trust-dancing

December 17th, 2024

• trust-dancing case study by Kaj Sotala
  • > B was saying that it didn't matter what move they ultimately played, that was all the same, but _she needed A to acknowledge that he'd unilaterally changed an agreement, and she needed to be able to trust that A would not do that_.
  • > With that, I could imagine another shape behind B's reaction. Some betrayal in her past, where someone else had unilaterally changed an agreement because _they_ thought the consequences were the same, when they were very much not the same to B, and then rejected B's objections as invalid... that this situation was now reminding her of.
  • facebook.com/Xuenay/posts/pfbid0gcvzwQEPF3Wzha9SLZsZNPz8m9p8wWhRMTcJzk…

a common confusion: "there's no way to satisfy this person's ask while staying in integrity" when what's actually so is "I __can't think of__ a way to satisfy this person's ask while staying in integrity"

• there's a common confusion people make when trust-dancing, where there's something that someone is asking for (eg to be understood, or to have something taken care of, or whatever) and the person they're asking feels that they can't satisfy the wish because there's no way to do so without violating something of their own

Write 100 summaries/proposals

• trust-dancing

July 8th, 2022

• thread by Mark Lippmann relevant to romantic relationships trust-dancing How we get there talkaboutability
  • twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1542541757602201602

April 28th, 2022

• trust-dancing tho is happening between people before any such breakdowns have occurred, including that people are usually somewhat sussing out whether they expect one another to betray them in ways they've been betrayed by others before
  • trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions

January 15th, 2022

• relevant to trust-dancing - Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • "trust" maybe shorthand for "psychological safety" here
    • from a friend: "psychological safety as anti-triggered" — common-knowledge that everyone has positive emotional knowledge
    • or talkaboutability
    • "can't address conflict-avoidance, without addressing lack of trust"
      • can address a conflict (perhaps)
    • 

Podcast summaries

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

• 1:08:46 - 1:23:39 - A few principles I learned from my time with LSA upward spiral fuel the upward spiral What is Blame? nobody is to blame building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions
  • 1:09:56 - M > Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great question. I've been working on a couple of pieces of writing on those fronts that I'm trying to figure out what to do with. Some of them would make most sense as internal documents to people who were already kinda in that scene, including, you know, dozens of people who have you know, just come to one workshop that we ever hosted, but have an appreciation for the thing or whatever. But then like I also want to post something to my blog. In some ways, the core two pieces are these maps of these two different dynamics, which you could call a downward spiral and the upward spiral. And then a list of what were called commitments and assumptions for how to kinda enact the upward spiral dynamic. And where I've come to it now is that... like, I was just a couple days ago, rereading some of these pieces and models and stuff, and I still basically resonate with the description of the upper spiral and downward spiral. Basically, the downward spiral is caused by guilt and an undermining of self trust, and so when people are trying to figure out what it makes sense to do, they second guess their own internal compass, and generate behaviors that are trying to do good by some external authority or something, but are undermining some internal sense that they have. Which then generates guilt because - or sorry, no, which then generates some sort of behavior that kicks into gear to meet their own needs that they've been ignoring, because they're trying to do the right thing according to somebody else. Which then generates guilt, because they're not doing the thing that they're supposed to do according to the external authority. Which then reinforces the idea that they should force themselves to do things that they don't want to do, in order to be good. And then there's this kinda... yeah, I mean, whipping around back and forth. You can sort of see the spiral shape of that, and the reason it goes downward is because it's, it's opposed to itself in a certain fundamental sense, and there's a kind of striving to only have the good and none of the bad, [to] only have the right and none of the wrong. But the way that it's striving creates the very wrongness that it's trying to avoid, by sort of dualistically reifying the rightness of the other thing, and by being unable to kind of listen to the other half of things. So that's kind of the downward spiral dynamic, and then the upward spiral dynamic comes from deepening in self trust, and a sense that you can learn by doing and by... language is so messy here, because on the one hand, I want to say learn by doing and by making mistakes, but the whole meaning of what a mistake is kind of even changes here as well. Like, it's, there's a kind of, like, "everything's a mistake," and also "nothing's a mistake and it's all just learning." And being able to see that and really relax into it generates a different kind of possibility where the things that are in tension in the downward spiral, or rather, in isolation, can sorta become used to form some part of a larger whole that is able to more directly be in touch with what it wants because it's not denying what it wants in service of something else. And so a lot of this resonates with the kind of stuff that's been becoming more popular in in our corner of Twitter, around like non-coercion or non self coercion. It applies to other other people as well, so it's not just the non self coercion, but it's also like, "What does it mean to not coerce others?" And coercion is an interesting word, it's one that we've used to talk about the downward spiral in Upstart context. But it's a pretty uncommon word in a lot of contexts. [Pause] See, I mean, you can maybe map it onto like trying to get a system to perform a different behavior without regard for why it's already performing the behavior it's performing, and [whether] it makes sense for it to be doing what it's doing. Like, that's a way of describing what coercion is, and so self-coercion [is] somebody who's like, "Oh, I just need to get up early. I should set my alarm earlier" or something, right? There's like an element of not respecting that, "No, I don't JUST need to get up earlier, if I did, I would already be doing it. So there's some other thing going on that's making it so I'm not just doing that," and then similarly with other behavior as well.
  • 1:15:17 - M > And so there's this list of commitments and assumptions that point at... that actually come out of the experience of the founders of the Upstart scene. [They are] of this period of time when the culture kind of felt like it really clicked into place, and then they kind of wrote a list of like, "What were we doing? What were we assuming? What were we feeling? How were we relating to each other that was generating this?" And the list has things on it, like, "Everything we know, and everything everyone knows is a model of how things are" or as Monty Python put it, "it's only a model." "Not knowing is a necessary and creative state as part of understanding and action." There's elements of these assumptions that, you know, connect with stuff from the Dharma, right? Like, you know, "Being fundamentally happy is worthwhile and attainable", "Everyone wants closeness, and autonomy, and these are compatible", "Everyone wants to be accepted as they are and also to change and these are compatible", "No one is right, no one is wrong, no one is to blame for anything," was one of the assumptions that people would often take the most issue with, when sort of presented with this list of like, "What do you mean, no one is right [and] no one is wrong?" like. And there's a whole thing, you know, that we could go into now or at some other point about, like, "what's really going on with blame? Like, what is blame?" I have some, again, half written notes about this, but it seems to me that there's a sense in which blame is confused, sort of like how geocentrism is confused. It's like geocentrism makes a lot of intuitive sense, man; like, it sure looks like we're in the middle and everything else is going around. But you can find a perspective from which you're like, "Well, that's sort of true, but there's an us spinning thing more than there is a 'things going around'ness of us, except for the moon." But, where I've come to with thinking about these commitments and assumptions and so forth, is that they work great as a short term experimental thing. Like, if you're doing a weekend workshop, which is one of the things that they were originally used for. Like, you know, you get a bunch of group of people together for a weekend and say, "Hey, we're gonna try out this new culture thing. Here's the basic operating principles." I sometimes like to use the analogy of like, "there's three simple rules that you can give to some triangles moving around the screen, that will cause them to behave as flocking birds." It's like "Don't bump into each other, but otherwise try to get close to each other and face in the same direction." And if you give the triangles those rules, they form very complex flocking dynamics without any top-down control. And so, you know, the idea is, "this is a sort of flocking behavior for humans." And that works great for a weekend, but the commitments and assumptions don't actually have written into them anywhere, "what to do, if you find yourself unable to reasonably assume something," or, "what to do if you find yourself feeling conflicted about a particular commitment." And so, as far as the longer term learning process goes, I've come to recognize, like, "Well, yeah, it's valuable for people to get a taste of these by just trying to go directly to them," like [to] get a feel for what the upward spiral feels like. But then if you're trying to actually live it in an ongoing, permanent way, which is possible - I can say it's possible in the same way that someone who knew enough thermodynamics could say that flight was possible. Like it's just clearly possible. If you're trying to get there more consistently, it's like, well, you've got to actually really slow down and integrate every voice inside you that says, "But no, somebody is wrong," or "But no, I am right," or, "But no, like being close and having autonomy aren't compatible." Like, you know, we have tons of learnings like this, and the bioemotive retreat was, for me, one of the things that sort of kick started my sense of like, "Wait, I've been trying to like push away all of my voices that disagree with what I, in some sense, do accurately know are the best principles that I could have for navigating my life." Like, in some sense, I know that and it's true. And yet, in another sense, other parts of me don't know it, and arguing with them, you know, trying to just tell them "No, no, no, you don't get it, it's like this" doesn't work. It in fact, perpetuates the very downward spiral on a smaller scale by saying "This way is right, that way is wrong. What are you doing? You're confused." as opposed to "Oh, well...". Part of what's neat is like the place I've come to, instead, is actually like, "I'm so grounded in these principles being right, in the way that they're right, that I don't need to defend them," and that gives me way more space to listen to my own or others objections. It's like similarly to like, at one point, I was hanging out with somebody and we were talking about square footage of something. And they multiplied two numbers, and were off by an order of magnitude. And I was like, "No, no, no it's approximately a hundred, not approximately a thousand." And they were like, "No," and I like double checked my own math and was like, "No, it's definitely the thing I said, but I'll wait. Like, take as long as you need to do the math, I trust that you can do the math, and you will come to the same conclusion as me. And you know, if you try for a couple minutes and you're still like, 'No,' then I mean, I'll check again. But I don't need to argue with you because it's sort of self evidently true from the right vantage point". And so that's been really cool - realizing that everything everybody knows, is in one sense, only a model inside our heads and is in another sense, self evidently true from some vantage point. And so being like, "Well, my model is better than your model." It's like, "Well, maybe, but, what does your model see that mine might not see." And so this starts to get into some of the Non Naive Trust dance pieces of like, one of the most core elements of the Non Naive Trust dance is respecting all distrust that arises. Like all distrust is knowing something, and you can't build trust starting from a place of "You should already trust." And this was, in principle, something that was totally part of the ethos of Upstart the whole time, that you can't just say "You should trust me," but there were still ways in which we were kind of both internally and interpersonally demanding of people that they trust when they couldn't, on the basis, perhaps, of them having trusted at some other moment without recognizing that the compartmentalization involved meant that you're actually dealing with a different sense making process inside the person and that sense making process couldn't trust the same thing that some other sense making process inside the same person could, because it was working with different knowings.

• 1:23:45 - 1:33:48 - Is NNTD and upgraded version of Upstart's ideals and methods? Liminal Space Agency trust-dancing Game A Game B CirclingNVC
  • 1:26:43 - M > Yeah, it it very much feels that way to me because, yeah, that's that's kind of how it emerged. And there's a profound amount of historical contingency to all of this. Like, the name 'Non Naive Trust Dance,' has a lot of rich elements to it, and it's not a coincidence that it's named that. But there's also a way in which like... and I may do things about this over the coming years, or months even, but like one of the things that's currently a little funny is that like, in some sense, Non Naive Trust Dance refers to a thing that people are always doing to greater and lesser degrees of skill and workability and effectiveness. Like, you know, any conversation that people have is them navigating, effectively or not, the trust landscape between them and building trust and building distrust, or having gaps in trust. Like, that's, that's always happening, right? And so in some sense, the Non Naive trust Dance is just a way of talking about a thing that's already happening. But it's already happening, and I didn't invent it in that sense of it, right? And that's part of why I talk about discovering the Non Naive Trust Dance, because it feels in some ways more like a discovery than like an invention. Having said that, it's a discovery that produces a set of kinda obvious implications for how one might go about trust dancing in ways that work in the same way that -and this is an analogy I use often- [in] learning thermodynamics and aerodynamics, it's like, you, you get an immediate sense of like, "Okay, yeah, you can build faster-than-light aircraft, but they need to have some way of lifting themselves," and there's sort of like, three or four-ish, I don't know, I mean, some expert in this could talk about it, but, you know, there's sort of a few ways to do that lifting thing, and, you know, pushing off against the ground can't do it, because you can't do that when you're in the air. Like, just some of these basic principles. And, you know, knowing thermodynamics, you'd also know that you can't build a perpetual motion machine. Like there's limits of entropy that prevent that from being possible. But you can build a superconductor, which is kind of cool. And so there's something where I feel like I've unlocked a very basic couple of fundamental truths about how trust building ever works, when it works. Like, it always follows these principles, but the principles themselves are really hard to put into words. They're like this sort of... I mean, in part because they sound almost tautological, like, they're just like, "you can't trust what you don't trust". But, if you really take that seriously, and you and you look for instances where you're trying to get someone to trust you when they don't, without actually changing what's available to them as information or just salient features that would allow them to trust you, instead of not trusting you, you notice that this is happening constantly with, with things that people say and do and so forth. So even though it's kind of obvious when stated that, like, "you can't trust what you don't trust," that's not actually how people operate most of the time. Anyway, I'm getting a little sidetracked from the the core thrust of your question, which was like, in what sense is the Non Naive Trust Dance an upgrade on what Upstart has been doing this whole time, right? So, in one sense, it just straightforwardly is, and, in some sense, even almost too much so, in that, as I was differentiating myself from that... from just being like, "the main way I have of understanding this collaborative culture thing is how we've been talking about it here, and, in particular, the way that Jean has been talking about it - Jean being the main founder of upstart and that whole project. As I was differentiating myself from her thinking, there was a way in which like, any difference that I had, between how she was seeing things and how I was seeing things that felt central, as opposed to just aesthetic or something got kind of put in the Non Naive Trust Dance. And in that sense, I'm not sure it's one thing. Like, it's in some ways a placeholder for Malcolm having his own thoughts about stuff, which I hadn't previously felt like I had space to do until I sort of started having this new framework. But in a different sense, it all feels really related. So I hope it's an upgrade. It is, at minimum, a critique, and I do have concerns that it's possible that I've missed one or two key pieces of the original, that Jean still understands that I don't. And that, in that sense, it might be a critique that's not actually viable in the sense that I might be missing some basic components. And it might be that I know I see things that ge doesn't see, because I've seen them and I've tested them and they do they do something. But it may be that I'm still missing some key pieces and that's part of why, over the coming years, part of what I want to do is find ways to bridge the thinking that I've developed back with Upstart's thinking which I was already starting to do while I was there - to some success. But I think it's gonna be really helpful for us to have had the space that we've already had, and the further space of me being out here. Which I'm just gonna mention for the recording, because if you're out in British Columbia, particularly on the coast or Vancouver Island area, I would be interested in talking with you, like nebulous podcast listener, people.
  • 1:32:35 - M > Right. And it's funny that you're using the metaphor too, because we've been using the operating system metaphor going all the way back. You know, from the very point that I joined, we were talking about the upward spiral as being humanity 3.0. Which is like the previous two operating systems being the kinda 'Hunter Gatherer pre Game A' one, and then the kind of various forms of much more serious hierarchy that humanity's had, that are also known as Game A. So the operating system metaphor goes deep, and we've even, you know, been reading some open source texts, like the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond. And we've been talking about the Non Naive Trust Dance as something of like a fork of the OS, I guess - a fork of the code of the cultural kernel that Jean has been stewarding for years. And, I mean, maybe one way to point at that a little bit there is, is NNTD the whole fork? Or is it just the changes that I've made on top of the fork, right? Like, is it just the patch? There is a way in which part of what's going on with the NNTD is very much designed to mediate between cultures and assumptions and protocols, kinda wherever they're at. And so, I think that similar patches might be able to be created from the same sort of font of inspiration that I've been drawing from, for other communities, other groups, other practices. You know, like various ways in which circling could benefit from a similar patch, or nonviolent communication or like other similar things. And that, that would make them all more able to talk with each other because of this basic assumption of like, "If something's not working for us, such that you don't trust me, then well, you can't trust me. Like that's how it is and that's the ground from which we need to start." And that needs to somehow be okay, in the sense that like, otherwise, you have to throw out the universe and get a new one.

• 2:10:17 - 2:19:12 - Experiments or practices to help you be more attuned to social dynamics, underlying trust needs and trust dancing opportunities/moments in general trust-dancing Learning how to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too self-trust

November 18th, 2021

• this seems like something that a memetic mediator and/or trust-dancing expert would be able to do
  • > fun game you can play at events: map out the status terrain, visualise the various factions and subgroups, win a little favour with all of them, then for certain moves you are the highest status person in the room (this is micro diplomacy)
    • twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1461596380976222209

October 15th, 2021

• information theory as relevant to trust-dancing
  • Yes Requires the Possibility of No
    • (failed) partswork / internal conflict example:
      • 5. Eve is has an aversion to doing B. She wants to eliminate this aversion. She tries to do an internal double crux with herself. She identifies a rational part of herself who can obviously see that it is good to do B. She identifies another part of herself that is afraid of B. The rational part thinks the other part is stupid and can't imagine being convinced that B is bad. The IDC fails, and Eve continues to have an aversion to B and internal conflict.

Internal Trust-Dancing

• a term to talk about trust-dancing as practiced internally
  • trust-building is fundamentally the same process on all scales (internal, between individuals, between groups)

NNTD pith instructions discussion

• There's also something about how NNTD is in some ways more view than it is method. trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions (tbh, interactions with animals as well, and arguably human-corporation interactions too) and the NNTD framework illuminates the basic physics of how trust works
  • for instance:
    • any way in which someone does not trust me is a way in which they can't trust me (without some additional data or experience they don't currently have)
      • even if it seems that I trust myself in this way, I don't know what their actual trust landscape looks like

August 14th, 2021

• trust-dancing #examples
  • two people watching each other slowly set down a weapon
    • or, on a totally different scale, the nuclear disarmament during the latter stages of the Cold War

August 10th, 2021

• trust-dancing
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1425047946022821893

August 3rd, 2021

• Relevant to trust-dancing, fractal selves, collective intelligence
  • 
  • twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1370163894459760647
  • #to-read Brains that Fire Together Wire Together: Interbrain Plasticity Underlies Learning in Social Interactions

August 1st, 2021

• why trust-dancing as a frame?

July 31st, 2021

• Sarah Peyton has a couple of resources related to trust-dancing: boundaries & violations
  • email newsletter from Jul 30

May 23rd, 2021

• great articulation of trust-dancing at scale & decentralized organization
  • twitter.com/RomeoStevens76/status/1383601191813222404

May 18th, 2021

• Duncan Sabien post that's relevant to trust-dancing
  • > ... that 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 do not usually put forth active effort to solve both problems at once.
    • thissss

May 16th, 2021

• re trust-dancing, a distinction between favor & trust
  • the thing I'm calling trust-dancing kind of includes both of these, but they're indeed worth distinguishing for sure!
  • twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1386304524764291073
  • much later, very relevant
    • twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1386338921454391303

April 19th, 2021

• example trust-dancing / parenting thing
  • fatherly.com/love-money/how-to-talk-to-kids-mister-rogers/

Malcolm podcast appearances

• trust-dancing