuddle-games And the porpoises dance and frolic in the waves Doing backflips and summersaults, screaming: "Be free! Be free!" But the water's cold, baby. And you're right that I'll get used to it And you're right that the sun will warm me And you're right that the ocean's where we came from And everyone's here And they're all just waiting for me to come back But baby, the water's so damn cold.

How hard can rocket science be, anyway?

Imagine you live in a place where everyone owns a car. And everyone has opinions about auto maintenance - where to take your car to get body work done, whether to work on the engine yourself, when to change the oil. Most people talk about enough car stuff with each other that there's a whole set of stock phrases and cached advice about ... well, anything you could possibly ask about a car. Some of it's good. A lot of it is just "how things are done" - not great, but better than not knowing what to do at all. Then, one day, you decide you're building a rocketship. A rocketship has a lot of parts that, if no one knows how they work, might look kinda like car parts. They're made out of the same sorts of material, they both have tubes and gears and fiddly things, they both require a lot of precision machining. But if you start asking about fuel sulfur distillation or heat shielding, people are going to be kind of confused. On the other hand, if you talk about things that *sound* like what people know, they'll have more annoying reactions. Tell them that you're looking for a fuel pump that can withstand 3200 degrees celsius, and they'll start yelling at you that whatever you're doing to your car, it can't possibly be safe. Tell them you need telemetry devices that can report speeds of over 1200 meters per second, and they'll tell you that you'll get arrested for breaking the speed limit. And even if you have time to patiently explain, "I'm not maintaining a car; I'm building a rocketship", they'll ignore it and go right on telling you about car advice, because it's all they know. "Rocketship" just doesn't have a slot in their brain. Anyway, if you're the kind of person who's building a rocketship with your life, I imagine you already know how annoying it feels to have to ask the car mechanics where to get parts, just because they're the only places you know about to get parts. I dunno if there's a better solution than to just tell them you're doing "something weird" first, ask for the simplest and most direct thing, and then gently rebuff any attempts at 'car advice'. This has helped me personally become waaaay more forgiving when people give me bad or annoying or even unasked-for advice - if 99.99% of people are maintaining cars, it makes sense that most of the time they'll have no clue what you're talking about if you ask about your custom rocket ship. Most people don't WANT to do rocket science. There's a reason "rocket science" is the go-to metaphor for "really hard thing that most people can't do". It's dangerous and risky and isolating and *weird*. And most people's lives are perfectly content and happy never setting foot on the moon. But then sometimes someone hears that sweet song, that calls to young sailors, and, well...

Decision Theory and You (and you, and you, and you, and you...)

Imagine there's a guy named Bob. Bob thinks, feels, and believes different things at different times in his life. After a few decades of growing up, though, Bob's different ways of being and thinking start to group into three strongly identifiable clusters:

Bob-A has a wife and two kids, and they mean the world to him. He loves the stability and purpose they provide to him. He loves the way they make him feel. He loves knowing that he has something to come home to. Bob-A comes out the most when he's home in Vancouver.

Bob-B really REALLY likes picking up women. He likes the feeling of a woman he's never met before being more attracted to him than all the other guys she could go home with; he likes taking her back to his hotel room and having sex; he likes the illicit thrill of getting away with it. Bob-B comes out the most when he's on a business trip, especially in Thailand or the Philippines.

Bob-C is an amazing negotiator, deal-maker, and salesman. He makes a cool three million a year, and regularly closes multi-billion dollar international deals. Bob-C loves the feeling of taking a bunch of powerful people with their own agendas, and getting them to agree on something.

Bob-A really appreciates Bob-C, because of how ridiculously well he provides for his family. Bob-C appreciates Bob-A, because he makes him seem solid and dependable and respectable.

Bob-B really appreciates Bob-C, because he gives him the power to fly all over the world and meet beautiful women. Bob-C appreciates Bob-B, because he makes him seem potent and dominant in a way that helps his reputation.

Bob-A hates Bob-B, because every time he sleeps with another woman, he's putting his family at risk. Bob-B thinks that what Bob-A's wife doesn't know, can't hurt him.

(Interlude: People familiar with Internal Family Systems should recognize some familiarity here. The difference is that Bob-A, Bob-B and Bob-C are not "personalities" or "aspects"; they are clusters. There's a particular way that Bob often is, that can be represented by Bob-B. There's another particular way that Bob often is, that can be represented by Bob-A. But there's really a thousand Bob-As - there's the Bob-A when he's stressed about the mortgage on their house; there's the Bob-A when he's arguing with his wife about his business trips; there's the Bob-A when he's sitting at home helping his son build a model airplane. These are VERY different Bob-As, but they all fit into the cluster.

So, unlike IFS, clustering Bobs into A, B and C is really just a conceptual convenience - it's important to remember that every contextually closed moment contains a unique Bob. That said, to keep things from going crazy we're going to cluster them and refer to A-like Bobs as "Bob-A" and so on.

Like so:

Okay, back to the main point.)

So, at this point there's a few different "levels" that Bob can play on.

The level zero player just... lives with it. Sometimes Bob cares about his family, sometimes Bob cares about his job, sometimes Bob cares about chasing tail. And then what happens happens, and tomorrow's Bob has to deal with the mess.

As long as you're fine with cleaning messes, or your inherent desires are reasonably simple and aligned with each other and don't have particularly long time horizons, playing at level 0 is fine. Most people manage to hold down a job and an apartment just fine at level 0.

The level one player, on the other hand, needs some kind of Schelling point for his individual moment-to-moment selves to rally around. So, all the various Bobs create a "Bob".

"Bob" is the ongoing, evolving story of who Bob is. It's the thing that Virtue Ethics says to build. It's the thing that religion and social class and such provide. It's the thing that Alcoholics Anonymous installs (when it works correctly). It's a coherent, stable Identity, that the various Bobs can rally around and compare themselves to and track towards.

The Bobs could decide, for example, to adopt conservative Christian values. At which point, Bob-A will be very happy, Bob-C will shrug and play along by the new rules, and Bob-B will get left out in the cold (unless Bob-B can effectively sabotage the process). The point of "Bob", though, is to have a story that the Bobs agree upon about which of them are actually Bobs, and which ones are "out of character".

An "out of character" Bob cluster gets admonished, and internal mental and emotional efforts are taken to prevent them from influencing future Bobs in their direction. An "in character" Bob gets internally praised, and mental and emotional efforts are taken to increase the likelihood that future Bobs tack towards that cluster.

So that's level one: pick a Story Of You, and play it out so your Bobs have something to coordinate on.

This gives "Bob" access to a new superpower, which the various Bobs can tap into through their connection to Bob.

This superpower is called "Willpower". It lets a Bob override their natural inclinations in the moment, in favor of a future pay-off to another Bob produced by longer-term thinking. Level zero players can do this in an ad-hoc way, but at level one "Bob" is actually tracking the Willpower expenditures and making sure that they tend to average towards an agreed-upon vector, rather than cancelling out. Level one is where people can actually Do Stuff with some degree of consistency and potency.

Level two is trickier, but way more powerful.

Level two is where Bobs sit down, thinks about all the Bobs he's been, imagines all the Bobs he could be, and then creates a "Bob" himself. Not one handed to him by religion or friends or a book or the environment; an actual unique Story Of You that is expressly designed to maximize the utility of Bobs across time.

This is tricky, because this "Bob" has to take into account the second-order constraints it will have on future Bobs, and take into account the framing effects it will have (will-have-had?) on past Bobs. A Story Of You is powerful. It will cause some potential future Bobs to never come to be. It will cause some future Bobs to regret having picked that story. It will cause some past Bobs to be re-interpreted in a light that those Bobs themselves might not appreciate.

And, unlike the story produced by religion or class or a good self-help book, the unique Story Of You evolves along with Bob. As Bob discovers new things about himself, he will need to adjust his Identity to maximize the expected utility payoff across all Bobs - including across all Bobs he's already been.

So lets say our Bob, when feeling particularly Bob-A-like while on a trip to Thailand, sits down and decides to develop a "Bob".

They decide that Bob-A and Bob-C are powerful allies, but that Bob-B is enough of a powerful and important part of a Bob that they can't just abandon him. They think long, and hard, and start evolving an Identity around an internal sense of ethics and integrity.

Then they go back to their wife, Alice.

Luckily, Alice is also smart, and competent. Even more luckily, Bob catches Alice in a particularly Alice-A state, and Alice-A tends to cooperate pretty strongly with Bob-A.

And so after a long and somewhat scary discussion, Alice-A and Bob-A begin to build an "Alice" and "Bob" that can respect many of Alice-A, Alice-B and Alice-C's needs, as well as Bob-A, Bob-B, and Bob-C's needs. And then they identify the ways that Alice-C and Bob-B tend to cooperate to weaken the connection between Alices and "Alice", or disconnect Bobs from "Bob" altogether. And they agree to build an "Alice" and a "Bob" that not only cooperate, but cooperate to meta-cooperate; helping to guide the development of "Alice" towards producing Alices that cooperate with "Bob", and helping to guide the development of "Bob" towards producing Bobs that cooperate with "Alice".

In this particular case, Alice and Bob agree to an open marriage, but to only explore with other partners together; Alice agrees to become less possessive of Bob and Bob agrees to become less dismissive of Alice; and they both agree to see their careers as support system for their family, rather than seeing their family as support systems for their careers. And then "Alice" and "Bob" do the best they can with that, while the various Alices and Bobs through time help or hinder the process.

First, read this: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/ Now, my thoughts: "Ra" is shorthand for "ontologically basic authority".Succumbing to Ra worship is downstream of having a phlogiston-like theory of authority, instead of a thermodynamic-like theory of authority. In the phlogiston model of Authority, there is some magical authority-fluid that is conferred from On High (the Greeks called the initial receipt of this fluid "charisma", so calling this model "charismatic leadership" is a kind of interesting place to start). That authority-fluid is then doled out and poured from soul-vessel to soul-vessel, endowing servants to follow the will of their Masters. In this model, people tend to behave as if the Mission is infused within the authority-fluid - if WidgetCo's Mission is to make widgets, and you work at WidgetCo, and the CEO of WidgetCo tells you to go buy him golf clubs, then clearly buying him golf clubs must have something to do with making more widgets. You can *feel* the authority-fluid pouring out of the CEO and entering into you, investing you with the sub-Mission of "get the CEO golf clubs". Maybe you'll ask a few questions about what kinds of golf clubs or what not, but you'll mostly follow his orders without question, because of *course* getting the CEO golf clubs is on-Mission. Switching from a phlogiston-like model to a thermodynamic model can be kind of jarring. Once you start seeing all the different game-theoretic decisions made by all the actors in the environment, you can start despairing of building a bottom-up statistical model of authority. Ra-theory *almost* works, and *feels* intuitively right, so the mind tends to slide easily back into it. But authority-fluid or charisma or Ra isn't a basic thing in the environment; it's sort of a credit account of anticipated rewards and punishments and expected utilities of following a particular set of orders over another, rounded off and wired into instinctive social dominance hierarchy stuff. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword that's been thrown around for like, 40+ years now. Most of the time it fails, and (in my experience) fails because it forgets to lay down wards and bindings against Ra. I think that servant leadership is rescuable, if and only if people are willing to see Ra as opposing their coordination efforts rather than facilitating them. (The Discordians and the Occupy Wall Street movement both had this intuition, but didn't have a good enough grasp of game theory and psychology to build something that could survive without Ra.) Here's a *basic* outline of what I think Ra-less "servant leadership" authority looks like: - identify each individual's needs, desires, and motivations. Have at least an intuitive model of their utility functions. This will require a lot of communication, with a lot of people, not all of whom will trust you - and not all of whom will end up on your side. This part is *HARD*. - craft a Mission that they can buy into, that if adhered to, will give each member more utility than they could get in the Nash equilibrium sans coordination. - You may have to craft *several* Missions. Some of these Missions will NOT give every agent in the environment a good payout; this means that different Missions will necessarily be comprised of different groups of agents. Once you have a good set of candidate Missions, though, you should pick one that achieves the greatest net good, and draw your garden walls so that it includes everyone who will benefit from the Mission, and excludes everyone who will oppose the Mission. - Once you have a good grasp on the Mission, take a look at the skills and resources that each member has that could be applied to the Mission. Your goal is to facilitate trades that further the Mission, and therefore further the above-Nash-equilibrium payouts. You need to take heroic responsibility for facilitating these trades, bearing in mind that *you* are also an agent with a utility function that's counted in the Mission, and your effort spent to facilitate these trades is a finite resource that is participating in the trades. - As the Mission begins to reify, it's important to remember that it's a construct, crafted for the purpose of coordination. It can and should be abandoned the moment expected payoffs dip below the uncoordinated Nash equilibrium. Reifying the Mission is one of the first steps towards summoning Ra. (Counterpoint: some Missions have such ridiculous net utility payoffs that, at human scales, the correct action looks functionally indistinguishable from reification. It is important to bear in mind that taking on such Missions *at all* means walking around with two barely sub-critical masses in your pocket and hoping you don't have an accident.) When I presented this model to someone else, I asked him to identify three virtues that he could pull out of the process I was describing. I forget exactly how he described them, but I assigned them terms for mnemonic salience: The Virtue of Coordination The Virtue of Coordination means always seeing the individual agents of your group as individual agents with their own utility functions, and always modeling their Nash equilibrium and treating that Nash equilibrium as a BATNA. It means always having a better deal for them than they could get on their own ("the Mission"), and whenever they can get a better deal on their own, stepping back and letting that deal emerge naturally. The Virtue of Stewardship The Virtue of Stewardship means always modeling the resources available to the group, and ensuring that those resources flow in the correct directions. It means facilitating trades between the agents of your group, and coordinating effort of the members of your group, such that the Mission is furthered, no matter what, for as long as the Mission is worth furthering. The Virtue of Excellence The Virtue of Excellence means always serving as an example of the behaviors you expect in your subordinates, never making it more costly for a subordinate to tell you the truth than to lie, and never making it more costly to cooperate than to defect. (If you rely on someone's cooperation, and you can't offer a better deal than they'd get from defecting, it's time to abort the Mission.) The Virtue of Excellence also means never allowing your Coordination and Stewardship virtues to be corrupted by Ra.

Solstice Invocation

Ia Ra-Hoor-Khut, Father-And-Son, Dying Ember and Birthing Spark.

Bless thy passing.

Bless thy going and thy coming.

Enter the Underworld clad in our hopes, our triumphs, our graces.

Wrest from Apep the promise of brighter days and deliver to us thy light and warmth, to-morrow and to-morrow's morrow.

Take from us this offering of blood, and fire, and labor's sweat.

We stand with thee at the gates of the Dark. We gaze with thee into the Unknown Abyss. We do battle with thee against the devouring Serpent, the forces of Chaos personified.

We stand fast with thee to the morrow. We hold fast to the promise of a brighter day.

We light the candles of Nuit to guide thy journey.

Hold fast the Fixed Star in thy right hand to guide thy journey.

Harken to the sound of our song to guide thy journey.

Ia Ra-Hoor-Khut, Son-and-Father, Birthing Spark from the Dying Ember

Sexual Shame

I have a lot - I mean a LOT - of shame around being sexual.

I have a strong sense that I shouldn't be sexual, that people are going to prod me for any sign of sexual interest or response, and then humiliate me for it. They're going to be *disgusted* by the fact that I could have sexual thoughts.

This is bullshit and I shouldn't have to put up with it. Many people will tell me that I shouldn't have to put up with it - but they still flinch a bit when I start talking about sex. And most of them DON'T seem to flinch when other people talk about sex.

This seems to be very strongly a status thing - I notice that people who are not competing to be sexually attractive themselves don't tend to have nearly as strong a reaction. But they still have *some* reaction.

People often give me the advice that if I stop talking about it, it'll go away - but it doesn't; it just becomes less salient to *them*. One of the consequences of my shame, is that I genuinely can't tell the difference between rejection and humiliation. I generally err on the side of rejection - which means that people who are actually trying to humiliate me have to do so even more harshly, in order to destroy the plausibility that they're just trying to reject me kindly. One of the consequences of this is that, once I do get humiliated, it tends to prime me even further to see all rejection as humiliation - which means I try even harder to compensate in the other direction - which means that people who want to make me feel humiliated have to be even more vicious and blatant in order to succeed. It's a vicious cycle. One of the outputs of this vicious cycle is a general slow increase in misogyny and sadistic fantasies - since I have no way to actually confront the sense that I'm being humiliated all the time, the only outlet I really have is the idea of how sweet it would be to turn the tables. Often I deliberately attempt to sublimate this into consensual D/s fantasies, but generally these feel pretty icky when I try to execute on them, because I know they're ultimately coming from a place of hostility and resentment. I'm not sure what's healthier here. Most of the time, the advice I get from people essentially boils down to "lose". Lose big, and lose publicly, and embrace losing, because anything else is just proof that I'm a big scary man who wants to rape and humiliate women. Which... doesn't feel like what's going on internally, at all. But I *do* understand why it's a useful narrative to impose. I'm not sure there's a good answer here. I've considered BDSM as an outlet, but I'm not really attractive enough or emotionally stable enough to maintain play partners. I've considered chemical castration, but that seems like a cop-out. I've considered suicide, but lots of people would be pretty pissed. I think the answer is to just keep trudging on, and slowly learn to live with disappointment and rejection. And yes, humiliation.

“Punching Down” in a curved social spacetime metric

So, a friend posted this on Facebook:

I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men's penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn't do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it's on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this is tragic. The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers' genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats. I would love to live in the nearby world where "you're cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?" is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man's actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman's. I recognize that, given we *don't* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting. I think it's a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances. But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.

So I gave my take on it:

The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful. It's generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive. The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.

Then I read this cracked article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-internet-gun-aimed-at-everyones-face/ Now, spread this ridiculously important meme:

If you're winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren't the kind of person you think you're fighting against.

If you're making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you're viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you're screaming at some transgirl for "invading your safe space" and "not being a real woman", if you're savaging some internet pundit for using "transgirl" because they haven't kept up with the lingo-of-the-week... you're almost certainly attacking someone who's probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.

Because if you're successfully attacking, and they aren't successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.

Feels nice, doesn't it?

Affordance Widths

Okay. There's a social interaction concept that I've tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I'm going to just go ahead and make a graph.

I'm calling this concept "Affordance Widths".

Let's say there's some behavior {B} that people can do more of, or less of. And everyone agrees that if you don't do enough of the behavior, bad thing {X} happens; but if you do too much of the behavior, bad thing {Y} happens.

Now, let's say we have five different people: Adam, Bob, Charles, David, and Edgar. Each of them can do more or less {B}. And once they do too little, {X} happens. But once they do too much, {Y} happens. But where {X} and {Y} starts happening is a little fuzzy, and is different for each of them. Let's say we can magically graph it, and we get something like this:

Now, let's look at these five men's experiences.

Adam doesn't understand what the big deal about {B} is. He feels like this is a behavior that people can generally choose how much they do, and yeah if they don't do the *bare minimum* shit goes all dumb, and if they do a *ridiculous* amount then shit goes dumb a different way, but otherwise do what you want, you know?

Bob understands that {B} can be an important behavior, and that there's a minimum acceptable level of {B} that you need to do to not suffer {X}, and a maximum amount you can get away with before you suffer {Y}. And Bob feels like {X} is probably more important a deal than {Y} is. But generally, he and Adam are going to agree quite a bit about what's an appropriate amount of {B}ing for people to do. (Bob's heuristic about how much {B} to do is the thin cyan line.)

Charles isn't so lucky, by comparison. He's got a *very* narrow band between {X} and {Y}, and he has to constantly monitor his behavior to not fall into either of them. He probably has to deal with {X} and {Y} happening a lot. If he's lucky, he does less {B} than average; if he's not so lucky, then he tries to copy Bob's strategy and winds up getting smacked with {Y} way more often than Bob does.

Poor David's in a situation called a "double bind". There is NO POSSIBLE AMOUNT of {B} he can do to prevent both {X} and {Y} from happening; he simply has to choose his poison. If he tries Bob's strategy, he'll get hit hard with {X} *AND* {Y}, simultaneously, and probably be pretty pissed about it. On the other hand, if he runs into Charles, and Charles has his shit figured out, then Charles might tell him to tack into a spot where David only has to deal with {X}. Bob and Adam are going to be utterly useless to David, and are going to give advice that keeps him right in the ugly overlap zone.

Then there's Edgar. Edgar's fucked. There is *NO AMOUNT* of behavior that Edgar can dial into, where he isn't getting hit HARD by {X} *and* {Y}. There's places way out on the extreme - places where most people are getting slammed hard by {X} or slammed hard by {Y} - where Edgar notices a slight decrease in the contra failure mode. So Edgar probably spends most of his time on the edges, either doing all-B or no-B, and people probably tell him to stop being so black-and-white about B and find a good middle spot like everyone else. Edgar probably wants to punch those people, starting with Adam.

In any real situation, the affordance width is probably determined by things independent of X, Y, and B. Telling Bob to do a little more {B} than Adam, and Charles to do a little less {B} than Adam or Bob, is great advice. But David and Edgar need different advice - they need advice one meta-level up, about how to widen their affordance width between {X} and {Y} so that *some* amount of {B} will be allowed at all.

In most of the situations where this is most salient to me, {B} is a social behavior, and {X} and {Y} are punishments that people mete out to people who do not conform to correct {B}-ness. A lot of the affordance width that Adam and Bob have would probably be identified as 'halo effects'.

For example, let's say {B} is assertiveness in a job interview. Let's say {X} represents coming across as socially weak, while {Y} represents coming across as arrogant. Adam probably has a lot going for him - height, age, socioeconomic background, etc. - that make him just plain *likeable*, so he can be way more assertive than Charles and seem like a go-getter, *or* seem way less assertive than Charles and seem like a good team player. Whereas David was probably born the wrong skin color and god-knows-what-else, and Edgar probably has some kind of Autism-spectrum disorder that makes *any* amount of assertiveness seem dangerous, and *any* amount of non-assertiveness seem pathetic.

There's plenty of other values for {B}, {X} and {Y} that I could have picked; filling them in is left as an exercise for the reader.

Does this make sense to people?

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