November 26th, 2021
- tons of amazing stuff in MESM convo today
- connection with in the meantime
- further thoughts on this:
- mechanisms of control
- fear
- guilt
- shame
- case studies:
- partner dance
- contact improv
- west coast swing
- other partner dance styles
- parenting
- infants
- kids
- teens
- jobs & UBI
- BDSM
- slavery
- animals
- notes from convo w a friend
- I feel like I understand it quite precisely: the attempt to control another's behavior by withholding something they want or need until they do what you want them to do
- (well, or your own behavior)
- ah yeah, maybe put better is something like "creating a problem for someone until they do what you want"
- (reward is just the temporarily relief of chronic punishment, in terms of conditioning)
- & where withholding comes in is that you may not have actually *created* the problem for them, you might just be taking advantage of it
- eg if someone starts out poor or lonely, and you aim to coerce them by saying you'll give the money or friendship but only if they do what you want, you didn't create their problem in the first place but you're sort of exploiting it
- another complexity is that like, some things are sort of structurally conditional?
- like maybe you're happy to cook me dinner but only if I buy the ingredients
- is this coercive? I thiiiink there's a way to disambiguate it
- if you're completely broke, and I offer to buy you food on the condition you cook it for both of us, that's.... maybe-probably coercive
- but I think in no other circumstances is this coercive unless there's guilt/shame-based manipulation going on under the hood
- because like, neither of us has to
- it's just like "hey, would this be a win-win?"
- and there's also something like, even in that situation, if I'm like "I really want you to be able to eat... hmm... I don't have time to make food, so I'm currently spending money on eating out, but I could save that money and thus afford more groceries, if you can prepare it"
- then there's a sense in which I'm strategizing to find a way to solve your problem that might work for you
- whereas if I'm like "hmm I definitely want a chef, hey who's someone who's desperate enough that I can get them to cook for me?"
- but even there it's pretty subtle, and there's also nothing wrong with wanting to solve your own problems
- AH! the point is something like,
- in the coercive world, I *prefer* for the person to exist in a state of desperation,
- so I can keep exploiting that situation (/person)
- whereas in the collaborative/creative world, I prefer for the person to exist in a state of abundance,
- from which I expect us to be able to find even better win-wins
- friend > desperation ↔ coercion
- me > sounds right yeah
- symmetrical differences
- different languages
- English vs Finnish
- different cultural touchstones (see Books/Cultural Literacy)
- lack of common experiences
- different values
- different aesthetics
- (this shouldn't, in the limit, affect conversational coherence much, but it does in the meantime both because people have trouble differentiating it and because people are afraid of losing touch with their own aesthetics)
- different communication styles
- speech patterns
- eg high-involvement vs high-considerateness
- mediums
- someone who expresses best in reading/writing may have trouble getting in coherence with someone who is mostly into oral communication
- or in the extreme case, a deaf person and a blind person
- asymmetrical/developmental elements
- basically covered under What are the components or dimensions required for collaborative culture?
- bouba kiki poll
- blogpost showtime organization... I want a recurring weekly showtime and a weekly time to schedule the next showtime
- I'm currently thinking Tuesday publication, and maybe... Wednesday schedule-next?
- tho could also just do like late-aft Tues pub, evening Tues schedule-next
- so that there's sort of some overlap / opportunity to be working on the two in parallel a bit
1 linked reference
Malcolm podcast appearances
- November 26th, 2021 on Drinking with Visionaries with Trace Brady
- self-energizing motivation