March 4th, 2025
- > If you're hiding a friend in your attic, and his mortal enemy comes to the door and asks if he's there, the question is a lie. They're really asking 'can I come in and kill your friend?'
'No' is a completely truthful answer to that question.
A lot of life works like this. 
- some new articulations of this
- notably, the "I can't just convey this simple thing because this person keeps taking it personally and making it infinitely big or infinitely small" thing turns out to approximately have "blame" as its cause
- and then you can also use the classic we-fi example as a case study of a situation where people are pretty good at sorting out the connection issues without blame, but out can sort of demo where blame would make them stupider
- then there was a new example of a couple fighting, and mutually triggering each other, and getting into the complex dance of "well we wouldn't have this disconnection if you didn't do X" "well I wouldn't need to do X if you didn't Y" and my interlocutor tonight was like "well someone has to choose to do something different"
- in some ways this becomes a different topic there, but in other ways it's the same, because there's a core question of: does your view include the idea that everything that everybody's doing made sense at the time / in context everyone is always doing whatever makes the most sense to them
- also last night convo w R had some good stuff on what makes something fighting and not just a difference or even a conflict
- if you have a difference but it causes no problems then it's not a conflict
- (some adjacent thing about some differences turning into conflicts if you get too close)
- a conflict is when you have desires that you don't see a way to satisfy simultaneously
- a *fight* is when you can't orient together to a conflict and negotiate about it (perhaps due to frame stuff, or other distrust) which means that you are instead making moves that are more direct/indirect
- analogy of my Korean roommate