#generalized-reading

[mclegibilist]

I am greedy to be understood

I think one of the things that often strikes when I really get to know someone, is that 99% of the time I am significantly more desirous of being understood than they are. For instance, I find people often accept way more coarse grained signals of whether someone understood their point than I do. I know, I sound like a lot of fun to talk to.

In reality, a lot of the time I just try to calibrate how much people understand what I’m saying from their vague answers and streamlined back channel grunts and “uh-huhs”, so I can snipe the right level of explanation for the next thing exactly right. This is where a lot of my energy goes and a lot of the time it’s super dumb, because the other person isn’t paying enough attention or investing enough emotional energy in the conversation, so that even if I do snipe the right level of abstraction and they do get it, it doesn’t lead anywhere or they don’t remember later and it was mostly in vain.

But what it does give is practice. And I have practiced and practiced figuring out how to get the abstractions exactly right for people, which mostly involves figuring out how they think about the abstractions presented...which has meant that I end-up with an obsession with figuring out what other people are trying to say when I want to be heard.

And this is actually the fundamental principle behind generalized reading: any accurate reading, leads to different writing, any successful writing, leads to a different kind of reading. They play off of each other, because each is trying to capture what’s in the other.

[mclegibilist]

Generalized Reading #1

A simple example of generalized reading: how people try to control their sneezes when they’re not alone. When we’re with other people we would, of course, rather not sneeze. This can be explained away by saying that we don’t to spread disease, but here’s a more complicated thing: we also try to make our sneezes quieter, even when we know there’s no chance that the company we keep will fail to notice them. This is because, we are aware of the reaction they elicit, e.g. a loud enough sneeze to be “unignorable” will elicit a “bless you”, a laugh, etc. In most cases, we tend to avoid imposing action on our company, and so we minimize our sneezes to avoid these reactions...but even when we know the reactions are coming, we minimize our sneezes (for instance in the volume of our accompanying vocalization) to at least show that we put effort into the ostensible effort of not eliciting a reaction.

[mclegibilist]

Excitement Misuse

I’ve been intermittently depressed for a while, and I have a bad habit: when I find myself excited I throw it at the most awful thing I have to do that feels urgent, in order to get it over with. Sometimes I can get over the hump of the problem with this method, but a lot of the time I can’t, and the result is predictable: I disincentivize myself from being excited and create a kind of “anxiety of responsibility” around excitement.

This is, of course, just an instance of “generalized reading”, the observation that when a signal becomes associated with something, that thing becomes part of the semantic content of the signal. I was teaching myself to handle excitement as the precursor to anxiety. That part is “just” Pavlovian response. The complicated part, is now that I’m stuck with the response, I plan around the language I’ve learned to communicate with my unconscious responses.