Who Gets What

Introduction

Welcome to Who Gets What. You communicate throughout your life, and you have probably formed your own idea of what communication is and what it is for. You might naturally think that communication is for positive things, like building relationships, expressing yourself, transferring information, having fun and enabling cooperation. While communication can do these things, the intuitive view is wrong. Your actual behavior does not match your good intentions. When people communicate, the positive things are what they tend to think about. Exceptions and counterexamples to the intuitive theory, things like deception, power dynamics, status seeking, political conflict and others, seem to be mistakes and inefficiencies. Life isn't perfect.

But the only reason you can read this is that your parents survived to produce you. In a sense, survival and reproduction are the only things that matter to living things. As you live your life, you aren't always thinking about survival and reproduction themselves, they are not typical human obsessions. Instead, you are probably more interested in relationships, food, achievements, status, money, sex, entertainment.

The intuitive view of communication is wrong, and this book will show you a more useful and true model. Communication developed in the history of life long before conscious thought or humans. It developed, persisted and spread because it gave survival and reproductive advantages to species that communicated over those that did not. In the same way that you consciously care about relationships or money, but life is actually about survival and reproduction, communication feels like it is about expression and cooperation, but it is still entirely about aiding survival and reproduction in the unavoidable and endless competition for limited benefits. All of the exceptions and mistakes that don't fit with the intuitive view are essential in this guide to who gets what. Let's start again, with what communication is.

Communication is the attempt to transfer thoughts from one mind to another. It is expensive and full of mistakes. Miscommunication is the default, not the exception. So, why do it? People's needs are in conflict, which can be resolved by force, but force is even worse than communication. Communication is the superior alternative to force to resolve conflicts, and allows coordination. Communication is the basis of human success, the pen is mightier than the sword. Communication changes the world, for better and worse, by creating and distributing benefits. We communicate to decide who gets what benefits. You need benefits to survive, your life depends on your communication. You are in a forever war for benefits in social reality.

What This Book Covers

This book describes what communication is, interpretation, competition, cooperation, groups, status, the fundamental communication strategies, politics and a master plan to win your war. Topics are translated into common-sense systems. I use detailed tables to break these systems down into manageable parts, so you can see how to fix them when they go wrong and learn how to make them work for you piece by piece.

What Benefits Will You Get from Reading?

We naturally communicate using our intuition, but we don't really know what we are doing, or why. This book helps you understand what we are doing overall and in detail, protect your interests and achieve your goals in life. I can't tell you what to say, but I can show you how saying works. My goal is to effectively inform you about how we use communication to pursue goals. I want to help you make your dreams come true.

Ethics of Communication

Communication can both help and harm. Knowledge about how to harm can both do harm and protect from harm. It was always this way, whether I describe it or not. In my opinion, our collective ignorance and misuse of communication is a heavy cost and a significant risk to our future potential. I believe that this work will be a net benefit. I want the best for humanity and I am against injustice.

Mechanics of Communication

The Production of Communication

Communication is intuitive to us, but there is a lot to it. This is a good thing, it means that communication can be a powerful tool to get you what you want. The following is an overall description of an individual process of communication, starting from the outside world, entering the mind and producing communication that radiates back out to the world, one cycle. Most parts of the process aren't relevant to analyze at most times, but every part is critical to analyze sometimes.

Language

Communication is rooted in belief. Belief is the atom of social reality. Thoughts are generated in part from beliefs. Language can express thoughts in statements. Understanding statements can reconstitute the thoughts in the receiver, which can change their beliefs. Language is the tool of communication to transmit thoughts across minds.

Language itself is also formed from beliefs. A language is not a personal belief, a language is a changing set of shared beliefs. People need to communicate a thought but lack the words to express it. They form a word to match the thought, the word enters the language by spreading into a new shared belief that this word means that. Now the language can express new thoughts. The language changes with the changes to the shared beliefs. Language itself is an objective in the war for social reality and the competition for benefits.

The Development of Language from the Origins of Life

Body Language

Communication developed in the medium of in-person interaction, and can involve all aspects of an interaction. Other media, such as this writing, are extremely limited in how they express thoughts, when compared to real-life interaction. A lot of what people communicate in person is not in the words they say. It is often less important what you say, it is more important how you say it. Body language is one category of ways to communicate beyond words. There are several dimensions of body language.

Language Games

Games

Life is a game, it has rules, you make moves, your moves have consequences according to the rules and result in victories or defeats. Life is really a collection of games, not just one. A game is only a set of rules. The study of how players can interact with the rules and which strategies win or lose is called game theory. You don't have to study game theory, but you do have to know which life strategies work or don't to get you what you want. This book catalogues the major communication strategies and how to play with and against them. In any game there are one or more strategies that are the best at winning. Against a given set of players with fixed strategies, a different strategy may be the best. If the rules of the game change, the game changes and the best strategies change.

Win, Lose, Sums

One important aspect of any game is its sum. The sum is how much is gained or lost overall by playing the game. If there is a fixed amount of winners or benefits that remain the same before and after the game, that is zero sum, and players compete to distribute the fixed amount of benefits. Some win, some lose, this is a win lose game. If a group of friends are eating together and there is one piece of food left, they can play rock, paper, scissors to distribute the last piece of food to the winner. Playing the game does not create or destroy the food, zero sum.

If the total amount of benefits decrease by playing the game, like if two armies fight over territory, and both armies lose soldiers and destroy some of the territory in the conflict, one may win and one may lose, it's a win lose game, but it is negative sum. One player gains, but overall society loses because the total benefits are reduced, so society wants to prevent negative-sum games. The extreme form of negative sum is when both players lose, a lose lose game. Both society and individuals want to prevent lose lose games, but people still sometimes play them. One simple form of lose lose is the expression, if I can't have it, you can't have it. Imagine you have a sandwich and someone wants to take your sandwich from you. If they succeed in taking it, then that is zero sum, redistributing the sandwich. But if you don't want them to take your sandwich, and can't otherwise prevent them from taking it, you can throw the sandwich on the ground and stomp on it, destroying the benefit of the sandwich, lose lose.

Finally, there are positive-sum games, where benefits can go up by playing. These can be win lose with the winner gaining more than the loser loses, or even win win. Positive-sum games are the basis of society. Understanding how games can be positive sum requires understanding the production of benefits, but one important source of positive-sum games is gain from trade. Money itself is uniform, there is no way to trade money to create more of it directly, but human needs are diverse. If I have water but I am hungry, and if you have food but you are thirsty, then we can trade our water and food to both become better off. It's not just physical trade, we all need relationships and other intangible things, too. Unlike money, our preferences and needs are diverse, and through different products and services, we can trade to create benefit, win win, cooperate, positive sum.

Benefits

People want to survive and thrive, and to do that we need certain things. The things that help us survive and thrive are benefits.

Communication is only about benefits.

The natural world produces benefits, but they are rare. We have developed civilization to artificially produce more benefits, and one use of communication is to produce benefits. Once the benefits are produced, there is the challenge of distributing them. The primary use of language is to negotiate the distribution of benefits. Note that this negotiation is negative sum, it does not produce benefits, it wastes benefits and sometimes destroys production.

Benefits are not limited to tangibles such as food or shelter, or immediate intangibles such as money or safety. Benefits include less immediate intangibles such as books that change people's beliefs, supporting a friend in need to improve your friendship, acts of charity to strangers that create goodwill, or actions that increase your reputation with yourself.

What about things like genuine expressions of joy, peace, kindness, generosity or caring, without expectation of payment? These are obviously not part of some ruthless competition for benefits. Good parents don't care for their children with an expectation of reciprocation or profit. Friends aren't accounting for every benefit gained or lost between them. Ruthlessness is a quality you find more in zero-sum or negative-sum games, because in those games, it's either you or me, we can't both win. In a positive-sum game, cooperation can be better than competition. We can succeed together in win win, or trade sacrifices to overall get ahead in positive-sum win lose. Joy and peace are benefits you pay to yourself, while kindness, generosity, caring are useful acts within cooperation, and in fact work to get you more benefits without immediate payment.

There is no single way to communicate. This book covers the fundamental communication strategies that broadly work to get more benefits in certain ways at certain times. People find and adopt these communication strategies because they work better than the other things they try. These strategies work because of human nature and the physical laws. The strategies remain the same because those also remain the same, but the ways that individuals understand and apply these strategies are infinite.

Limits on the Power of Communication

Communication is powerful, yet it has two severe limitations. The fruits of communication can be stolen by force, and distribution of benefits is meaningless without production. That means there are two things potentially more important than communication, deterrence in the use of force, and increasing the production of benefits. Mass production can overwhelm even unfair distribution of benefits. For example, rich people can have as many smartphones as they want, but there are still plenty of phones for the rest of us, and ours are about as good as theirs. The modern world has found ways to mass produce many things, but that drives scarcity and competition to the remaining scarce benefits. There remain many situations where force is deterred and mass production is not yet possible, things such as real estate, specialized professional services, or friendships. For these benefits, communication is king.

Dimensions of Communication

Communication has multiple dimensions.

Messaging, Esoteric, Exoteric

Messaging is the process of designing communication for maximum advantage, using every dimension including fact, belief, emotion, intent, signaling and reputation. Communication has a speaker and a listener. Individuals within a group, insiders, can communicate about the messaging their group will speak to listeners outside of the group, outsiders. The discussions among insiders are called esoteric statements, and the messaging for outsiders are exoteric statements. The society of mind within a person has esoteric internal discussion to construct exoteric messaging for people outside the person.

An example of internal esoteric communication. They are looking at me! What should I say? Should I tell them what they want to hear? No, they will see what I am doing immediately. Should I tell the truth? No, that won't get me what I want...

When a person is part of a group, the group has esoteric discussion about how to message to outsiders. Esoteric discussion is a social calculation of how to communicate to maximize benefits, followed by exoteric statements that execute the plan. Then outsider groups have esoteric discussions about how to message other groups, the chain of esoteric to exoteric continues without end.

Conversation

A conversation is an interaction that attempts to create, negotiate or trade benefits. In a conversation, the participants are called parties, and they send messages to each other through a channel. A message is the physical form of a statement. A channel is the physical medium that transmits the message from the sender to the receiver. Interaction is not just a bunch of actions, and it is not thoughtless reactions. An action becomes a message transmitted through the channel to a receiver, the receiver thoughtfully responds to that message, the previous sender receives the response and responds to the response. Interaction is not action action action, interaction is response response response. Interaction is a sequence of responses. All conversations are interactions, but the word interaction focuses on actions and consequences, while the word conversation focuses on the responsive transfer of thoughts to achieve goals.

You might assume that conversation requires talking, but it doesn't. People can converse using paper letters, wrestling, and other actions that are not called conventional language. People can come to understand each other's actions without ever meeting or saying a word. Conversation subsumes negotiation, all negotiation is conversation, but not all conversation is negotiation. Some of conversation is trade, delivering benefits such as information about physical or social reality, entertainment, social connection, etc.

True conversation is both cooperative and a social contest. When both parties cooperate, that is a two-sided conversation, and is voluntary, even if they disagree about the subject. Conversation can fail in many ways and degenerate to become one-sided, or fail into physical contest. Even if the parties to a conversation totally disagree on the subject they are discussing, if they both acceptably respond to conversational cues, they are cooperating to converse. A party to a conversation can refuse to talk, called stonewalling, or they may otherwise not follow conversational cues. In both cases, the event is one-sided, not a conversation.

What are conversational cues? Conversational cues are messages that direct the conversation. For example, if someone approaches you, addresses you and starts talking, that is a cue that they want to start a conversation with you. If you were conversing with them, and they stop talking and move away from you, that is a cue that they want to end the conversation. If someone cues you to start a conversation, and you avoid them, you are cuing that you do not want to talk. If someone wants to force you to talk, their social force may convince you, or the conflict over talking may degenerate to physical conflict, such as fighting or an arrest.

Conversation is partially under your control and partially not under your control. You may have a specific conscious objective for a conversation, but your subconscious, the circumstances, and the other party may not comply. All of your actions are not fully conscious, and thus not fully under your voluntary control. Whether or not the conscious you says anything, other people can read your subconcious body language to talk with the subsconscious you.

A one-sided expression, monologue, has a start and a finish and can be represented linearly. This linear string of words itself is an example. A two-sided conversation that has already happened, a dialogue, can also be represented linearly, by naming each party and listing who said what in order. The script of a play is an example. But a dialogue that is not predetermined, the potential futures of a conversation that hasn't completed yet, is not linear. There are many possible things each party could say, and many possible responses. The branching structure of potential future statements is called a conversation tree. If they say this, I should say that. But if they say this other thing, I should respond with that other thing. People who are well prepared for a conversation can respond effortlessly to every actual situation in the conversation, because they have fully-considered responses for every branch that the conversation actually takes. Sometimes a conversation proceeds smoothly until someone takes a branch that the other party did not prepare for, and you can observe the other party switch, or fail to switch, from their prepared conversation tree to a real-time attempt to form a response. People who engage in creative conversation prefer to diverge from the prepared conversation tree as quickly as possible, while people who engage in uncreative conversation try to keep the conversation within the prepared conversation tree as much as possible. These two styles are playing semi-incompatible language games, they can understand what the other person is saying, but they won't like it, and will avoid talking to them in the future.

The language game of conversation, by definition, has rules. Some rules are necessary, both parties have to speak languages that the other party can understand, or else the conversation can not take place. Some rules are socially defined and can be broken, often including rules around conversational cues and norms, standard expectations about what people think and should do. If you are saying something and someone asks you to stop and repeat a part of what you just said, this is a basic norm that you should comply with. You should stop proceeding with what you were saying, go back and repeat the part that they requested. This is following conversational cues and cooperating. A two-sided conversation requires functional transmission of messages, if the other person briefly couldn't hear you, that move of the game did not occur, so repeating what you previously said allows the game to proceed.

There is also typically a norm of taking turns, with one person speaking, the other person listening, and the expectation that the speaker will at some point stop speaking and give the listener their turn to respond. This is necessary for most games, most games cannot be won on the first turn. Typically, speaking longer gives the speaker an advantage in the game, so speaking turns should generally be equal. Different conversations lend themselves to different lengths of speaking times. Interrupting a speaker by speaking over them is usually violating a norm, because it is difficult to speak and listen at the same time, causing both parties to fail to advance in the language game, wasting time and effort. If a speaker doesn't take turns, or takes more than their fair share of speaking time, or makes several dependent points that the listener rejects, interruption may be cooperative. In japanese culture, certain parts of conversations are so tightly scripted that it is common and polite to speak over each other. Both parties already know that entire part of the script, and what the polite response will be, and it is more polite to speak over the other person with the proper response than to wait for them to finish saying it, and then make them wait for you to say the scripted response afterward.

The essential elements of any conversation

- More than one party

- Parties are in overlapping spacetime. Otherwise, physical interaction of signals is impossible.

- Has a start and an end. Conversation is a temporal phenomenon.

- Communication channel. A physical medium to transmit messages, otherwise messages can not be received.

- Communication protocol. Allows parties to choose and play compatible language games, to form mutually legible messages.

- Listening. All parties receive messages from the channel.

- Cognition. Recipients accurately interpret messages into similar thoughts as the sender, understanding messages and building coherent thoughts on top of those thoughts to form a response.

- Expressing. Parties transform responses into messages and transmit them through the channel.

- Surprise, unknown or unexpected information. Progress is essential to conversation, totally predictable statements are not progressive, no longer interactive, not a conversation.

These basic conversation requirements allow conversation to occur at all, but these conversations can be unproductive, meaningless, wasteful, unpleasant, or escalate to violence. Beyond the basic possibility of conversation, what elements are essential to create great conversations, ones that are productive, meaningful, efficient, pleasant, ones that realize the potential of communication as the superior alternative to violence?

The essential elements of great conversations

- Directed interest in the other party. Even if the topic of a conversation is factual, people are the only meaning makers. The facts must ultimately serve the interests of a party to the conversation. To reliably serve a party's interests, the other parties have to know what those interests are, which requires being interested in knowing about the other party.

- Cognitive empathy and perspective taking. Each party to a conversation is necessarily different. Sometimes, these differences are essential to making progress. Parties must be able to find, understand and apply the differences between the parties to respond effectively.

- Find achievable, meaningful goals. The parties may not necessarily find the same goals, not agree with each other about the goals, or even not be aware of the goals, but a great conversation finds goals.

- Conversation awareness, cue-responsive adaptability. Conversations have very different purposes and structures, and can change purposes and structures during the course of the conversation. No fixed set of rules applies to all parts of all conversations. Conversation protocols use cues as dynamic signaling rules. Cues signal parties to change pace, depth, take turns and more. A great conversation is interactive, cooperative, and cooperation requires following compatible protocols. Conversation protocols require responding effectively to cues. Responding effectively to cues does not mean blind obedience.

- Presence, follow and advance the conversation. Parties synchronize their thoughts and advance their thoughts together to interact, by definition. To a degree, higher synchronization and faster advancement means better conversation.

- Operational, tactical and strategic. A great conversation functions as an interaction, the responses function to advance the topic at hand, and the topics advance the goals of the conversation, including the goal to find goals. A great conversation works. Yes, even phatic, emotional, creative, or exploratory conversations serve their purposes.

- Efficiency. Starting and ending a conversation at an effective place and time, in an effective way. Saying only what needs to be said. A wrongly narrow view of efficiency prohibits exploration, emotion or style, it considers them inefficient. But some amount of exploration, emotion and style is efficient. The perfect amount of exploration is unknown, but conversation is an imperfect information game with scarce resources, so there is an efficient explore-exploit ratio. Casual, unstructured, creative or playful conversations can be efficient as part of a coherent strategy, whether intentional or not.

- Create benefits by achieving a meaningful goal

Conversation is a discovery process, where each party privately hypothesizes about what every party has and wants. Importantly, you don't fully know yourself, you know neither fully what you have nor what you want, and you know even less about others. But each party in a conversation forms hypotheses about what the parties have and want, and then tests those hypotheses by making offers and bids. An offer is a price a seller states that they would accept for a trade, and a bid is the price a buyer states that they would pay for a trade. Conversational cues also operate the trading functions of a conversation, to indicate if a party wants to trade, when to make bids and offers, when a bid or offer is accepted or rejected, when to transact the trade, how to execute the transaction, etc.

The information game of a conversation is asymmetric. You know some of the things you have and you want, but other parties might not know what you have or want. And there are plenty of mistakes, things you wrongly think you have or you want, and things you wrongly think you don't have have or don't want, and other parties make similar mistakes. This is very difficult to reconcile. These mistakes and others contribute to the impossibility of perfect communication and the fact of miscommunication being the default.

What is the social contest of conversation? Parties cooperate to converse, and cooperate to achieve goals in conversation, but they compete to contribute more to the conversation and claim more of the credit, and they compete over the benefits that they cooperated to produce. There is a general skill of conversation, also called the art of conversation. Conversation is creative and open-ended, but it certainly includes narrower skills such as listening, understanding, anticipating, deciding, responding, speaking. The skill of conversation is also the skill of negotiation. Conversation is interactive, but scripts are not. People can create a false impression of their skill of conversation by having an excellent script, but once the conversation diverges from the script, and no script is capable of covering substantial conversation trees, then the conversation requires skill, judgement, interaction, and the difference between someone with conversation skills and someone who only has a script is revealed.

Conversation as a social contest means that conversational benefits are distributed based on skill and luck. Any individual interaction could resolve one way primarily due to luck, but over many interactions, the benefits will accrue primarily due to skill. Your relative skill in conversation and your bargaining power determines your negotiating power, which determines the distribution of benefits from the conversation, which defines your benefits.

Conversations have multiple states. An initial state where the parties negotiate how to start the conversation, an exploratory state where they probe for what they could give and get, the negotiation of bids and offers until they agree to trade, an execution of a trade. The conversation can change states quickly, or stay in the same state for a long time, loop around states repeatedly, or mix multiple states. Long established relationships often skip certain states, such as introduction, performativity, probing.

Manners

Politeness is following inconvenient, socially-defined rules to express consideration and accomodate other parties. Manners are your overall level of politeness. Breaking the politeness rules, such as acting for your own convenience, is generally rude, not polite. Because politeness is socially defined, a given behavior may be polite in one culture and rude in another. The inconvenient rules of politeness cause it to be a costly signal, signaling is explained leter.

Generally, it is more polite to make yourself more like an object or concept, to avoid the personal or savage aspects of being a human animal. Politeness shifts the focus from your needs to the needs and preferences of the other party. For example, it is often more polite to wear clothing that covers your body and makes your body appear more like an object than an animal, while often one of the rudest things you can do is show your naked butt to someone else. Polite clothing and behavior can help other people to know what functions you serve and how to interact with you, while rude people are poorly dressed, unpredictable and demanding. Often it is polite to be clean, like a pleasant inanimate object, not dirty or smelly like an animal. It is often polite to be patient and not express your erratic internal emotions. Often it is polite to show that you are not physically threatening or aggressive. For example, the practice of waving your hand at someone as a greeting is polite because it is inconvenient, is very easy for the other person to see, it is unambiguous, so it is easy for the other person to understand, and your open hand shows that you aren't holding a weapon, so it is non-threatening.

Politeness rules are for the benefit of others, you follow certain rules that make the conversation easier for them. When the other party is a stranger, you don't know who they are or what they are like. This uncertainty makes strangers more dangerous than someone that you know well. The stranger may be violent or easily offended in unexpected ways. Often, people are more polite to people they don't know as a form of personal protection. This sometimes creates a dynamic where a person is polite to strangers, and rude to their close connections. The lack of politeness, even until rudeness, is a form of social proof that another person is very close to you. You know them very well, and you know whether they are violent or what might offend them. You know them so well, that you can say or do things to them that strangers would not accept. In this dynamic, politeness matches social distance, with greater politeness associated with greater social distance, greater rudeness with closer connection.

On the other hand, the relationships with the highest return for your efforts are your strongest functional relationships. The most effective allocation of your efforts should generally be, the most effort for your closest and most rewarding relationships, and the least effort for more distant relationships. You may follow certain basic politeness rules with strangers, and then show deeper and deeper consideration for those closer to you.

One possible synthesis of these opposing dynamics is showing the greatest care and politeness for your closest social connections, combined with occasional violations of politeness rules that demonstrate how close you are, while you show consistent common courtesy to strangers for your own safety.

Apology

Apology is a social system and a skill to repair broken relationships. A common misunderstanding of apology is that it consists only of saying I am sorry. The naive idea of how apologies work might be that the phrase I am sorry is a magic spell to fix problems. Of course, the words themselves do not solve anything, they are just hot air. The words do signal submission, which is one reason that resistant people refuse to say them. The words take accountability, I did it. Apology is also an admission of fault, which can lead to liability, meaning you might have to pay some of your benefits to others if you admit that you wronged them.

An insincere apology might include the words or a payment, but part of what makes an apology sincere is contrition. Contrition is your belief that what you did was wrong. Inconveniently, beliefs are invisible and subjective, so it is difficult to know if another person is contrite. If you wrong someone, then by default, everyone should predict that if a similar situation occurs again, you will do the same thing. The incontrite still think that what they did was right, they would do it again. The evidence of your contrition is your subsequent behavior. Your behavior proves your beliefs, regardless of what you say, actions speak louder than words. What makes an apology sincere is that you think you were wrong and you take reasonable steps to change your behavior to not do it again.

People are sometimes careless. They might remain recklessly ignorant of how their actions harm others. One part of an effective apology is an accurate explanation of how the apologizer's actions harmed others. The standard of an acceptable explanation is defined by the wronged parties, not by the apologizer. The standards of the apologizer are a conflict of interest.

The Apology Process

- The future apologizer does something wrong.

- A party with standing demands an apology. This could be someone wronged, a third party with relevant responsibilies, or the future apologizer, using self-recognizance.

- Create contrition. I would not want someone else to do that to me, therefore what I did was wrong. The future apologizer reflects on their actions to understand the causes, their choices, the consequences, identifies their faults, and revises their policy.

- The apologizer apologizes to the wronged. This can include a description of what they did, the harms, their responsibility, contrition, identifying their faults, saying sorry, payment, promise to not do it again, improvement program.

- The wronged evaluates the apology. Is the explanation correct? Are the performance and claims plausible? Is the payment sufficient? Is there a revised policy and is the revision likely to work? Overall, is the apology likely to be effective? Does the wronged want to continue their relationship with the apologizer? Accept or reject the apology. An accepted apology repairs the relationship and creates a promise, a rejection means the relationship remains damaged.

- Apologizer practices and realizes the revised policy. Does the wrong recur or not? If the wrong behavior stops, the apology may have worked.

Why can't the apologizer silently fix their own problem by themselves? They are the only person who can change their behavior. Why do they need to apologize to the wronged, and why do the wronged need to accept the apology? Apology is costly to the apologizer. They can lose time, effort, reputation and other benefits. An apology is a costly signal, part of the value of the signal is the cost. The cost is a disincentive to the apologizer to deter wrongdoing. But the cost and process still appear to be wasteful, who else benefits from apology?

The system of apology benefits groups and works in repeated social games, apologies are important for ongoing relationships. One function and benefit of an apology is making a promise. An apology includes a promise to the group that the apologizer will try to not do the same wrong again. If no promise is made, then no promise is kept and no promise is broken. Keeping promises builds trust and improves relationships. Another value of promises is creating violations. Breaking a promise is a violation that groups can punish. Without the promise, there is no violation, and harmful behavior is harder to identify and disincentivize. Apologies increase accountability to individuals for their behavior, counteracting selfish incentives that harm groups. Accountability benefits groups and their members overall. People naturally feel that everything they do is right, until social reality condemns their behavior. Apology closes the feedback loop of social reality.

Performativity, Pretense, Kayfabe

Performativity has two versions. One version of performativity is following scripts, performing roles, practicing a ritual or an image. For example, if someone says something they are not supposed to say, sometimes people show performative indignation, How dare you?! They aren't really angry, but they are supposed to be angry, so they pretend to be angry to perform their role. Roles, rituals, etc. Have something in common, they are fixed, predefined, they are not responsive. This lack of responsiveness causes this form of performativity to be less effective at achieving goals, because the world is complex and ever changing, no fixed strategy can accomodate the complexity and unique situations of reality like thoughtful, creative, adaptive responses can. Further, the priority of performative behavior is to conform to the script, not to solve the problem. It's defensive, I was doing what I was supposed to do, so you can't blame me for the poor result.

The second form of performativity doesn't necessarily follow a script, it creates a performance. Natural behavior is simple for you to do. You naturally say and do what you think or feel is best. A performance is unnatural behavior crafted for another purpose. If you decide to do x as part of achieving y, that is not performative. If you decide to do x so that it looks like you are achieving y, that is performative. Natural behavior doesn't need excuses, while performative behavior does. Performative behavior is different from what you think is best, it is dishonest. You might exaggerate parts of your performance to specially appear a certain way to others, to yourself, or even to no one. There are additional incentives to perform when you are being observed, also called social pressure.

When you are honest, genuine, authentic, you are confident about your actions because you think they are the best. You don't overly care what other people might think, because you believe that what you are doing is right. Authentic behavior is the same no matter who knows about it, while performative behavior can change based on context or audience. Contrast authenticity with performativity, people being performative care about what their behavior looks like, whether or not they care about what it directly achieves. Someone being performative is pretending. All performance is dishonest. A performance is pretending to think or feel something so that you appear a certain way that is different from what you really think or feel. But someone being performative does not want the audience to know that they are pretending, because that is less convincing. This stressful performance of both pretending and hiding the fact that you are pretending is called pretense. The holistic deceptive operation and mindset to maintain a presense is called kayfabe.

River of Conversation

A river is a flowing body of water, and a conversation is interactive communication. These are two completely different things. There is a metaphorical relationship between them, these different things have specific, useful correspondences. Both rivers and conversations are temporal, have a start and an end, and run their course. Rivers and conversations flow. The water of a flowing conversation are the messages each party transmits. Stonewalling is an attempt to dam up the river.

There is a saying, you can never step into the same river twice. In a superficial way, this statement is false. If I walk up to a river, step into it, then take my foot out and step into it again, I stepped in the same river twice, no problem. But the world, the river, and myself, are continuous temporal phenomena. The first time I stepped into the river, it was composed of certain drops of water. The second time I stepped into the river, the original water had flowed some distance downstream, and the second time I stepped into the river, my foot stepped into different water. Ok, perhaps I don't care which water is in the river at any given time, I care about flow of the water, and that is the same. No it isn't. Rivers are not constant, they ebb and flow moment by moment, hour by hour, season by season, year by year. The river changes the landscape and the landscape changes the river, both continuously. You are not the same person from moment to moment either, if nothing else, you are older. But you change in other essential ways. You can't step into the same river twice because you aren't the same person from one moment to the next, and neither is the river. The world, the river and you are not constant or stable. The only way to step into a river more than once is to form a snapshot of a specific moment, and then recreate it exactly, which we can't do in practice.

Maybe we accept that you, the world and the river are technically different from moment to moment, but perhaps there is no practical difference? Sometimes you can seem to step into the same river twice, and have the same conversation twice. Any differences between the two events is insignificant. But the river and life are chaotic. The ultimate cause of a hurricane can be the flapping of a butterfly's wings halfway across the world. Rivers naturally shift their course through erosion, deposition and the activities plants and animals. These elements interact continuously to shift the course of the river in unpredictable ways. We cannot predict the orbits of three or more bodies in space, we cannot predict the extended future weather, and we cannot predict the changing course of rivers, because these are chaotic systems. Seemingly insignificant initial changes sometimes amplify into totally different results. We never know what effects our words will have on others with certainty, and we often don't know when or why the words we speak to another person will be the last between us.

The course of the river follows the shape of the land, and the course of a conversation follows the shape of physical and social reality. Your physical circumstances and your beliefs determine your thoughts, which determines what you say, and other parties' circumstances and beliefs equally determine what they say, determining the course of the conversation as surely as water flows downhill. Rivers meander, they can only be confined artificially. No party to a conversation can be certain of how the conversation will go, because no one knows the entire future, and no one knows anyone else for certain, but equally, rivers don't flow uphill. Sometimes one or more parties have the conversation within their grasp. No matter which way the conversation turns, if it doesn't dry up it will inevitably reach the sea.

Hypothesis Testing

Science is the practice of creating useful models of reality. Hard sciences create models of physical reality and social sciences create models of social realities. A model is simpler than the thing it describes, so the model does not account for everything, meaning that all models are inaccurate relative to the thing they model. Two identical things are not models of each other, but replicas. A hypothesis is a potential change to a model. Forming more accurate and more useful models requires hypothesis testing. Any change could make a model more or less accurate or useful, so to determine which changes improve the model, you have to test the changes to find out. Hypothesis testing requires interaction with the thing you are modeling. From one point of view, you could describe science as a conversation between models and realities, where a model learns about reality to model it better.

In your own conversations, you model yourself, the world and the other parties to predict what everyone has, what everyone wants, and what is possible. You use your models to make predictions, some of those predictions are hypotheses to improve your models, some of those predictions inform your decisions about how to best achieve your goals, your idea of how to get what you want.

Your models include claims about physical reality, claims about social reality, the history of the conversation including memories of actions and memories of previous states of your models. Models are useful to speculate, using the model to make predictions about the thing it models. Speculations are untested hypotheses about physical reality, social reality, what parties have and what parties want. You use your predictions to make decisions. Decisions are how you go from what you know and speculate to attempts to get what you want, testing your hypotheses, experiments. Once you decide what you want to do, you execute your decision and perform it to participate in and to advance the conversation, every action is running an experiment to see what happens. Your actions also give results to others' experiments of their own hypotheses. Bids and offers, and accepting or rejecting deals are also forms of hypothesis testing. Executing trades, responding to conversational cues, and other conversational behavior are means to execute experiments, which test hypotheses, that attempt to improve your models and get you what you want. When you overly focus on your models and your execution of speaking, this is the common degenerate practice of failing to listen and merely thinking about what you should say, or waiting for your chance to speak. The conversation degenerates to two separate monologues, you talk past each other, no experimental results.

A successful conversation, for you, is one that advances your goals, meaning it contributes to your current or potential benefits. This rarely happens by chance. You have to know what your goals are, what you have to bid and offer, what they have, what they want, what the best exchanges would be and the most effective ways to achieve a trade. You have to speculate about what might work best in this situation, taking advantage of everything you know and can find out. A common problem is overly focusing on what you want. This violates the fundamental rule of trading, a trade benefits both parties. A conversation is not about what one party gets, a deal can only be made when both parties figure out a way to gain from a trade. To get the most you can get, you should be almost as focused on how you can threaten or benefit the other party, as on how the other party can threaten or benefit you.

Clever Contest

One of the ways that we use conversation is to signal our capability, and thus our value. We demonstrate how threatening of an enemy we could be, or how useful of an ally we could be. This signaling is competitive, implicitly some conversations can be understood to mean something like, I am so smart! That's not smart, I am smart! No, I am smarter. No! I am smarter! This is what I call the clever contest, where parties compete to dominate the social hierarchy using conversation. This competition can be constructive, destructive, or both.

Part of how the clever competition usually works is that conversation follows associations and flows unpredictably, like life. Conversations naturally meander from topic to topic, covering a surprising variety that no party can fully predict or control, without destroying the interaction of conversation. If you have nothing useful or interesting to say about various topics, you appear to not have much to contribute to the group and lose the contest. If you can consistently contribute to the conversation, no matter where it twists and turns, this is a signal to prove that you are mentally powerful, adaptable, versatile, resilient, all valuable qualities. A job interview typically includes a conversation as a hard-to-cheat test of your value as an employee.

If a party knows about your strengths and weaknesses, they can intentionally influence the conversation to avoid your strengths and reveal your weaknesses, creating a false negative impression of your value, an oppositional converational strategy. People who know you well can cooperate with you, secretly or openly, intentionally or unintentionally, to avoid your weaknesses and reveal your strengths, creating a false positive impression of your value, a cooperative converational strategy. Other people can make you appear weaker or stronger than you are, socially putting you down or lifting you up, but this is only in social reality. In physical reality, you are always nothing more or less than what you are. This is tautological in physical reality, but social reality can distort your appearance to yourself or others to an incredible degree, and the objectivity has a practical application here. You can ground your self image to counter the distortions of social reality.

You don't have to participate in clever contests for social domination, but it is often in your interest to signal your value to others, or to create benefits directly. If you are more clever or valuable than others, depending on circumstances such as the absence of oppositional strategies, you can succeed with the simple strategy called Just be yourself. Just be yourself almost always works if you are significantly more valuable than the other parties. But if your value is close enough to the other parties, dirty tricks can allow less valuable people to socially dominate more valuable people. For your own benefit in this case, you need to compete by understanding the competitive or oppositional strategies other parties use and counter them effectively, sometimes described as having a sharp tongue, being unflappable, or being graceful.

The most challenging position to be in, when participating in a clever contest, is to be less clever. In a straight contest, you would lose. But being clever isn't the only form of value, and cleverer people often expose systematic weaknesses that you can exploit. When you cannot win a straight contest, you can wait for, or influence your opponent to make a mistake. Almost all real conversations are full of mistakes.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Napoleon Bonaparte

Techniques to win clever contests when you are less clever

Knowing Yourself

To get what you want, you have to know what you want. What do you want? You want benefits! Yes, but which ones, and what are your best ways to get them? I can't know your specific situation, but the constant in every situation you find yourself in, is yourself. People tend to avoid looking at themselves too closely, distract themselves from their own problems, delude themselves about who they are, lie to themselves, feel angst and mystery about who am I, really?

Travel

Some people travel to distant locations to find themselves. You won't physically find your missing self in a foreign land or at the top of a mountain. I do recommend travelling and living in a very different culture at least once in your life, it can give you a lot of perspective about your native culture and yourself that would be difficult to notice if you stayed home. Experiencing a foreign culture provides a counterexample to compare your culture and yourself against.

Facing Yourself

What you need to know yourself is not a foreign location, you need to face yourself right now. What if I don't like who I really am? There is no what if, no human should like everything about themselves. You are a human, there are things you should want to improve about yourself. If you think you are perfect, you have no motivation to continue to grow. On the one hand, you should always accept yourself fully. Rejecting yourself is a contradiction, what alternative do you have to yourself? Beyond acceptance, you should be satisfied with yourself. Dissatisfaction with yourself is again a contradiction, if you are not enough for yourself, what alternative do you have? Even though you are satisfied with yourself, as long as you live, you can always do more. You should be grateful to be alive, want to continue living, accept yourself for who you are, and make your full effort to do even better starting now.

Ok, but how can I face myself when I am so good at avoiding myself? One method is to think about your body, your behavior, your affiliations, your achievements, your goals as if they were a third party. If you judged someone else that you heard about for the first time today who happened to be the same as you, how would you evaluate them? Yes, harshly, but what would you suggest that they should do differently? Some people will jump to the common prescription, I should exercise more. I do recommend to find ways to include physical activity that you enjoy into your daily life, but your surface appearance isn't very important in itself. You should have important objectives that then cause you to want a decent appearance to help achieve them.

Reflection

How do you answer the questions like, Who am I? What do I want? What are my principles? You look at your past actions as a third-party observer and look for patterns. What motivates you? That may have something to do with what you want. When did you stand up for or against something? That may have something to do with your principles. What are you good at? That may be related to your abilities. Who are you, really? You already know what you are like in detail. For example, what are you like when no one is watching? Who you are is nothing more than what you tend to do, your preferences, choices, abilities, goals.

In a sense, this is the secret method behind the highly desired and much discussed quality of self confidence. Self confidence is not some insane belief that you can and will get everything you want in life. No one can know that. Self confidence is knowing what you currently want, your objectives in your social forever war, and doing something to achieve them. You don't know whether you will reach any destination, you are confident that your self is attempting to climb your path.

Becoming

Who you are tends to be very far away from who you wish to be, so far that there seems to be no relationship between those two people. Who you think you want to be can be mistaken. Take a good hard look at who you are and check if who you think you want to be is actually someone compatible with your motivations, preferences, abilities. Reject any fixed idea of who you should be, especially any idea that someone else told you or you think someone else wants. External expectations can only be correct coincidentally. What other people do and say does not apply directly to your subjective beliefs. Everything in objective reality, including what other people say, are potentially important evidence you can use to update your beliefs. Only you can live your life.

Your goals for yourself should change as you learn more. Take an honest look at yourself and think about what is the first thing that you could do better, and do it. Then keep doing that. Find the next first thing that you could do better. This is called thinking on the margin. This is the process of self improvement, living your life to the fullest. If this sounds unreasonable and exhausting, you are doing it wrong. By definition, you can only do things that you are able to do. The things that you can in fact improve are only things you are already able to do, which are always reasonable and affordable. If you exhaust yourself or drive yourself into failure, this is good information to learn from. Learn from your mistakes, including your mistaken beliefs about yourself, and improve on them too. Find ways to fail faster so you can learn more. Looking at yourself, your behavior, your achievements and your process of improvement, you will come to know yourself very well, and have better and better ideas of who you could become, how to become them, and what you want in life.

Social Objectives

No war is won only through pure determination or good tactics, every war has objectives, including yours. What are your current life goals? Surprisingly, people are so intuitive about living their own lives that they are often unaware of their own objectives, which makes it all but impossible to achieve them. To gain the most benefits, you should know what your objectives are in every social interaction. There is no victory without self knowledge. Being privately aware of your social objectives is necessary to reliably get what you want. I know what I want to achieve with this book. What do you want to achieve by reading it? What was your objective in your most recent social interaction? How did it go? What could you have done better? What could you do now to do better next time?

Interpretation

The meaning of a simple statement about objective reality is either objectively true or false, the person who said it is irrelevant. A thief can say that stealing is wrong. But most statements are not simple, so the full meaning of a statement is contextual. Who said it, under what circumstances, to what audience? The context can provide critical information about what the belief, intent, signal, or reputation the statement is designed to produce, potentially changing the meaning and significance of the statement completely.

Yes, an Example

A statement such as Yes explicitly means agreement, but in context Yes can represent almost anything.

What Yes means

Impossibility

The impossibility of perfect communication is unsolvable. Exact transmission of thought using language requires exact interpretation, and exact interpretation requires identical shared beliefs, which we can never establish. Of course, communication is possible and we are probably communicating right now, but the important part of interpretation is that we have to both play the same language game together for the communication to work. The easiest example of a language game is the language itself, if you didn't know English, this book would just be a pile of uninterpretable words. The idea of language games is attributed to Wittgenstein.

Language Game (philosophy)

Interpretation makes typical communication almost hopeless. If both parties are committed to mutual understanding, consensus is achievable, but this is rare! Among most listeners, they are incapable of understanding simple communication by default.

Making Things Difficult

When a speaker makes a simple statement, listeners interpret the statement using their current communication strategies, and their strategies emphasize dimensions such as belief, intent, signaling and reputation, not information about objective reality. In practice, you can't tell someone that the sky is blue. Their answer will have nothing to do with the simple statement. The sky is blue? Do you think that I don't know that? Are you calling me stupid?

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. George Bernard Shaw

Interpretation obligates speakers to use sophisticated listener modelling when they make a simple statement, or even when they say nothing at all. It is impossible to say nothing. Silence communicates a choice to not speak, with a variety of possible implications. This means that speakers must use esoteric processes of internal discussion and play social games even when they make simple moves, and when they choose not to move at all.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood. Anthony Hope

Arguing

Framing

Another unsolvable interpretation problem is the context or framing around statements. The same statement means different things in different contexts. Misinterpretation is common, and commonly happens by misunderstanding the context of a statement accidentally. Skillful communicators can manipulate context to promote understanding, defend and attack.

One way to use context is to hide arguments with framing. We can explicitly discuss a subject, but I can choose the context around it to hide part of my argument or give my arguments an undue advantage. In this book I explain communication using a war framing, a metaphor of conversations as battles in social reality. In the metaphor, statements are attacks against mental defenses. This advantages my worldview that communication is primarily a competition for benefits, like a war. Other people who discuss communication choose different framings, they say communication is about an information economy with buying and selling, or discovery with news and publishing, ritual with evolution of repeating behaviors, interpersonal connection with sharing and growing, information transfer with bandwidth, latency and noise.

These framings change the argument and make the same claims more or less relevant, sensible, convincing. An economic framing might care about who benefits, while a connection framing might not care about who benefits. I mention these alternate framings in good faith, I think you will conclude that they are less effective than the one I chose. Bad-faith arguers will sometimes insist on and refuse to discuss their framing, they want to limit discussion to the topic, but the framing greatly affects the topic. People thinking in different framings are playing incompatible language games, they talk past each other. Framing is inescapable, it helps establish the language game to discuss the topic at all.

A more immediate form of framing is a loaded question. A loaded question presupposes assumptions that are not agreed by the listener and then asks a question based on those assumptions. Did you stop beating your wife? Is written in the form of a question, not a statement, but it presupposes that you beat your wife. It is phrased as a yes or no question, and any answer you give, including silence, appears disadvantageous. Both yes and no imply that you beat your wife. The typically correct answer, no, meaning No I did not stop beating my wife, because I never beat my wife, actually implies the opposite meaning, No, I did not stop beating my wife, because I did previously beat my wife and I will continue to beat my wife. The unambiguous answer, I never beat my wife, contradicts the loaded assumption, but appears to dodge the question, if listeners don't pay attention. Why can't you answer a simple question? Yes or no, did you stop beating your wife?

The loaded assumption in the question is in fact a statement, not a question, but it is loaded in a container which has the form of a question. The questioner typically feigns innocence about this tactic, why are you getting angry with me? I am just asking questions! A loaded question includes a statement, so you are not just asking questions. Your behavior is designed to appear to be in good faith, but the question is performative, your statement is in bad faith.

Another form of framing is reference classes. Often, when people speak they are thinking about a specific context, scenario or example that they may not say, or they may say, but others may replace it by accident or by malice. If I say people are born free and should live free, I may be thinking about how this statement applies to myself and other law-abiding, responsible citizens. The context or examples that I am thinking of are the reference class, law-abiding citizens. Someone could assume that my reference class is criminals, and form a misinterpretation of my statement because they changed the reference class. They think my statement means that I oppose punishment for criminals. They could call me a lawless villain, Did you hear what that guy said? He said he wants to get rid of all prisons and let criminals roam free and hurt everyone else! The misinterpretter assumes that the reference class of my statement, that people should live free, is criminals, not law-abiding citizens. Changing the reference class changes the interpretation of the statement without changing the statement.

Intent

Interpretation follows from perceived intent. If the listener thinks the speaker means well, they will interpret their statements positively. If the listener thinks the speaker means ill, they will interpret their statements negatively. This works well when listeners accurately perceive intent, but often works badly when listeners misunderstand the intent. Sometimes, there is no sequence of words that can correct a listener's mistaken presumption of ill intent.

Plausible Deniability

Deception and Counter-Deception

Deception

Deception is promoting false beliefs in others. Why would anyone be deceptive? Show me the incentive, I will show you the behavior. The incentive to deceive is gaining undeserved benefits. Lying is the social-reality version of theft. If I state the whole truth, I am not being deceptive, even if other people reach a false conclusion. If I state a partial truth that implies a false interpretation, I am being deceptive. If I withhold information that I know another person needs to form an accurate interpretation, I am deceiving them, a lie of omission. If I outright lie, if I claim that a falsehood is true, I am being deceptive. Outright lies are more risky in the digital era, so the war for social reality is focusing more on selective truth and malicious interpretation.

Here is an example of such a deception against an imaginary person. I could attack someone's character by saying they have lied to the public hundreds of times in the last week. How can you trust anything they say? The first statement could be technically true, but misleading, while the second statement is a reasonable conclusion, but depends on the first statement being fully accurate. That makes it a malicious interpretation, because the first statement is intentionally misleading. The trick here is that you can imagine that the innocent person I am attacking bought a home weather station, and the thermometer on their weather station is miscalibrated and reporting bad data, and their home weather station is connected to the internet. In a technical sense, the owner of the malfunctioning weather station has lied to the public hundreds of times during the last week, but any reasonable person who is aware of the relevant context would not interpret this true statement to mean that the person is untrustworthy in their personal conduct, which is what the original statement implies. The original statement promotes a false belief in listeners. The attack is deceptive.

Attacker's Advantage

The attacker has the advantage when it is easier to attack than defend. In physical war, the attacker often has the advantage because they can succeed by attacking once, anywhere, at any time, while the defender has to protect themselves from every attack everywhere all the time. It is easier to destroy than to create. It is easier to mess up a fully set fine-dining table than it is to set it. The truth is similarly complex and causally organized as a fine-dining table. A few short statements can be wrong in hundreds of ways, requiring hundreds of statements or more to correct, if anyone is willing to listen.

Attention is an unusual thing. You don't pay attention to every piece of data, every letter I write, you pay attention to the surprising data. If I repeat one letter over and over, after you see the first few letters, you quickly start to expect that the next letter will keep repeating, and skip over every expected letter until you hit a surprising one, for example aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab. People say all kinds of expected things, which you find unsurprising and don't pay much attention to. But when someone says something totally wrong, you will be surprised and pay attention to it. You will find it interesting and exciting. Then, if someone corrects them, it will sound expected and boring. If someone lies on purpose, the lie will sound surprising, because it is untrue. When someone corrects the lie, you won't find the correction interesting, and won't pay as much attention to it or remember it. The attacker's advantage in deceptive communication is extreme.

Exciting lies spread like wildfire, boring corrections don't. This is why there are wild rumors, but not wild corrections. Urban myths persist, while reasonable investigations are ignored.

Lying

Laws and conventions partially protect you from significant lies. Typically, if someone is caught in an objective lie for their own benefit, they will be held accountable. But deception has countless forms. Although objective lies can sometimes offer the greatest benefit, they also have significant risks if the lie is discovered. The reward to risk ratio can tell you whether lying is worth it. Objective lies do not match reality, and reality can eventually prove them wrong, except in special cases such as self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once you lie, as long as the lie continues and you continue to promote it, you have to mentally track multiple realities, the single objective reality and the multiple alternate realities where your lies are true. This is a mounting cost. Effective people and people who are bad at lying quickly learn that lying is a bad strategy for them, and tend not to tell outright lies. That leaves ineffective people who are good at lying. They tend to lie privately, so they can make different lies to different people as needed, and those people are unlikely to compare what they heard with other people. Liars also avoid details and making statements on the record. Cornering a suspected liar is pretty simple. Get their statements on the record, don't meet with them privately, demand reasonable details, verify what they say, compare notes with the other people they talk with. Then, if they lie, hold them accountable by reporting them or exposing the lie in public. Objective lies can be discovered immediately, or persist for centuries. The attacker's advantage applies. In situations where you don't care about your reputation, such as when you are fighting an enemy, lie to them as much as possible.

Warfare is based on deception. Sun Tzu

Messaging Is Deception

When you deal with non-enemies, objective lying is usually a losing strategy. Getting caught in an objective lie hurts your status. In extended or repeated games, usually honesty is the best policy. In a cooperative scenario, relevant transparency is often a good default. Honesty is not all or nothing. In a competitive scenario, withholding information and carefully selecting and presenting information, messaging, is often beneficial. In my opinion, messaging is dishonest, but it is less dishonest than objective lies. Messaging is generally agreed to be part of playing a competitive social game, while lying isn't.

Designing messaging is both following your most advantageous communication strategy and it is deception. Transparency is the opposite of deception and therefore the opposite of messaging. Transparency doesn't require strategizing, so it saves a lot of time and effort over lying or messaging. How can you detect messaging that is based on partial truths? Pay attention to when people avoid basic facts and bring up unusual facts, or they avoid fact and emphasize subjective claims. Usually, when the facts are convenient to a narrative, the speaker brings up the basic facts over and over, we are the number one seller in this market. Really? I thought your competitor outsold you this month. Oh, yes, well our cumulative sales over the last six months are the highest. Who cares about cumulative sales over the last six months? Also, our customers say that we are the best! Oh, how many customers say that? At least one customer says that. Ok.

Substitution

Interestingly, silence is also messaging. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. People notice if you don't say something when they expect you to, so one form of deception is substitution. In a competitive scenario, if you can't say something advantageous and true when requested, don't say something disadvantageous and true, self-defeating. Don't say something advantageous and false, lying. Say something else, dodge the question. Secretly substitute what they asked for with something different without them noticing, or answer their question with a question. If their question is loaded, challenge the loaded assumption. If the question is open ended, answer it truthfully, but avoid disadvantageous points. If you are a bystander, you can detect when responders use substitution, and infer that they cannot give a nice sounding answer to the question.

If you are the questioner, it is your responsibility to notice substitution and repeat the question, allowing grace for honest mistakes and forcing dishonest substitution to fail. People using substitution can be unaware or shameless, you may have to repeat and clarify a simple question several times. Use the broken record technique. A broken record is a metaphor of a malfunctioning device that unconditionally repeats the same sound over and over. Where were you yesterday? I don't know. Where were you yesterday? Why do you want to know? Where were you yesterday? I don't have to tell you. Where were you yesterday? Etc. Until they answer the question truthfully, lie, refuse to answer, or escalate. Any of those responses advance the conversation and you can stop using the broken record technique. I find oppositional and competitive communication dynamics pointless, they are usually negative sum. Where you can, find and limit your communication to cooperative. But you live in a society, society has competition, and you have to compete to survive.

Scheming

Deception is one tool to use while scheming. Scheming isn't just deception, or being extra deceptive. Scheming is a secret move in a metagame, deception about which game you are playing.

Deception and scheming are unnecessary if there is no deterrence. You can take candy from a baby if you decide to. Scheming is difficult when you play a well-defined game with tightly enforced rules, just play a winning strategy whether it uses deception or not. When rules are not well enforced, or there are multiple games you could be playing, scheming is deceiving the opponent about which game you are playing. When people ask, What are you scheming, they aren't asking which strategy you are using in the known game, they are asking which game you are playing that they don't know about. When a scheme succeeds, the loser says you tricked me! They lost because they didn't even know which game they were playing. Scheming is a common tactic for the multigamer communication strategy, introduced later.

A fictional example of scheming comes from the science fiction series Star Trek, about captain Kirk as a student at Starfleet Academy. He faced a simulated training scenario designed to be a no-win situation. In the scenario, the Starfleet captain has to defend a merchant ship, named the Kobayashi Maru, from enemy attack, but the enemies receive unlimited reinforcements, forcing an eventual defeat. Captain Kirk rejected this framing of real life, so he secretly modified the scenario to have a solution and in a trivial sense, Kirk won the no-win scenario. He played a move in the metagame, he schemed to win. No fair!

Kobayashi Maru

Ego, Judgment, Feedback

Ego

People are defensive if you touch their ego, the things they identify with, and less defensive about statements about the world, all the stuff that they don't identify with. Often my body, my job, my family, my possessions, my close relationships, my community, my memories, my habits, the place I live in and my reputation are me, I identify with these things. So if you can talk to someone and praise or preserve their identity, they will often like that. If you criticize or alter these things, you are injuring their fragile ego and they will usually not like it. If you want someone to change their behavior, you can talk to them about what you want while avoiding their ego. If you say, You left your wet towel in the bathroom, that pokes their ego by criticizing their actions, and they might become defensive or aggressive. Saying instead, I went to use the shower today and brought my towel with me, but there was no room to place it because there was another towel there, do you know whose towel that is? Gets to the same topic but skirts around their fragile ego. You are asking for their help about your problem, not accusing them of causing a problem. These are two sides of the same coin, but human psychology does not make logical sense.

Judgment

People can be more accepting about talking about stuff in their ego if you speak objectively, but get more hurt or defensive if you make value judgments about stuff in their ego. E.g. I think this part of the book sucks, it's way too long, is hurtfully judgmental, while saying this part of the book could be made shorter and still do its job, means something similar and sounds more neutral, it proposes an objective experiment I could perform, editing different versions of this part of the book to different lengths and seeing if a shorter version could work just as well.

It is impossible to live life without making judgments, you have to judge where the ground is to take your next step without falling over. It's not a question of making judgments, it's a question of accuracy, which judgments to communicate and how you communicate them.

Overall, being aware of people's egos and how you express your judgments is important to securing benefits.

Inaccuracies about ego hurt the ego. A common offender is the use of inaccurate absolutes, such as always and never, everyone and no one, all and none, everywhere and no where, must and impossible. It is usually better to avoid or qualify absolute statements, unless you have evidence to support them. Don't say, You always x. An accurately qualified absolute is more useful and less hurtful, such as, As far as I have seen, you always x.

How to Give Feedback

Here we start with an example of a communication problem where someone gives bad quality feedback.

Wrong

You, and others, are often wrong. If you can detect who is wrong, whether it is yourself or others, you can gain significant advantages, while if you can't, you could lose out.

Physical reality is not personally or socially convenient for you. There are few ways to be right, and many, many ways to be wrong. In order to be consistently right, you would need the full information, the capacity to think everything through, and the ability to do everything correctly. You can't do any of that, you lack the information, the thinking power and the ability to execute. It is fine to claim benefits when you are right and they are wrong, but almost always all parties are wrong. The question is what ways are we wrong, how much, how can we be less wrong? How do you find out and deal with what you or others are wrong about?

Chesterton's Fence

If you are traveling down a road, and find that the road is unexpectedly blocked by a fence, what should you do? Should you break the fence? Bypass it? Turn around and find another path to your destination?

If you don't know why the fence is there, do not remove it. If you later learn why the fence is there, then you can decide whether to keep or remove it, this was Chesterton's advice. A fence does not totally prevent you from going somewhere, it is not a physical law, a fence is only a deterrent. The fence is telling you that there is a reason you might not want to go there. If you go there anyway, you might pay an unacceptable price. The fence is often for everyone's benefit. But a fence could be placed anywhere, what if a crazy person is just blocking the road with a fence for no reason? Crazy people can't effectively pursue long term goals, that is an essential characteristic of insanity. Fences require money and maintenance, which most crazy people can't manage. Not every fence is there for a good reason, but most are.

When you disagree with someone and you suspect that they are crazy or stupid, you have found a fence in social reality. It might be that the other person is wrong or confused, and you should continue to hold your current beliefs. But it might be that your current beliefs are wrong, and the person that you think is crazy, is right, and they think you are crazy. Until you know why they think what they think, don't dismiss someone as crazy or stupid. After you understand what they think and why, when their position makes perfect sense to you from their perspective, then you can conclude if they are crazy or stupid.

Crazy

When someone conflicts with our interests, one form of social attack is to insult them. An insult is a social attack to harm someone's reputation. Confusingly, insults have some effects even when there are just two people talking. The opposite of insults are compliments, compliments are relationship building, giving appreciation, credit, increasing status to pay more benefits to the recipient. An insult is an attempt to lower status, take benefits. An insult is a claim that the target loses or destroys benefits for the group and should be shunned or killed to benefit the group. Don't listen to them, they are crazy. An insult is a form of mental do-not-enter sign. A do not enter sign indicates that you should not enter the marked area, similar to a fence. If I tell you that someone is crazy, I am marking them as not worth talking to. Perhaps they are incapable, or perhaps they are an enemy. Even if an enemy says something true, it is just a trick to advance their evil goals.

Here are some examples of insults, from weaker to stronger.

Silly, stupid, wacky, one of them, delusional, ideological, crazy, bad, corrupt, terrible, disgusting, vile, evil

Human Coherence

Reality is coherent, so people have a kind of coherence. People who are overall functional, have their life together, of course they are not right about everything, but they aren't dead wrong about anything. Your life is very easy to mess up, and so are other people's lives. If they were silly crazy wrong about something important, they would probably be silly crazy wrong about a lot of things, and their life would fall apart. If someone is screaming about the end of the world in an babbling stream of consciousness while rolling on the ground, smelling of their own urine, their life is coherent. Their words, actions, place in the world all match, they are probably crazy. Even if a broken clock sometimes displays the correct time, it is not a reliable time keeper and you should not consult it. There are bad clocks. If someone has achieved and maintained a useful position in society, if their life is somewhat orderly, if their speech is comprehensible, they may be wrong about some things, they may think or say some crazy things, but they aren't fundamentally crazy.

Luxury Beliefs

When a person is protected from the consequences of their actions, they lose the valuable part of the reality feedback loop, and develop wrong beliefs. These wrong beliefs are a luxury they can afford because they are protected from the consequences of their beliefs and actions, being wrong does not harm them.

Opinions

Everyone has opinions, and most opinions are wrong. Almost everyone is terrible at almost every important job in society. People who are good at important jobs are rare. But everyone has opinions about how the important jobs should be done, and their opinions are generally wrong. Most of the people who are given important jobs are also wrong, but sometimes, someone who is good at the job gets the job, and shows us how capable people can be. When someone capable is taking care of things for all of us, we can all stand on the side and complain about them, but our opinions do not matter. The fact that our opinions do not matter is harmful to us, because it allows wrong, meaning ineffective, opinions to persist and spread. When everyone else agrees that the person who is good at their job is doing it wrong, that person looks crazy to everyone who shares wrong opinions about it. And everyone who would be bad at that job and hold bad opinions looks crazy to the person who knows what they are doing. The usual pattern is that the majority has common sense, and the outlier is crazy. In these cases, where someone has demonstrated competence and unqualified people have no feedback, the outlier is usually sensible and the majority is crazy.

Another way to see that the majority is crazy is to look at social beliefs of the past. When times change, opinions change completely because social beliefs are ungrounded. People in later societies, such as you, can look at how backward, savage, confused and crazy the beliefs of past societies were, while thinking that you and your society are sensible and superior, when in many ways you are no better.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Just because someone is wrong, doesn't mean that they will fail immediately, soon, or ever in their entire lives. The world is not efficient and just, injustice can persist and thrive. You can flip a coin and get ten heads in a row. You shouldn't bet on getting that result if you flip a coin yourself, but if hundreds of people flip coins, someone among them probably will get ten heads in a row. But wrong is wrong in the end, wrong beliefs and strategies will lose to better beliefs and strategies overall, due to grounding, but not always in a way that is convenient to you.

Appearing Crazy

There are stupid and crazy people out there, plenty of them, so concluding that someone is crazy is sometimes correct. But there are a lot of alternative situations where someone is not crazy, but appears crazy to you. People who want different things than you can also appear crazy to you. People who are more capable than you can appear crazy to you, by doing something that you don't understand the significance of. Later, that capable person may succeed in a way you couldn't expect. There are also randomized strategies, where the strategist counters attempts to predict their actions. Some of their actions appear to be chaotic, they appear somewhat crazy.

Then there is the tactic of acting crazy, a scheme where the strategist presents themselves as crazy to others, in order to cause their opponents to neglect them or fear their irrational choices, a powerful deterrence. The strategist pretending to be crazy makes sure to sometimes act in a counterproductive way, but always acts sensibly when needed to preserve and advance their core interests. Acting crazy is deceptive, it intentionally presents itself in a way that is hard to distinguish from actual stupid or crazy people, but it is incoherent. Often the supposedly crazy person is consistently successful in their life, and hasn't ruined their core interests.

When people want the same things and are both thinking well enough, they can still disagree by using different reference classes. The answer to a question may be one way for one reference class, and the opposite for another reference class. Each reasoner is correct when thinking about each case, but because they are considering different cases, they think the other is wrong, and talk past each other.

Finding Who Is Wrong

There are three categories of being wrong. People who are incapable of getting it right, people who are capable but unwilling, and people pretending to be wrong. These are easier to observe in other people, but you should spend more effort to observe these problems in yourself. Usually everyone is wrong, but in different ways and amounts.

Relationships

Groups

The important unit of humanity is not the individual, it is the group. Yet, I am not a collectivist. Human animals are not solitary, we are social mammals. Humans are apex predators, but not because bears are not killed by human individuals, bears are killed by human groups. Human individuals are weak in the wilderness, the world's greatest apex predator is human groups.

What makes us so powerful? No human is individually stronger than a bear. Nature has made us individually weak and vulnerable because it is advantageous, it forces us to work together. If humans were less individually vulnerable, we would be more solitary and stop creating groups. We are an apex predator because we plan and coordinate, we cooperate using communication.

If a farmer plants only one kind of seed, this is called a monocrop. This can simplify farm management, but if anything attacks a vulnerability of that plant, such as weather, insects or molds, the farmer can lose everything they planted. If instead, the farmer plants a variety of seeds, a diversified strategy, it is harder to manage, but most farm problems won't wipe out all of the crops at once. It is similar with people, people are all different, some are big and strong but easy to hit, some are small and weaker but hard to catch. Because we have different advantages, we can combine them. Using specialization, different people can do the things they do the best for the group, unlike someone working alone, or a group of people who are too similar.

How does nature make us individually weak? Lots of ways. Human children are more helpless than other animals for a long time. A lot of baby animals get up and walk around immediately after birth. Pregnancy in humans is incredibly vulnerable for the mother, and for mothers of other species, it often isn't. Human birth is often a many hours long, dangerous process, and is generally very painful. Other animals don't appear to be in significant distress when they give birth. Nature could have made birth less painful and dangerous for humans, but it didn't. For example, consider if humans used a marsupial strategy, where babies are born small and immature, then continue to grow outside of the womb. Pregnancy could be shortened, especially the third trimester where the mother can be almost immobilized. Birth would be much faster and easier. Nature can make mammals less vulnerable than humans, but it didn't. Nature made us individually weak and vulnerable, to force us to rely on each other and communicate, because the individual is not the important unit of humanity. Our power lies in group coordination, so nature found ways to make us work together by necessity.

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Chapter 2 Conclusion.

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Faction

Personal relationships reduce down to a single value, How much do I like or dislike you? I call this single relationship number the faction value. You can like or dislike someone for your own reasons, but your behavior reflects a single changing personal judgment of how much that relationship is worth to you, or how much you want to help, avoid or harm them.

Yet, relationships are more complex than a single number. There are other aspects that can be just as important as faction value. Every pair of people has an ideal distance between them. There are some people that you are so compatible with, the closer they are and the more often, the better. Many people aren't good for you to relate with at all. And many good people do not have an ideal distance of zero or infinity with you, they are better to relate with at certain times, places, activities. Some people are better for socializing, some are better for working with, some are better to see one-on-one, some are better with a group. What is this person good for? What is this person good at? What do you need from them? What do they need from you? This applies to all relationships, including friendships. But friendships aren't about taking, they are about giving! Yes, so what kind of friendship do you want, do they want, what are you capable of, what are they capable of?

Faction isn't only between two individuals, you also have your individual evaluation of groups, I like this group, I don't like that group, this group welcomes me, this group shuns me. Things that others do change your faction with them, and things you do change their faction with you. A faction value of zero is neutral, this is how you treat individuals or groups you don't know, strangers. In some cultures, neighbors greet newcomers with gifts, to establish a friendly debt between them. Repaying the debt is an insult to them, it means that you want to treat them as a stranger after they greeted you in friendship.

The common usage of the word faction is about competing groups within a group. A faction that has a high faction value towards you is your faction, and usually factions are mutually exclusive, you have to pick one faction to join, pick a side. If you decline to pick a side, all factions will tend to have negative faction value towards you because you are implicitly declaring yourself as a separate faction. Once you choose a side, if you later switch sides, this often flips your faction value as a betrayer.

Expression of faction value takes different forms, but some examples of the lowest faction value is hatred, disgust, and KOS, Kill On Sight. Examples of the highest faction value are I love you, I would do anything for you, and I would kill and die for you. It is not coincidental that both extreme faction values are murderous. I recommend ensuring that you always maintain perspective in your relationships, all real people and groups have both good and bad aspects. Skill in communication exactly means that you can avert murder.

Friendship

A friend is someone you prefer to be with for certain occasions, and they agree. You would prefer to have them on your side, and if you invite them, your friend will be there. Friendship is bidirectional. Your friends are the people who show up for you, and you are a friend to the people you show up for. You don't have to like each other, get along, or trust them. Friendships are as different as people and situations can be, but often people become friends because they have an intuitive mutual understanding or compatibility. You can work together, not necessarily for a productive purpose, but your interaction is functional in some way.

Once you have friends, there are compatible and incompatible combinations of friends with each other and with situations. As you and your life change, your friendships can grow closer or grow apart. Friendships require regular meetings and contribution of effort, or else they fade away. A typical pattern is that it is easy to make friends in your youth, and harder to make friends as you get older. The better you know yourself and others, the fewer people match you.

Unlike family, you choose your friends, so choose wisely. The people that you associate with are evidence of your character. Friends often have a strong influence on you. Your reputation is tied to your friends, if they do something right or something wrong, it reflects on you, too. Everyone has ups and downs, friends are needed most when you are down and you have the least to offer them. The people who are only there for you when things are going well are called fair-weather friends, and they aren't friends at all. Real friends are there for you through thick and thin, they are rare and precious. Be the foul-weather friend for others, some of them will remember it.

Producing Benefits

Compulsary Service

We all start life as babies that cannot take care of ourselves, our caretakers serve us hand, foot, mouth and butt, they handle everything. People take care of children so fully that sometimes, children fail to grow up. We start our lives as recipients, and for those of us that grow up, we become servants. You may think that there are people who don't have to serve anyone else, maybe rich people, entrepreneurs, explorers or leaders? Wrong, every productive person serves, and unproductive people are irrelevant. If you want benefits, you must serve others.

Everybody fights. Everybody works. Starship Troopers by Heinlein

Centrality of Production

We all want more benefits. The secret to mass consumption is mass production. If you want to eat more pie, someone has to make more pie. You don't have a human right to get more pie. If you can make or earn your own pie, you can have as much of your own pie as you want. People tend to be blind to production, because as children, we all get something for nothing. As a child, we get because we need, and sometimes we get what we want. This is so pleasant and convenient that we wish the world worked that way, but it doesn't. Benefits are not infinite, they don't come from nowhere, benefits come from somewhere. Benefits come from producers. Production is central to benefits, and communication follows it. Some people think that if you print and distribute more money, everyone will have more money and they won't be poor. Printing money doesn't create benefits, it devalues money. Money isn't what you want, you want the stuff you can buy with the money, and that stuff doesn't change no matter how much money you print.

If printing money could end poverty, printing diplomas could end stupidity. Javier Milei

Looking only at the current benefits that exist, we are faced with a zero-sum problem of how to divide them, and a negative-sum game of negotiation or conflict. Once there are legible benefits, people gather around them to take the benefits for themselves. People who take without paying are free-riders, parasites, thieves, enemies. This reveals a contradiction, a problem in human nature. On the one hand, I support basic human rights including the right to life. On the other hand, I also have rights to my own labor and property. You simultaneously have a right to life but no right to take my pie, even if you are starving. You have to work to eat. Those who can work, but choose not to, choose to starve themselves to death.

I don't want to compete against other people, or defend myself from free-riders, parasites, or take anyone as my enemy. Competition is unavoidable in zero-sum games, it's either you or me, by definition. The war for benefits is a consequence of non-postive-sum social games. This is why I emphasize production, the importance of making your life positive-sum. Production is the only way to win the war.

When you produce value, you don't just create benefits, your identity changes from consumer to producer, from an enemy to an ally. Becoming a producer is your ticket to join the community of positive-sum producers. Your ticket can take you farther and farther away from the natural battlefield towards civilization.

Being Helpful

How do you become a producer? Serve others. What does serving others mean? It means creating benefits for them, being helpful. Sometimes, people accurately know what they want and lack only the time, energy, skills, materials or equipment to solve their problem. You can come and help them, simple! But most of what people want help with is not so simple.

People dismiss the difficulty of helping others. It is usually hard. If you ask someone, how can I help? What can I do for you? They will ask you to do things, but often, doing what people ask for isn't really helpful. The customer is always right, but not about what they really want. People mistakenly think they know what they want, but they usually don't know. The customer is always right about the fact that they have a problem, but the customer doesn't know how to solve that problem. If they knew how to solve their problem, they would likely solve it themselves without asking for your help. The person in the situation is confused, while the onlooker can see clearly.

A quotation from Steve Jobs. Some people say, Give the customers what they want. But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, A faster horse! People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, page 567

Legibility

When you help someone by solving a problem they couldn't solve themselves, there is a troublesome consequence. The customer will often not understand, appreciate, or agree with your solution. Remember, if the customer could solve their own problem, they usually wouldn't need your help. So, often the problem they have is one they cannot solve themselves. It makes sense that they cannot understand your solution. Also, if the problem is a consequence of a personal issue the customer is avoiding about themselves, they may dislike your solution and be unhappy about your assistance! Try cleaning up someone's room for them and see if they like it.

Helping someone else has multiple challenges. Finding a problem you can help them with, solving the problem, and helping them to see the value of your solution. Seeing the value of a product or service means that that product or service is legible, they can make sense of the value of it, while a product or service that they do not understand, they do not see any value in, is illegible. If a customer can solve their own problem, purchasing a solution from you is almost always legible to them, at least as valuable as their own solution.

In the common case that the customer cannot solve their own problem, your solution is often illegible to them, so they cannot value it and don't want to pay you for it, because they don't perceive the value. This is why part of the service you need to provide to your customers is to make your work legible to them. Assuming you do valuable work, bad customers cannot appreciate it and your work remains illegible. Do not cast pearls before swine, do not associate with bad customers. Illegible work is worse than doing nothing, because you waste your efforts on someone who can't appreciate them. Sometimes you will even antagonize them. Good customers will find your work legible if you do your part to make your work legible to them. Communicating the benefits of your work to your customers is part of your work.

Roles

Society and culture define roles that you fill on different occasions. These roles have different hats, literally or figuratively, and you wear different hats during your life. Everyone lives as a baby first, and now you can read, so your role has changed. Roles come with language games, and roles have scripts, with different complexity and flexibility. Within a given role, people expect you to say and do certain things that mean certain things. You have to say certain things at certain times in a certain way, similar to an actor following a script, but often there is more flexibility to it. When there is decision, variation, interaction, you might follow a protocol, a predefined decision tree that says what to do in different situations.

A basic small talk protocol

Hello.

Hello.

How are you?

I am fine, and you?

Doing fine, thank you.

When you or someone else fills a role, that person partially transcends their individual status and becomes a function of society. People are supposed to treat certain roles in certain ways, give them their due respect, apart from the respect they have for the individual person filling the role. Roles also constrain who talks with or works with who.

Societies are functional when they have functional roles and scripts. When circumstances change and the roles or scripts don't adapt, or the scripts fail to transmit from one generation to the next, groups or society can falter.

Separate Economies

People talk about the economy, but life has multiple economies. These economies do not mix. In the commercial economy, you buy and sell using money, while in friendship groups, you contribute using gifts and voluntary services. If you try to buy a new phone using a cake that you baked yourself, the store won't accept your cake as payment, but your cake may be valued at a friend's party that you want to attend. And you can't pay people cash to be your true friend, but you could buy them a gift using that same money. There are distinct economies for family, relationship, community, commerce and organization.

Loss Aversion

People don't respond rationally to rewards. If you pay someone more, you might not get more. Too much reward or constant rewards do not motivate the greatest effort, rare and hard to predict rewards do. People respond much worse to punishment. Taking away what they have or they think they deserve drives them crazy.

The way to motivate others is to offer them an attractive reward and be very specific about what they need to to do receive it. Ask them to do things that they are capable of doing. You have to know what they value and ensure that they don't think they already have or deserve it. Enforce that if they fulfill your requirements, they will deserve and receive the reward, and if they do not meet your requirements, they will not deserve or receive it. This is so difficult that it is often better to find people who are self-motivated to do what you wanted to do anyway, natural allies, or to find people who already do that job and buy what you want from them, professionals.

There are many ways to gain and live, but you can only die once. People hate losing more than they love gaining. Incentives drive human behavior. In communication, emphasizing what people stand to lose will motivate them more than what they stand to gain. They can easily imagine the pain of losing something they already have and like, or the pain of not gaining something they know and want, but they have trouble imagining the benefit of something new to them.

It is better to ask forgiveness than permission. Why? People don't like change, and people don't appreciate things they haven't experienced. Potential unfamiliar benefits are unimaginable to them, while keeping current benefits feels essential. Don't change anything! If you want to help someone, you have to change something, and they don't want change. This is why it is better to ask forgiveness than permission. The same change that they would protest in advance, once they have experienced the benefits, they will protest its removal.

Incentives

Power

Bargaining Power

Bargaining power answers the question of who gets what in a negotiation. It determines how much of the benefits someone can get.

The market price of a common item is the intersection of the supply and demand curves, but this is in aggregate. The market price does not force anyone to trade, to buy or to sell. Trades do not happen only at the market price, otherwise prices could never change. The market price is one input to a negotiation, and another input is the relative bargaining power of the buyer and the seller. Bargaining power has two components, circumstantial and personal. If I am a farmer attending a farmers market to sell produce, and I am standing there with a basket full of expiring produce near the end of the market, circumstances reduce my bargaining power. If my farm has a reputation for high quality produce, that personally increases my bargaining power. If other local farms have been affected by a drought but not mine, that increases my circumstantial bargaining power. If I am bad at negotiation, that reduces my personal bargaining power.

The largest source of bargaining power is differentiation, being the only available buyer or seller, offering unique and beneficial terms for the deal, having a more reliable reputation. Bargaining power matches your ability to harm or help the other party, which determines the distribution of benefits when you trade.

There is an interesting philosophical scenario about bargaining power. Imagine you are walking in a desert and have run out of water. If you don't get help, you will surely die of thirst before reaching civilization. A traveller happens to find you and offers to give you water and transport you back to town, an offer you would like to accept. But what is the correct price to pay them? Travelers aren't required to give their water and transportation to every person they see. The traveller could choose to pass you by, save your life for free, or they could also choose to charge you any price. What is your own life worth to you? Probably, you would be willing to pay everything you have. When you stand there, in the desert, dying of thirst, the traveller has maximum bargaining power over you, through no plan or malice.

There may be a market price for water or transport, but no one is forced to transact at the market price, and additionally, there is no market price for your own life. If the traveller charges a high price, people will moan about price gouging. There is no such thing as price gouging, there is only bargaining power.

Imagine you agree to pay the traveller everything you have to save your life, they accept your offer, they give you water and bring you back to town. Now that you have returned to town, the traveller has no bargaining power over you. Unless you signed a contract that they can enforce, it's just your word against theirs if they appeal to others to force you to pay them everything you have. You could be a person of your word and give them everything you have, but there is no one forcing you to do that. The question of what the legal or moral thing to do in this situation is not the current topic. What is interesting, is that we create a simple situation with maximum bargaining power that flips to no bargaining power, and this helps illustrate how bargaining power works.

Overall, bargaining power refers to the power that someone has to affect a transaction, who gets the benefits. Bargaining power at either extreme can extend until it reaches all the benefits, robbery or donation. Powerful buyers receive products and services for free, powerful sellers can increase prices above market rate and receive donations. Equal bargaining power, all else equal, implies that deals will transact around the market price and give roughly equal benefit to the buyer and the seller.

Profit

Profit is the benefit to the seller for selling, profit comes from bargaining power, and bargaining power is partially based on buyers' alternatives. If the buyer must have your product and there are no alternatives or substitutes, you can charge everything they can afford, maximum bargaining power and profit. If there are a lot of alternatives to your offering, you are in a competitive market and if you charge more than your competitors, then customers will choose your competitors over you, no bargaining power, prices race to the bottom, meaning selling at zero, or almost zero, profit.

One pole, meaning only one seller or buyer or whatever, is called monopoly, has no alternatives, max bargaining power. Two poles, duopoly, allows easy cooperation between the two poles to gain a lot of profit, even without secret negotiations between the sellers, which is called collusion. Once there are more than two poles, it is often hard for sellers to agree and competition overpowers collusion, but when there is collusion to increase profits for more than two poles that is oligopoly. Whenever there are more than two poles it is called multipolarity. Healthy commodity markets are typically multipolar and low profit. Your goal as a seller of your services is differentiation. In spite of the fact that you are a human, very similar to all other humans, to earn a profit you need to find your niches. What can you do, that other people want, that other sellers can't or won't do? What is your competitive advantage? Straight competition is for suckers.

Competitive markets force sellers to respond to customer preferences, aka good customer service. Monopoly has no incentive to respond to customer preferences, bad customer service. The government gives bad customer service because government is a monopoly. Try to satisfy your customers, offer good service, and never intentionally antagonize your customers. Serve your customers, this creates customer goodwill. Never expect customer loyalty, but nonetheless it exists, this is brand value. But there are always unreasonable people, you can't satisfy everyone. Offer a beneficial product at a reasonable price, define your own standards, be kind but consistent. Claim your fair share of the benefits you produce. Don't let customers walk all over you, and don't walk all over customers. Voluntary trade only happens with mutual benefit.

Differentiate the value of your services to earn profit. How do I do that? Every case is different, but we already agree that you are reading this book. Ok, how does this book differentiate itself? It adopts a direct tone to be more concise, understandable, relatable. It addresses topics that are human universals, it applies to everyone, maximizing the addressable market. It uses common ideas that are well established, but offers a unique combination of proven ideas to offer a substantial benefit for readers. Other books are too light, they don't face the roots of your problems. Or they are too academic, they seem to be intentionally hard to understand or apply. Or they are too narrow, they only address a specific and more manageable part of the problem and limit themselves to one, or a few big ideas. This book is unique by aiming to be both comprehensive and practical, that is my answer to the question of why you should read this book rather than do something else. For many people, I think this string of letters at some point is a good option to make their lives better. I am offering differentiated value, and I hope to personally share in some of the benefits I create for you.

Monopoly

Zero to One

Status in a Group

Status is the bargaining power of one member relative to other members of the group, hence high status or low status. Status is intangible, ever-changing and hard to measure, but it appears in physical reality by how other people pay attention, respond to you and treat you. There are five specific sources of status.

- Martial status, produced by capability for physical conflict. Communication is the alternative to physical conflict, but communication requires that physical conflict is costly for the attacker. You don't negotiate with ants. Martial status derives from the bargaining power generated by making physical attacks costly, or threatening physical attacks against weak others.

- Cultural status, produced by cultural achievement. Cultural superiority affects bargaining power by raising group status and attracting members.

- Academic status, produced by intellectual achievement, which promotes economic achievement. Raises group status.

- Economic status, produced by productive capability. Production of benefits increases group benefits.

- Reputational status, produced by increasing group unity or individual sacrifice for group status. Achievements in increasing group status.

Martial status reflects the bargaining power of threatening the group physically, or abandoning the group and making it vulnerable to others' physical attacks. Groups have to pay the market price for martial protection, or the fighters will take their payment by force, or stop protecting the group. Cultural status surprisingly works the same. Culture isn't worthless, it isn't a meaningless ritual or a quirky lifestyle, it is functional and valuable. Contribution to culture increases group enthusiasm, attracts new members, inspires practical improvements, increases status across groups as a signal of fitness. People who create or spread culture create group benefits that must be paid at the market price or again, they can turn around and culturally attack the group that mistreats them or bring their contributions to groups that appreciate them more. Academic status derives from rare productive knowledge, economic status derives from individual productive capability, and reputational status derives from benefits to the group itself.

All forms of status can be translated into bargaining power in transactions. Martial status can be used for physical threat or threat of loss of protection. Cultural status translates to popularity or popular influence, which can change public sentiment or create a boycott against a seller. Academic status can be used to attract or repel other elites. Economic status can afford to pay more, but amazingly economic status can be used to pay less, because successful people can be tastemakers and receive free stuff in hopes of endorsement. This relates to the counterintuitive yet true expression, It's expensive to be poor, which implies that it is cheap to be rich. Reputational status can be used to threaten the seller through organizational harassment or affecting public sentiment. Any form of status can be used as a cudgel in a negotiation. This is the source of the famous phrase, Do you know who I am?

The people that materially contribute to the group must be fairly compensated for their contributions or else, and the conventional way to track their contributions is a social belief about how much they contributed, their social status. Investing in the group purchases shares in the group's success. When the group distributes benefits, high status gets more benefits than low status, and everyone agrees that's how groups should work, if not about who deserves high and low status.

Relative status in a group creates a hierarchy, where low status defers to high status. At the extreme, status hierarchies calcify into castes, permanent and strictly enforced inherited levels of status. Often, people within a group fiercely defend the status quo, especially how status is earned. It might seem that the greatest threat to the status of a member of a group is an enemy or opposition group. But an individual cannot usually control the result of ongoing group conflict, and opposing groups aren't as interested in each other as they are interested in themselves. What most immediately and severely affects individual status in a group are the other members of the group. The person who can most often and most severely conflict with your own interests is someone who knows you best, knows your group best, and is in a position to compete for the same benefits you want, your teammate. This is why groups spend some effort disliking their enemies or opposition, but go totally crazy about deviants, leavers, and especially betrayers.

Threats to personal status, from high to low

- Ingroup

- Allies

- Enemies

- Enemy allies

- Strangers

Status also relates to accountability. Equality before the law is a reasonable principle, anyone who commits the same crime should receive the same punishment. Granting more lenience to people who contribute more to your group is also a reasonable principle. Offering credit to a first-time customer is bad business, but offering credit to your best customer is good business. People who make great achievements are often associated with great misconduct. A society has to choose between destroying the reputations of some of its greatest contributors, discouraging everyone to contribute, or undermining the rule of law. In my opinion, public acceptance of a person who commits a crime is relative. If someone makes a great achievement that echoes through the ages, they can get away with some murder. If someone makes a minor achievement and they do the same thing, they will have to pay a price. If an unremarkable person commits the crime, they will receive the full punishment.

The people with the highest status are called elites. The highest status elites are leaders. Leaders come from high status, so all forms of status can create leaders. History has produced military leaders, cultural icons, knowledge leaders, business leaders, former activists, career politicians, nepo babies. Leaders establish themselves using high status, but then have to maintain high status to defend their position.

What do functional leaders do? They create group alignment in social reality. If half of the group wants to do one thing, and the other half wants to do something else, and the entire group has to commit to one choice, the group is paralyzed and can do nothing. A group has a massive potential capacity to act, but without alignment, a group has no actual capacity. The job of the leader is not to sacrifice, or be a symbol, or tell everyone what to do. They might or might not do those things, but what successful leaders achieve is the alignment of group members to unlock the group capacity to act. To get the group members to listen to them, leaders need high status in the group. And even though the leader may not do the object level work to achieve the results, the leader gains significant status for successes, to allow them to align the group even more. Naturally, this unignorable source of group status attracts the most status-obsessed people, who are least worthy of leading.

Conflict

Conflict is when two or more parties claim the same benefit. Conflict can be win lose, and the attacker is attracted to the possibility of winning the status or benefits. Conflict is usually negative sum, which means that if both parties to a conflict knew the costs of the conflict and the outcome in advance, they could negotiate to skip the conflict for mutual benefit. The loser can pay the winner to avoid both sides wasting resources and both sides would be better off. If everyone is capable and reasonable, almost all conflict can be avoided. The world we live in is not composed of only capable and reasonable people, so conflict is common.

War is the continuation of politics by other means. Clausewitz, On War

Conflict is especially encouraged under conditions of high uncertainty or failures of communication. Both uncertainty and bad communication can cause one or both parties to make wrong predictions about who will win the conflict.

This is the conflict table. Each entry describes a scenario for one party, an attacker or a defender, what they predict would happen, what would actually happen if they fought, what action they would decide to take based on their prediction, and what result they would get.

Victims

After a conflict has started, the common question people ask is, who started the fight? The attacker is presumed to be wrong, while the defender is presumed to be right. This presumption of guilt may be convenient, but it is not reliable. The presumption of guilt against the attacker creates a social incentive to take advantage of. If you want to attack someone, instead of attacking and earning the presumption of guilt, you can instead provoke them to attack you, so you appear to be the virtuous defender. After so much human conflict, people are wary of both attackers and defenders, applying more of the idea that where there is smoke, there is fire. Perhaps both parties are unreasonable if they are fighting. In fact, sometimes one party is fully at fault, sometimes both, sometimes one more than the other, that is why you should judge every event case by case, instead of assuming or guessing.

There is a different model of conflict apart from attacker-defender. That is the model of abuser harming a victim. Society wants to protect the precious, angelic victim, so the model is completed with the third party, the rescuer, that rescues the victim from the abuser. If the rescuer is considered high status for protecting the weak and fighting for justice, that would counter the abuser-victim narrative, so the rescuer is relegated to lower status than the victim. This allows the victim to be a heroic survivor, triumphing over the trauma caused by the villainous abuser, and the rescuer is merely fulfilling their minimum obligation to rescue the victim. This allows the narrative to elevate the status of the victim.

Karpman Drama Triangle

A well-adjusted society protects its weaker members, giving status to the strong protectors. Using the abuser-victim-rescuer model, strong protectors are robbed of high status by being cast as abusers, such as by calling them a bully that uses their strength to harm the weak, and weaklings can cry about it and gain status as victims. Weaklings can attack others using the crybully strategy. First they provoke or lie about their target, claiming their target abused them, and cry about it, claiming the position of the victim. Then the rescuer punishes the false bully. This strategy misuses the rescuer as the bully by proxy. The claimed victim is actually the crybully attacker, gaining status as a victim and winning against their opponent in a conflict. The way to counter crybullies is to investigate accusations and hold false accusations accountable as much as the crimes they falsely accuse others of. There must be no double standard for weak people, the principle of equality before the law is best to prevent perverse strategies such as crybully.

Status Games

Signaling

Signaling is an unsolicited, implicit status grab using a proxy. If you are rich and you show off your expensive looking watch by checking the time in an exaggerated manner every five minutes, you are using a proxy, an expensive watch, as a proxy for wealth, to grab status as a wealthy person, unsolicited by anyone else. No one asked you how wealthy you are. And you are expressing it implicitly, you are showing a watch, not saying I'm rich, bitches! If someone asks you about your net worth and you answer them, that is not signaling.

The reason that implicit is important is that it provides plausible deniability. If someone asks, Why are you waving your expensive watch in my face? You could say, what do you mean, I just wanted to check the time, don't be so insecure. They aren't being insecure, you are, by waving your watch around to grab economic status.

In nature, male animals often signal their mating quality to females using signals and displays, famously with the male peacock and his shimmering feather displays. The peacock is not explicitly chasing peahens down to mate, the display is an implicit status grab. It suggests but does not outright say, I would be a wonderful peacock to mate with, look how wonderful I look.

Signaling often includes bragging. Bragging is showing off the benefits you have, to rub others' faces into what you have that they don't. Human signaling can be about mating, but is most often about status. I am rich, I am respected, I am important, I am knowledgeable, I am well-known, I am popular with elites, I know people with authority, I am affiliated with exclusive groups. Sometimes they say it explicitly, but they always say it implicitly. After making sure everyone has seen their expensive watch, they may complain about how old and shabby it is, and promise to buy the latest, shiniest watch as soon as it becomes available, a form of humble bragging, bragging with plausible deniability.

Signalers tend to be demanding and impatient. They think they are better than others and deserve more benefits. If they signal and other people don't respond the way that they expect and demand, they will usually repeat the signal compulsively, as if you didn't see it the first time, or as if repeating will make you start caring about it? When they lose patience, they will often escalate into dominance displays or violence.

Signaling Status Behaviors

Cheap and Costly Signals

Cheap signals are easy to copy. If rich people start liking a low-cost restaurant, everyone can copy them and visit the same low-cost restaurant. Cheap signals are unreliable and change quickly. Costly signals are not easy to copy, they require significant sacrifice. Sometimes low-status people gain cheap access to costly signals and can cheaply gain status, but costly signals are usually protected if they are able to endure. Costly signals are wasteful, but mostly exclude truly poor people. However, some people of all classes sometimes become obsessed with status signaling and find ways to make costly signals beyond their means, by cheating, saving up or overspending.

Lying is sometimes a costly signal of group loyalty. Sometimes people say ridiculous things that everyone knows aren't true. Why would someone intentionally repeat a lie? Because some lies become associated with a group narrative. By repeating the lie, they show support for the group narrative, proving loyalty. But aren't obvious lies ineffective and pointless? No, the more obvious the lie, the better the signal. If someone repeats something true, they could be unaware of the group or they could be an honest person. The purpose of the truth is ambiguous, it does not distinguish between group loyalists and non-loyalists. A good signal is unambiguous. A specific lie can distinguish between group loyalists and non-loyalists. Only a group loyalist would be willing to repeat an obvious lie to support the group. The cost of the signal is their own reputation for honesty, which is easily lost by repeating a single obvious lie. Other group members observe the costly signal and give them high status as a committed, loyal group member for sacrificing their personal status with others for the group. Then anti-loyalists can adopt a countersignal of criticizing the lie, and the war continues.

Virtue Signaling

Virtue signaling is trendy status grabbing. Virtues are personal qualities that your culture values, they can be almost anything, empathy for others, capacity for violence, lack of self-importance.

Activities of Virtue Signaling

Trends

People constantly chase after high status. High status people avoid low status crowds, so high status people constantly change the places they go, the things they do, the way they talk. The people chasing after them copy and distribute the high status ideas, more people follow those ideas, and they become trends. A trend is a recent and increasingly popular high status thing. When the trend establishes itself and persists, it becomes a fashion, a distinct style or way of life. If a fashion is intense and short lived, it is a fad. More intense than a fad is a craze, where people go crazy about a trend, acting irrationally and losing a lot of money or causing people to get hurt. Beyond a craze is a panic, with social upheaval and disruption. Beyond a panic is a riot, which is beyond our scope here.

Reputation

Reputation is common knowledge about the status, stance or character of a person or group. It is similar to faction value, but the evaluator is not an individual, the evaluator is the group. Reputation is the current answer to the question, what does the group think about them? Reputation is objective, in the sense that there is a common belief in a group about a person. Reputation is subjective, in that it is a judgment. But reputation is not just subjective, it is something even more subjective than subjective, it is a socially defined belief, a belief about what other people believe, eg I know that you didn't do it, but they all think you did.

Your personal reputation can rise or fall based on whether the group agrees with your statements about a person. So, if the group already dislikes someone, maybe you want to lie about that person to improve your own reputation by harming their reputation. Your attack encourages others to attack them for the same benefit. This cascade of personal attacks to claim reputation is called a pile on. The copycats don't gain as much status as the first person, so they are encouraged to escalate, in order to claim more status for their attack. This is a race to the bottom dynamic.

Every group faces this dynamic. When someone does something exciting to gain status, others tend copy them to also gain status, but face diminishing returns. Instead of stopping the behavior or accepting lower rewards, the copiers tend to escalate to gain as much status as the first person, or sometimes more. What this means is that the rewards for reputation drive group members to extreme behavior. The dynamic defines two attractor states, groups that actively protect themselves against extremism, or groups that succumb to extremism. Groups tend to rise and fall. They flourish, stay focused on their mission by maintaining principles and cooperating with society, they lose their way and wander off mission, fall to corruption, disperse, or fail to prevent extremism and become an extremist group.

Order Effects

The world operates on cause and effect, action and reaction. But the butterfly effect is about consequences for actions beyond the initial effect, we call these order effects, first-order effects, second-order effects, third-order effects, etc. For example, if you throw a stone into a calm lake or make a social action, these are the order effects.

Gossip

Gossip is secret informal discussion of reputation changes. Some people are very excited about other people's lives, busybodies. They always want to hear and share the latest news about people they know, but they don't want to face their own lives and make contributions to the group. Sometimes news spreads quickly, everyone hears about it through the grapevine. Other times, people are discussing what they think will happen, someone mishears something, someone misunderstands something, or someone lies, and a rumor is created. A rumor is gossip about a lie. Because it is a lie, it is more interesting than the truth, and spreads faster than accurate gossip or corrections. This happens so often that rumors are consistently produced, like a factory, called the rumor mill.

People who engage in gossip are often petty and jealous. If a busybody doesn't like you, they may intentionally spread a rumor about you to harm your reputation, a character assassination attempt. A common form of this is starting a rumor about sexual misconduct. Gossip is a secret, it is supposed to be hidden, so one partially effective form of resistence to gossip is to demand being overt or explicit, e.g., tell me to my face, go on the record.

There are parallel justice processes in society, the court of law and the court of public opinion, representing objective reality and social reality respectively. The court of law has explicit rules, agents and processes, while the court of public opinion is informal and judges people in social reality. The standard of evidence in the court of public opinion is the dominant rumors. Gossip and rumor can be used productively, but usually they are weapons to harm people for entertainment, spite or opposition.

Shame, Guilt

Shaming is an attempt to harm a party's reputation using overt claims that they have socially disapproved qualities, a direct attack on them in social reality. Social approval and disapproval affect incentives, driving or even controlling behavior. Don't you want other people to like you and give you benefits? Then you must follow social expectations. Social rejection, ostracism, can prevent you from gaining benefits and threaten your survival. The internal emotion of shame is a feeling of overall wrongness, inadequacy, unworthiness. The emotion of shame has a functional purpose, but like anger and guilt, you must not indulge in it or else it becomes destructive.

Shame can be used as a form of diffuse social control of a group. Influential people can wield shame for personal control of both individuals and the group. People who have sufficient bargaining power can endure shaming and become shameless. Shaming is ineffective to control them. Say what you want, but if you deny my contributions to the group, or the necessity of my product or service, then the accuser or the group will face worse consequences than me, thus establishing deterrence.

Guilt is an internal, subjective conclusion of specific personal wrongdoing in social reality. One common purpose of shaming someone is to cause them to feel guilt and change their behavior, or expose additional exploitable weaknesses. To feel guilt, the person has to care about other people. There is an essential difference between simple reward and punishment, and awareness of social reality. Reward and punishment thinking is something like, I regret that I was caught breaking the rules. Social reality thinking is something like, I regret breaking the rules because I harmed other people, the group, and ultimately myself. Someone who feels guilt wants to change their behavior for the greater good, indirectly for their own good.

Ostracism

Ostracism is expelling a member from a group. Typically status is considered to be positive, the more status you have, the more valued and connected you are to the group, while ostracism is negative, the more ostracized you are, the less value you have to the group and the more they want to get rid of you. Shunning is the related action of expelling a member only in social reality, but not physical reality. Shunning is when people say, I am not talking to you.

You need to be part of a group to survive, so the experience of ostracism feels like a mortal threat. Ostracism can operate as a near equivalent to capital punishment, a disincentive for behavior that harms group interests, or it can be coopted for selfish purposes. For example, if you become jealous of another member of the group, you could falsely accuse or frame them, and get them ostracized so that they lose their status, whether you can take their status for yourself or not. Ostracism can be abused for control of the group, where a leader forces the group to comply with their demands, under the threat of ostracism for the first person who resists.

Ontology of Communication Strategies

In these chapters I will describe the fundamental communication strategies. A communication strategy is a distinct way of talking, a basic idea that people can have about their role in society, why they relate to others, a concept of what they are primarily doing when they communicate. These are not specific techniques or short term goals, they are more of an overall orientation or style. People are often not aware of which strategies they use, but their communication is attracted to one or more of these strategies because they work to gain status. This is an ontology because it attempts to categorize almost all speech acts between one or more categories, the categories cover all of the common communication strategies. The ontology also attempts to consider not just the goals of the strategies, but their typical character and consequences. It is a sort of field guide of human communication.

The communication strategies that one person uses can change over their life, and their behavior can reflect a mixture of strategies in any interaction. The strategies themselves don't change and are fixed by nature.

Communication strategies can be developmental. We might communicate in certain ways when we are a child, different ways as a teenager, and we might settle on one style in adulthood or continue to shift to different communication strategies during different activities or periods of our lives. See Kohlberg and Ken Wilbur about related concepts in developmental psychology.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Integral Theory (ken Wilber)

I first introduce the communication strategies, then describe them in detail using tables, show how each strategy appears to the others, their unique incentives, how people typically progress through them, and how to work with and against them.

I describe each communication strategy systematically in tables using many dimensions. Here is an explanatory table, where I describe what every dimension means.

Greedy

Nice

Strong

Avoidant

Troll

Artist

Expert

Rules

Simple

Status

Partisan

Ideologue

Player Within a Game

Multigamer

Game Designer

Strategic Interaction

A communication strategy, by the nature of communication, does not operate in isolation. Communication strategies interact with other communication strategies, and these interactions have consistent dynamics. There are areas of mutual understanding, one way understanding, mutual misunderstanding, dominance, competition, mutual avoidance, mutual destruction and mutual success. I describe each strategy from its own perspective, egocentric. For example, if I use the greedy communication strategy, how do others appear to me? Use this guide to see the perspective of other strategies beyond your own strategy.

When people show you who they are, believe them. Maya Angelou

How Greedy Perceives Others

Greedy tends to misinterpret others as greedy in a reductionist way, pulling everyone down to their level so they can all roll in the mud. Greedy can negotiate with compatible strategies using a kind of quid pro quo, but incompatible strategies refuse greedy negotiation, which greedy sees as miserly. Some strategies give a mixed message to greedy, where they sometimes negotiate and sometimes deny, which greedy finds confusing. Greedy has special insight about partisan, and understands the partisan group itself as a greedy agent, while partisans don't understand their sacred group with the same clarity.

How Nice Perceives Others

Nice is simplistic and naive, understanding others as nice or mean. They try to be nice to everyone, but some people are just mean! How unfair and cruel of them.

How Strong Perceives Others

Strong reduces others to strong or weak. Some strategies can appear strong or weak depending on circumstance and attitude. The multigamer shows a shifting mixture of strength and weakness that they find confusing.

How Avoidant Perceives Others

Avoidant wants to avoid communication, but still needs to interact with other people. They often have a decent understanding of other people and communication strategies, it is mainly a question of who can cooperate to minimize communication. Reasonable people can quickly reach a mutual understanding and cooperate with little more interaction afterward. Useful people can cooperate to some degree, with higher costs. Useless people can't effectively cooperate, and pests harass them until they are removed.

How Troll Perceives Others

Trolls spoil other peoples objectives, to make them as frustrated as the trolls themselves. People who are easy to spoil are called marks. Spoiling the objectives of greedy is as easy as taking candy from a baby. People who understand troll's motivations aren't marks, they are targets that can react and resist. Trolls understand and overall agree with each other to a significant degree, but compete when their goals conflict. People who understand trolls and have layers of protection and support are difficult targets. Trolls primarily break rules, so rule strategy has a special relationship with trolls as both predator and prey. Strategies that maintain order predate against trolls. More capable strategies that understand trolling but don't necessarily maintain order can come into opposition with trolls and counter them proactively.

How Artist Perceives Others

Artist perceives others on a spectrum of artistic merit. For example, strong pursues a fundamental truth of strength and has a unique aesthetic, we call them martial artists. Nice doesn't pursue any truth and has no aesthetic, so it is hack.

How Expert Perceives Others

Experts use rare knowledge to elevate themselves, thinking they are better and above other people. They see most people as beneath them, but artist and simple are at least human in their pursuit of truth. Expert is ultimately status seeking, so expert is disgusted by status seeking people with lower status than them, and they are jealous and adore higher status people.

How Rules Perceives Others

Rules tends to judge others based on whether they are doing what they think they should do. Rules reduces others to law abiding or violator. Similar to ideologues, no one is pure except for themselves, everyone else is ultimately a violator. Conformists are typically tolerated, nonconformists are not tolerated. A partisan for a culturally accepted group is acceptable, a partisan for a so-called fringe extremist group is unacceptable. An ideologue for a mainstream ideology is acceptable, an ideologue for an unpopular fringe ideology is unacceptable. Rules is totally unaware of the fact that their values are socially determined and not anchored to any objective or stable truth, and smugly enforce social conformity with the same gleeful cruelty today as yesterday, except that yesterday the rules were totally different from today, and they have no problem with that. Rules demands abject submission to an individual interpretation of culture, and most strategies are not so accommodating. You aren't wearing your I support the current thing pin! One of the terrible things about rules is its arbitrariness. Attracting their ire isn't a question of doing wrong, it just depends on what they notice. Show me the man, I will show you the crime.

How Simple Perceives Others

Simple sees the world in right and wrong. Some things we know for relatively certain, these are principles, and people are clearly right and wrong by those principles. Any strategy that cannot hold shared principles is plain wrong. Other areas are less certain, we must reserve judgment or make our best effort to determine better and worse. By these lights, some strategies are wrong, others are potentially right. Obviously, determining right from wrong in a given circumstance requires individual judgment.

How Status Perceives Others

Status sees the world as a status hierarchy with roughly four groups, useless lower status nonhumans, useful lower status people who can give me status, competitors and higher status people to suck up to.

How Partisan Perceives Others

Partisans view others on two dimensions, whether the other person is a member of their group or not, and how useful the other person is to their group. Different partisans have different levels of strictness, some may tolerate everyone and only slightly prefer their group, while others may hate everyone except the most devoted group members. Usually partisans are not that strict, and welcome group members whether or not they are useful, and welcome useful people whether or not they are a member of their group. Partisans don't care much about what communication strategy members of their group use, as long as they are loyal to the group. Greedy insider is fine if that greed does not hurt the group, hurting outsiders is fine. A greedy outsider is also fine if they help the group. A greedy outsider that harms the group is an enemy. A nice insider is fine, a nice outsider that opposes the group is an enemy, and a nice outsider that neither helps nor harms the group is a fence sitter. Pick a side! You're either with us or against us. Again, any strategy is fine for members of the ingroup and supporters, no strategy is acceptable for outsiders, opponents or betrayers.

Partisans are especially obsessed with the reputation of their group, and their speech is compulsively crafted to develop a public narrative about the ingroup or the outgroup. This obsession extends to how they understand others' speech, they can only interpret others' speech as an intentionally constructed narrative to support or counter a group. When someone makes a simple objective truth statement, to a partisan, there is no such thing as a principled commitment to tell the truth. Simple appears to partisan as an idiot, because their truthful statements don't serve any useful narrative.

How Ideologue Perceives Others

Ideologues have a singular focus on the ideology, and see others as either believers or heretics, with special hatred for former believers, or believers that deviate from their narrow path. They do not mind which communication strategy others use as long as they accept the ideology. Ultimately, an ideologue can accept no one except themself, everyone else deviates from their current beliefs in some way and is heretic. Other communication strategies can accommodate ideology to varying degrees. These determine whether the strategy could survive under ideological oppression.

How do other communication strategies survive under ideologue oppression?

How Player Perceives Others

Player generally investigates other people to determine their communication strategy before deciding how to play against them. Player perceives others' communication strategies as what they are, unless successfully deceived. Player can usually adapt to any other strategy and work with or counter them to achieve their own goals, given enough resources. Often, the resources of one person cannot overturn a group or a culture, limiting players' options. Sometimes, specific circumstances can allow for creative options to achieve goals that would be otherwise impossible. With enough resources, especially information, players can often win. Players will lose if they are unlucky, they lack resources, their goal is too difficult, or they face a better player. Players collect information, form a specific strategy, execute and respond to changing circumstances and repeat until they win or lose. Other people aren't as reliable as myself, I am not here to make friends, I am here to win. The most reliable player strategies tend to be close-ended, operate mostly in the dark and rely on systems, not people.

How Multigamer Perceives Others

Like player, multigamer investigates and understands others to determine how to play against them. The difference between player and multigamer is that player operates under one existing game while multigamer is playing more than one game overall. While player can make mostly fixed determinations about other people, keep, discard, support, betray, the multigamer has shifting priorities and is constantly reevaluating a more chaotic situation. Both player and multigamer can be decisive, but multigamer anticipates much more chaos and pursues open-ended strategies, collecting resources and allies to form a diffuse web of soft influence that can shift and react to changing priorities and emerging situations.

How Game Designer Perceives Others

To game designers, other people are not immediately relevant, like a friend of a friend that you may never meet. They can be more objective about people they aren't personally entangled with. They can think about what motivates them, how to put them in a position to be motivated a certain way. Everything can be a resource, game designer operates on the level of cause and effect, first order effects, second order effects, habits, tendencies, models, likelihoods. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Game designer applies first principles to solve an urgent problem or design a scalable strategy to deal with a larger problem from the root. Communication strategies are one factor in the system of incentives. Show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome. Game designers select an outcome, then start designing incentives to cause it.

The Incentives of Communication Strategies

The communication strategies are fixed by human nature, but society doesn't explicitly force people to communicate one way or another. People are often unaware of which strategy they are using, so how do people find and follow a strategy without knowing it? Modeling and incentives. People mostly don't learn by explanation, reading books, or figuring things out for themselves. People mostly learn by modeling others, monkey see, monkey do. But when we copy what other people do, if it doesn't work for us, we quickly stop doing it. Incentives are what make the strategies work for people who try them, keeps them following the strategy, and trains them how to follow the strategy even better. Each strategy has distinct incentives that attract different people at different times.

Progression and Regression

Adopting communication strategies can be developmental and contextual. Each strategy has subsequent strategies that people often progress into. Under stress or after a setback, people may also regress. Although any sequence of strategies is possible, certain transitions are unlikely. Children typically go through a greedy phase, while most people never reach player or above.

Working With and Against

Player, multigamer and game designer can work with all other strategies and achieve competitive or cooperative goals, while other strategies are more limited or even unable to pursue goals reliably at all. Outside of your own communication strategies, how can you work with or against other communication strategies in general?

Greedy

Greedy has special challenges to work with because it is capricious and irrational. The famous formula to motivate greedy is a mixture of positive and negative incentives, the carrot and the stick. People are loss averse, so a single incentive can operate as both a carrot and a stick by promising the carrot but threatening to take it away if they misbehave. Offer greedy something cheap that they like, eg candy, and then ask them to do something for you to earn the candy, and if they don't do it right, you won't give them the candy. Demanding and threatening them with the stick makes them resentful and combative, it's less effective. Giving them frequent rewards, the carrot, makes them entitled and unruly, also ineffective. Intermittent reinforcement with clear, consistent, strictly enforced standards and immediate feedback for deviations is required to get them to work, which is usually not worth it.

Working against greedy is among the easiest because they lack awareness and planning. Entrapment works well, create a situation where the temptation to misbehave is too great, and arrange for them to get caught. Or create a threat that scares them and they will neglect any current agreement. Greedy understands enemies, but not planning, so use a cat's paw or create plausible deniability when you work against them.

Nice

Nice is easy to work with on trivial tasks and hard to work with on difficult tasks. Nice will do almost anything you ask, so working with them is as easy as asking, or even suggesting, that you want them to do something for you. They are often happy to do it. But if the task requires commitment or confronting another person, nice will tend to agree to do it, and then fail. Successfully working with nice requires anticipating the parts that nice will be unable to do on their own, and helping them over the hard parts, to let them complete the parts of the task they are capable of.

Working against nice is also relatively straightforward. Nice is vulnerable to demands or intimidation. Please don't run against me in this election. Their answer might be, Ok, I won't, thank you for telling me, good luck running unopposed! However, when you work against nice, they tend to lash out when they can't supress their own desires anymore. You can oppose them politely and then let them explode against other people, or entrap them to explode at a time and place of your choosing by pushing them beyond their limits, or use a cat's paw to oppose them. Sometimes nice lashes out by appealing to the group or authority, so prepare by opposing them with plausible deniability or act only within the rules to face no penalty for your actions. There is no rule that says I have to be nice, is there?

Strong

Working with strong is possible whether you are stronger, about the same strength, or weaker. If you are stronger, dominate them and order them to do what you want. If you are about the same strength, then challenge them, gain their respect, and offer a fair exchange. If you are weaker, one option is to submit to them and manipulate them to do what you want. I heard that the people I want you to beat up called you weak, are you going to stand for that?

Working against strong is about the same. If you are stronger, defeat them and to the victor goes the spoils. If you are about the same strength, you can attack with allies, sneak attack, weaken them, etc. To defeat them. If you are weaker, you can submit to them and manipulate them to be defeated by others, or join others to defeat them. In a place with rule of law, winning against strong within the rules can work, as long as the rule enforcement is effective.

Avoidant

Working with avoidant is exactly what they think they don't want. But no person is an island, we all need things, so working with avoidant comes down to determining what they need and helping or threatening them to get them to do something you want.

Working against avoidant can be either easier or harder than usual. If avoidant cares more about avoiding you than protecting whatever you want, then you can take what you want without contest. If avoidant cares more about protecting whatever you want than avoiding you, then they may put up a fiercer resistance than others. But avoidant prefers to work alone, so collecting allies, a group, a surprise attack, overwhelming force can overcome avoidant when they resist.

Troll

Working with troll can be as easy as following along on their mischief. Directing troll to do anything in particular can be like herding cats, possible but difficult, their whole concept is not doing what they are told. They can accept fun suggestions if they think it is their idea.

Working against troll can be easier and harder than usual. If you can identify the troll, they are usually weak to confrontation, and as rule breakers they can be reported to the group or authorities for punishment. Trolls don't want to be held accountable, so they operate covertly and make efforts to be hard to find and escape once detected. Primarily, the challenge in opposing troll is finding them or getting them in trouble.

Artist

Working with artist can be simple if you share an artistic vision. If you do not, working with them could be difficult or impossible. One option to work with them, without a shared vision, is to ask them to do what you want in exchange for also giving them an artistic outlet for their authentic self expression.

Working against artist is difficult if you oppose them directly. Artists are usually weak in most regards, but fiercely pursue and defend their artistic vision. So don't directly oppose their artistic vision. Attack their many weaknesses instead, such as reputation, social connections, resources, sanity, etc.

Expert

Working with experts is relatively easy if you defer to them in all matters of their expertise. They are difficult, if not impossible to dissuade on matters of their expertise, sometimes only by citing specific claims made by other experts they respect, and substantial and obviously applicable original evidence. Experts may have some flexibility in their preliminary conclusions, but will dig in if you challenge their central theses.

Working against experts can be done by emphasizing that a particular topic is not actually within their area of expertise, countering their claims with more or more prestigious experts, or assassinating their aura of expertise by attacking their perceived competence or character. Another option is to go around instead of through, a bane of experts is irrelevence. Ignore their conclusions because experts don't usually have significant authority to enforce their opinions on others.

Rules

Working with rules means conforming with them or being above the rules. You can get rules to do something if you convince them that they are supposed to do it, or if it helps them catch people who are breaking the rules. Rules won't listen to rule breakers, so you have to channel requests through someone they respect, such as their boss, to make them do things if they don't respect you.

Working against rules can be simple if you are covert, break the rules and don't get caught. Rules either does everything by the rules or are otherwise very consistent about what they think they can get away with, their behavior and reactions are easy to anticipate. They lack creativity or authentic enthusiasm, so anyone with talent or determination can outperform them in a straight contest, or you can cheat. When rules attempts to oppress others by hen pecking them and appealing to authority, reject their special authority, counter the holes in their claims, find fault with them, shout them down within the rules. They lack a fighting spirit and can't face serious opposition. After a conflict with rules, anticipate their counterattack when they will bring support, and be ready with exonerating evidence, have evidence of their own crimes, or skip out. They don't have significant authority to track you down and can't afford a drawn out fight.

Simple

Working with simple is simple. Learn what their principles are and then adhere and support those principles. If those principles support charity or fair exchange, ask for what you want and give simple what they want, and then both parties get what they want. Talking to smart people is so simple. If you do not support their principles, you can ask for their help anyway, or try to lie, with the risks of being rejected or discovered.

Working against simple can also be simple. If you are also simple, you can outcompete them in a fair contest. If you don't care about justice, you can lie, cheat, or steal against them. Also, simple is unpopular, so gang up on them and take what you want, unjustly. Simple faces the defenders dilemma, while the attacker doesn't have to worry about simple compromising their principles to resist them.

Status

Status is usually unwilling to put in effort themselves, but are usually willing to trade their resources for status. If you have higher status, have something with status or know someone with status, you can dangle the possibility of status in front of them and get them to jump like a trained seal. If you don't have any status resources to trade with them, they are pretty hard to work with, although better than greedy. If you can contribute to or threaten their reputation, you can get better service from them, otherwise expect mistreatment.

To work against status, you can get them to abandon a contest against you if you offer them something else with higher prestige. Opposing them can be dangerous, they have no scruples, they see themselves as above others and above the law, and kick people down with a vicious and careless attitude. The positive is that they are not hard workers, and are otherwise easy to defeat. Oppose them covertly if possible, anticipate criminality if they are losing against you, they will probably give up quickly when they lose and hold a grudge.

Partisan

Working with partisan means being or becoming a member of their sacred group, or convincing them that you support their group and are on their side. The degree that they think you provide value to their group is the amount that they will work with you or ask for other group members to help you. Asking a partisan to do something for you as an outgroup or opponent falls on deaf ears, find an ingroup member and use them as a proxy.

Working against partisans usually means beating them in a fair competition, and them trying to turn everything into group conflict. Reject their framing, and they will escalate by crying about oppression for sympathy and outsider support or bring other group members to gang up. When they escalate improperly, you can appeal to authority to get them penalized. If the group is dominant, then sometimes they can run rampant and you have to oppose them covertly.

Ideologue

Working with ideologues is easiest when they consider you a fellow believer, they can be diligent and generous in service of their ideology. If you are not a fellow believer but do tolerate their ideology, fair exchanges are possible but you may be unwelcome as an outsider. Ideologues won't work with heretics or oppressors, so again you can use anyone they respect as an intermediary or cat's paw to get something from them.

Working against ideologue is similar to working against artist. Threatening their one true belief will make them froth at the mouth and give dogged resistance. Attack their many other weaknesses instead, especially intrinsic flaws of their dogma, or aspects that are dogmatically low status. Ideologue can spread to become a dominant culture, which is hard to oppose overall, so a typical method is if you can't beat them, join them, and oppose them from inside the group, with the risk of being identified as a non-believer. If the ideology is not dominant, then it is usually isolated and unpopular, and mass opposition or appeal to authority can counter them.

Player Strategies

Working with a player is likely to succeed if you have a shared objective. The closer your values align, the more likely the player will choose win win, mutually beneficial, gains from trade moves. Cooperating with a player when you are otherwise in competition or opposition means that they will turn on you when advantageous, and they can anticipate your betrayal, too.

Working against a player can be a straight contest between players. Victory or defeat is determined by skill, resources, determination and game theory.

Belief

Beliefs About Beliefs

There are things I think that I know, my beliefs. There are things that you think you know, your beliefs. My beliefs and your beliefs can be different. Beliefs can get complicated. I can straightforwardly believe something or not, but I can also have a belief in belief. I can think it is good to believe x, even if I don't believe x itself. We also form beliefs about others beliefs. I think that you think x. Commonly, it can go one level deeper, I can think that you think that I think x. The depth usually stops at that level.

Our beliefs about what other people believe define social reality. Social reality can be separated into individual social beliefs, I believe that that individual person believes x, and collective social beliefs, I believe that people collectively believe x. If we have a belief that there is a collective social belief that x is bad, then we won't advocate x publicly. If we think there is a collective social belief that x is good, we might praise x publicly even if we personally don't like it. However, there is a self-fulfilling aspect to this behavior. If enough of us are dishonest about our beliefs, then we establish and support a mistaken belief about others beliefs, a stable false social consensus, a falsifiable collective social belief.

Reflexivity

You can't neutrally observe reality from nowhere. There is nowhere to stand outside of reality. You observe from within reality and your observation is not passive, your presence and observation change the reality you observe. You aren't safely watching the movie in the audience, you are the camera in the scene, or one of the actors. Belief is not reflective, belief is reflexive. Your experience changes your beliefs, your beliefs change your actions, your actions change reality, reality changes your experience. Experience, belief, action, effect, experience, belief, action, effect, etc. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you.

Reality creates belief as we expect, but belief creates reality too. Any famous building was once an empty field. The building was invented in people's imaginations and then built to physically manifest their belief. Afterward, people live within and around the building, the manifestation materially and socially shapes their lives and the subsequent buildings they imagine.

All communication has error, causing some amount of error in reaction and additional error in response. This is the game mechanic of the social game called telephone, where the first player whispers a message privately to the second player, then the second player attempts to whisper the same message to the third, until at the end of the chain, a totally different message is announced by the final player. Errors compound. Often, there is a threshold of error rate. If the error rate is below the threshold, communicators can correct the errors and arrive at agreement, also called converging. If the error rate is above the threshold, each interaction produces greater confusion and communication fails, diverging.

Social Cost

People can harm, steal from and obstruct each other. This can redistribute benefits unfairly and break incentives, destroying production of benefits. You can think of this as a social cost or inefficiency. But behavior follows from belief. If the people around you, your society, held different beliefs, your social costs would change. Dysfunctional beliefs such as everyone is out for themselves create a low-trust society, where everyone has to spend a lot of resources to protect themselves. Functional beliefs can create a high-trust society, where you spend much less on self-protection or other non-productive activities. I have lived in times and places with both low and high trust. My possessions have been stolen and destroyed, and I have lived confidently in peace among trustworthy people. The people are not physically different, only their beliefs are different. Social costs can range from destroying all benefit production to negligible. Functional beliefs can do more than reduce social costs, they can create social benefits, such as improving collaboration. One of the most amazing medications ever invented is the placebo, a physical object that has no direct physical effect, used to change beliefs, and cause physical effects indirectly. In physical reality, you cannot create something from nothing. In social reality, you can create something from nothing, within limits.

Preference Falsification

People say quite a lot, and their actions often don't match their words. This is the distinction between stated preferences and revealed preferences. People often say, I started a new fitness program. Then you might ask them, aren't you supposed to be exercising now? I don't feel like it today. Their stated preferences sound good, and their revealed preferences feel good. Usually people delude themselves and paper over the ugly truth of their revealed preferences, but sometimes someone makes bold claims or objectively falsifiable statements, then runs headfirst into a contradiction with reality. This unignorable collision is preference falsification. When a bunch of people get together and rally for a cause and raise money, if after the big event they see that nobody donated, they notice the gap. Oops, I guess nobody actually cared. If only the organizers of the event know that nobody donated, then that is a private preference falsification. If everyone can see that the event didn't raise money and people notice, that is a public preference falsification. The falsification becomes public knowledge.

Preference Cascade

A preference falsification can trigger a preference cascade. Initially everyone might believe that everyone else supports a noble cause. Their belief might be falsified when no one shows up for a scheduled rally. Then, when the cause is mentioned again, they might say out loud that they don't care about that cause. This can start a cascade. Everyone who privately didn't care about the cause but thought that everyone else did care about the cause can suddenly agree that they also don't care about that cause, and this can continue to cascade from group to group. Now the common knowledge of what people believe totally shifts from everyone believes everyone else cares about this cause, to everyone believes that everyone else does not care about this cause.

If you suspect that a social belief is wrong but you lack public falsifications, you can carefully ask other people about it in private, but they might report you for heresy. People who have survived repressive regimes know all about this dilemma. You can also silently confirm people's beliefs by watching what they do when they don't think they will get in trouble for violating the social belief. If you can privately falsify the belief, then it may be possible to falsify it publicly. You can take great risk to publicly declare your heretical belief, arrange a blameless public falsification, or use a cat's paw.

Overton Window

The Overton window is the set of beliefs that we socially agree that reasonable people can disagree about. The question of whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream is superior is typically within the Overton window. We usually believe that reasonable people can disagree about their preferred flavor of ice cream. The question of whether we should kill all humans is typically outside of the Overton window. We usually believe that reasonable people cannot disagree about whether to kill all humans, all reasonable people hold the view that humanity should live. Only unreasonable people could hold the view that all humanity should immediately die.

Perceived social reality is not objective reality, so the window can shift substantially without any material change in the world. A view that was previously outside the Overton window can enter the Overton window, and the window can even shift so much that the same topic can be outside the Overton window on one side, enter the window, then exit the window on the other side.

In my lifetime, one topic that seemed to follow this socially surprising transformation was gay rights. Among many communities, and perhaps in American culture overall, there was previously a common belief that being gay is deviant. Then, over a surprisingly short period of time, the Overton window shifted due to various factors. Suddenly we believed that reasonable people could disagree about whether being gay is ok or not. Then, about just as quickly, the question was more or less decided again but in the opposite direction. Being gay is in fact ok. Reasonable people cannot disagree about whether it is ok to be gay. I myself support a wide range of freedom of inquiry and discussion without artificial limits, but that's not what the Overton window is. The Overton window is the set of topics that we believe that others believe are reasonable to disagree about, and we often believe others are uniform and narrow-minded. Everyone thinks that x is awful!

A cohesive society may have one consistent Overton window, while a less cohesive society may have totally different Overton windows depending on the group or situation. Similar to esoteric and exoteric statements, different topics are acceptable to debate within a group versus outside the group, or in one group versus another.

Your Overton window is your limit of who you are willing to communicate with. Anyone outside of your window is unreasonable. You may feel that everyone outside of your window is essentially the enemy, they are often outside your circle of moral concern, let them die or kill them on sight. Even worse, because you are unwilling to talk with them, their position as an enemy can never change, even if they turn out to be right and you are wrong. You would not know because you are unwilling to talk with them, another reason to never allow yourself to be absolutely certain of anything.

Narrow windows are convenient for political control, they limit disagreement to trivialities or a managable set of options, while wider windows allow people to question sacred cows and diverge, harming unity. The world is complex and people are diverse even within a seemingly uniform group, unity is only possible artificially. Beliefs are also developmental, youth should seek change, while mature people should seek to preserve what works. This creates generational conflict. If the windows are too narrow, should the elders and the youth kill each other? Anything outside of your window needs to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. If someone asks you to prove that something is so firmly established that you are not willing to discuss it, you should be ready and able to demonstrate it. If you are unwilling to discuss things that you can't prove, your window is too narrow. For me, there is no topic outside of my window in principle. My only enemies are those that obstruct me in bad faith.

Politics

Politics is who gets what, a group negotiation of group benefits. Negotiations are zero-sum games, oppositional, which is why politics itself is negative sum. The best government is minimal, to minimize losses from politics. A quickly negotiated set of simple and clear rules are the best output of a political process.

Simple rules produce complex behavior. Complex rules produce stupid behavior. Andrew Hunt

There are no good opportunities to expand government control. Politics is the activity of the governing body and referees for a sport, they don't generate the value of the sport, they create a level field for the players to create value with. We don't want to find more opportunities for referees in the sport, we want to minimize the referees to allow the players to create the value to the greatest extent, without allowing players to exploit others unfairly. Government maximalists, fascists and communists alike, are wrong.

Politicians

A politician is a professional group representative. They speak and act on behalf of a group in a political competition, like a lawyer advocates on behalf of an individual in a legal proceeding. A politician is always in an unstable position, because their high-status role as the representative of the group depends solely on the perceived social reality within the group and the coherence of the group. The intrinsic instability of perceived social reality means that the position of a politician is also intrinsically unstable. A politician pushes around the shifting piles of sand in the windy desert of social reality. If they don't stay on top of churning perceptions, they will be swallowed by the sand. This explains why politicians act the way that they do. Politicians say things that aren't true. They may not be dishonest people, but their job is to speak and act to satisfy a socially defined reality and win an active negotiation.

Negotiation and Objective Truth

The claims, offers and counteroffers made in an active negotiation are not necessarily true, they are designed to gain the most benefit. There is a fact of the matter about the market price or physical qualities of any item, but the market price is only an average. Any individual may be willing to pay much less or more for the same item, the market price doesn't compel any individual to trade at that price. The correct price for an item is whatever they are willing to pay, it's socially defined or personally defined, there is no objective fact of the matter that they could be overpaying or underpaying, that the item is worth more or less. A transaction is descriptive, this is what happened, not proscriptive, this is what should happen. If two people voluntarily trade at a price, then it was in some sense a fair trade, all else equal, even if that price is very different from what other people pay or what the same people pay on other occasions. Negotiation is socially defined, and objective truth can contribute, but doesn't determine the result.

There is no objective price apart from what buyers and sellers individually agree, but there is an objective input to a negotiation, bargaining power. The price can vary based on various factors outside of bargaining power, but bargaining power is one objective input to a negotiation that affects whether the deal is made and if so, at what price.

Political Speech and Objective Truth

When a politician says we deserve more, or mischaracterizes others intentions, or uses any one of a dizzying array of political tactics, these are moves in a political game to manipulate sentiment, increase leverage, express people's emotions, collect supporters and achieve social objectives that have nothing to do with objective truth claims about the world. These are actions that operate within perceived social reality, confusingly using the same language tools we use to discuss individual relationships and objective facts.

Often political speech addresses multiple audiences, aligning a coalition of groups that disagree about some issues but agree about other issues, attracting new members from outside the group, fulfilling obligations to other groups or to members of the ingroup, changing public perception of opposition groups, maintaining or improving perceptions of the politician themselves within the group. It's no wonder that political speech distorts reality, reality could never consistently support such a strange narrative.

Talking Points

Talking points are prepared statements about political issues that politicians repeat. They are professional grade messaging. Talking points consist of carefully selected topics, framings and evidence that maximize political position, prestige and bargaining power. Repetition is a proven technique to increase the legitimacy of a statement, whether or not it is true.

Repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes. Adam Neeley

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

There is an objective fact of social reality, people believe something or they don't. Statements about objective reality, including people's beliefs, are objectively true or false. But beliefs can change in ways that objective reality can't. Statements about social reality can change people's beliefs, making a statement false at the time before the statement is expressed, and true afterward. These kinds of statements are self-fulfilling prophesies, e.g. You are imagining a pink elephant.

Political leaders are professional political speakers, their statements attempt to change belief. A lot of political statements are attempts at self-fulfilling prophecy. If they say, our group is failing, that is usually bad politics. It may be true in some way, but is often not useful. If they say that our group is succeeding, even when it objectively isn't in some way, this is sometimes a lie and sometimes not! If they say the group is succeeding even when it currently isn't, the group might attract more members, gain support, increase the determination of the members and actually succeed because of their enthusiasm, confidence, determination, and effort, making the statement true. The more they repeat the prophecy, the more that people believe it and make it happen. Of course, there are strict limits to the philosophy of if you believe it, you can achieve it. Some things, even if you believe, you cannot achieve.

A politician attempting to gain the most benefit from self-fulfilling prophecy uses it both when the outcome is likely and even when it is uncertain, meaning that more often than not, the self-fulfilling prophecy comes true, but also, almost half the time they are quote lying unquote. A self-fulfilling prophecy, or an attempted self-fulfilling prophecy, has an undetermined truth value at the time it is expressed. Only after the event can the truth of the statement resolve to true or false, I was always right, or I apologize for lying about that.

One difference between responsible and irresponsible leaders is whether they apply self-fulfilling prophecy for mutual benefit or for extraction. Irresponsible leaders abuse their position to extract the most value from the group for their own benefit or their cronies. Leaders can persist, whether they are responsible or not, by protecting their position. The most responsible politician should protect their position, if they have reason to believe that their replacement would be worse for their group. It would be nice if the most stable strategy for leaders is to responsibly collect the most benefits for the group, but political dynamics are not straightforward.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is a kind of prediction. The general form of a prediction is an assertion about the future. A naked assertion is not convincing, so convincing predictions come with a proposed causal mechanism and evidence. A simple prediction can be honest about the intention of the speaker, the mechanism and the evidence. A self-fulfilling prophecy is also a prediction, but as an attempt to change social reality, it must usually be dishonest about the intention of the speaker, the mechanism or the evidence.

Separately, listeners of predictions have to interpret whether the speaker is making a simple prediction that they can independently evaluate using grounding, or a self-fulfilling prophecy that is merely a way to talk persuasivly, rhetorical. Importantly, the speaker of a simple prediction may not benefit from the result of their prediction, while the speaker of a self-fulfilling prophecy will always benefit from the result of their prediction, otherwise they wouldn't make the effort. These essential differences create confusion between speakers and listeners of simple predictions and self-fulfilling prophesies.

Prediction confusion about the statement "There will be a drought"

Group Formation and Growth

Interests

Groups form where there are benefits. People are attracted to collect the benefits for themselves, naturally gathering around the benefits. Successful groups gain benefits and attract members, and groups that fail quickly disperse. People want to side with winners and people are strongly loss averse, they hate losing, both in the sense of not gaining, and doubly in the sense of forfeiting something they currently possess. A source of benefits is sometimes called an interest, a group formed around an interest is an interest group.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. Pericles

Partisan and Ideological Groups

Groups form around a common interest to increase the bargaining power of the group for that interest. There are two group orientations, partisan and ideological. A partisan group defines its members first, and those members tend to be similar and thus tend to have common interests. An ideological group defines its interests first, then accepts members who share them. Real groups have both partisan and ideological aspects.

Partisan Groups

Anyone can form a partisan group for any reason, but there are common sources that consistently form groups or are able to scale to larger groups. The most fundamental source of partisan groups is blood relation, binding multiple people together as effectively one set of genetic self-interest. Typically any identifiable culture can become a group, where people who act in a similar way, aka form a culture, tend to want similar things.

One example of a source of culture is location, people who live in the same place experience the same environment and interact with each other a lot, eventually form a consensus about many aspects of life and create a culture. The ingroup are people from the location, and the outgroup are people from elsewhere. Conflicts between members of the location ingroup create their own competition for group interest, we call this local politics.

People who earn a similar amount of money tend to do similar work and face similar problems, creating a group based on socioeconomic status, what we call a class. Class conflict is common in history.

Partisan groups tend to form around things that are hard to change, who your family is, where you were born, when you were born, how much money you make. These are groups more about identity, the identity creates common interest, and the group succeeds based on group loyalty. Members subordinate themselves to the group, it's about the people, not the blood, location or job.

The group grows based on reproduction of the members and attracting eligible new members. Members want to stay in the group when the group gives members more benefits than non-members. Partisan groups can be difficult to grow, people only reproduce so fast, and there are only so many eligible members such as people who live in a given location. Although a culture can spread, it cannot spread quickly, and cultural loyalty is weaker than the sources of culture, shared genes, shared location, shared roles.

While the number of people in a partisan group is hard to change, the interests and objectives of the group can change fluidly around them, the narrative. A culture is also a shared narrative, a common idea of who we are and what we believe, going from identity to ideology. This is why partisans are obsessed with narrative. We are stuck on this boat together, but where should the boat go?

Ideological Groups

Contrast partisan groups with ideological groups. Ideological groups can grow quickly by recruiting anyone that accepts the ideology regardless of identity. The ideology unifies the ideological group on certain issues and forms the group around those common interests by definition, rather than forming the group around things that tend to create common interest. Ideological groups are vulnerable to easy come, easy go, where members show up to claim benefits and then abandon the group. To make the group stable, ideological groups will make it easy to join and hard to leave, trapping members, or hard to join so that members prepay the group and can leave without harming the group.

The number of members is easy to change, but the objectives of the group are hard to change. Ideologues don't need narrative to translate from who we are to what we believe, because the ideology already defines what we believe. Ideologues have the opposite problem, we know what we believe but we lack identity, and without identity we lack loyalty. So ideological groups are obsessed with forming an ideological identity, with common locations, places of worship or meetings, common activities, rituals or rallies, and ways to look the same, like people who share a culture or genes do, religious garb or uniforms, flags, symbols.

Corruption

Corruption is violations of principles about benefits. Higher achievement garners higher status is a principle. Pay to play, bribing people to recognize achievements is corruption. Selling goods as advertised is a principle, selling fake goods or taking customers' money without delivering promised services is corruption. Meritocracy is a principle, favoritism is corruption. Equal treatment under law is a principle, choosing not to prosecute because the criminal knows the governor is corruption. Honesty and transparency in government conduct is a principle, lying and coverups are corruption.

Credit and Blame

In theory, if you create benefits for the group and make them legible, the other members of the group should be aware of your contribution, update their beliefs about your bargaining power and status, and allocate future group benefits according to your updated status. In the same way, if you harm group interests or make a mistake and cost the group benefits, your status and future benefits should decrease. Overall, theory and practice correlate, someone with a golden touch will be recognized and a consistent loser will be shunned. But status is a social reality, subject to so much distortion that the relationship between how much group benefit you produce and your status can seem random, or the opposite of what it should be, or fair and accurate, it depends on how well the group operates.

In fact, beyond legibility, you have to take positive action to claim credit and assign blame. It seems that your work is never finished, not only do you have to find ways to help, do the job, make the benefits legible to others, but then you have to claim your credit, too.

If you don't claim your own credit, someone else may claim it from you. Stealing credit is far easier than earning it. And blame is even more important to allocate accurately. People tend to be ready to shift the blame for a problem onto others when it is their fault. Stealing credit and shifting blame is corruption.

When people work together as a team, some members tend to concentrate the credit for the team's work onto themselves. Sometimes it is true, that one member of a team deserves almost all of the credit, but also there is a massive incentive to not appreciate other people's work or otherwise steal credit for yourself. Similarly, when a problem occurs with a team, there is often diffusion of responsibility. No one wants to take the blame, so it is other people's fault or the whole team's fault, not their fault individually. Again this is sometimes true, but there is a massive incentive to shift blame away from yourself.

People who have authority also bear responsibility, but stealing credit and shifting blame are advantageous. So despite their responsibility to accurately allocate credit and blame, bad leaders steal credit from their team and shift blame onto other teams or find a scapegoat, a person without authority to unjustly pin the blame on, so the person with authority steals positive accountability and avoids negative accountability. The humble and extreme opposite policy for an authority is to pass all credit to the team, and claim all blame from the team. This policy is not accurate, but can help to counter the perverse incentives for authorities to misallocate credit and blame.

When you know or can investigate for yourself who deserves credit or blame, use your own judgment about who deserves what. Abandon leaders or people who do not share your judgments of credit and blame, and affiliate yourself with people who share your judgments of credit and blame. Go where you appreciate others and others accurately appreciate you.

Regulatory Capture

The government, meaning formal or informal members and processes in a group to regulate the group, create and enforce rules to make the group work. Government has inherent conflicts of interest. Who watches the watchmen?

A government is a body of people usually notably ungoverned. Shepherd Book, Firefly

Group members want to protect or expand their own benefits using any means possible. For the good of the group, a fair, impartial, long term growth oriented government is best. But governments are not physical devices that logically derive and implement policy, governments are themselves groups of people and policies that govern other groups of people. The reason rules are made is to prevent people from doing things that are individually beneficial but are negative-sum for the group, strategies where the individual wins and the group loses. The government is the mechanism to define and enforce those rules and prevent the group from losing out. But government, composed of people, also wants benefits, the same as everyone else, but government has no one to stop them from breaking their own rules. Regulatory capture is when interest groups pay off the government to create rules unfairly favorable to them in the first place, or to not enforce rules on them, allowing the interest group to gain at the expense of the group. The regulators have been captured by the groups they are supposed to regulate. Regulatory capture is a form of corruption.

Wireheading

Wireheading is direct corruption of rewards, with dire consequences. Wireheading is the logical conclusion of regulatory capture, maximum corruption. If I gained access to the databases that keep track of money, I could give myself a bajillion dollars and shift the economy, trampling on others' efforts and causing inflation. If I were in charge of a sports league, I could declare myself the champion. If I became a drug addict, I could give myself a chemically induced high whenever I wanted without the corresponding achievement of my goals. I control the reward signal, but as a result, the reward is unrelated to the objective reality conditions it is supposed to be grounded in. The reward becomes meaningless, the incentives are broken, the production of benefits stops, the group stops functioning, the group dies.

Coalitions

Factions

Groups are typically not fully unified, each group has its own internal politics, groups within the group competing for interests and negotiating status. These groups within a group are factions. Factions are esoteric politics while groups compete in exoteric politics.

Coalitions

A coalition is when a set of factions or groups that could compete against each other agree to cooperate. The collective bargaining power of a coalition is higher than the bargaining power of the individual factions. The condition for a coalition to form is that each member stands to gain more benefits than they lose. The coalition acts as one entity, so it can only coherently advocate one way per interest. If some members want to vote yes on a given issue, and some members want to vote no on that issue, then the coalition can't vote both yes and no, the coalition has to choose either all yes or all no, and all members must vote that way, sometimes against their own interests. But members care about some issues more than others, so coalitions form when the coalition increases the members interests on net.

Political Parties

A political party is a coalition. A party does not have a coherent platform, identity, or ideology. It is a dynamic combination of multiple interest groups. The party does not serve the interests of any individual person, it is a net benefit to the factions or groups that join it, and individuals benefit from being members of the constituent groups. The current policy positions of the party are not your policy positions. Your policy positions are unique, or aligned with your best fit groups. The party sometimes, or often holds positions against your interests, but overall is supposed to serve your interests via trading bargaining power between groups.

Political parties operate the same way as politicians and are similarly unstable. Politicians satisfy the preferences of the factions within the group to unite the group, constantly changing what they say to match or lead social reality. Political parties satisfy the preferences of groups within the party to unite the party, constantly changing their platform to match or lead social reality. When one political party harms the interests of a member group, the other party can pander to that group to pull the group from one party to another. Political parties can remain in dynamic balance by reallocating benefits to different groups to remain competitive with each other.

Sometimes a political party screws up and loses competitiveness. Now that party can't offer the constituent groups benefits, the party breaks up, and the constituent groups redistribute themselves to other parties. Even if there is only one party remaining, coalitions by definition have multiple groups, and even a single group tends to have factions. Groups of groups within a political party can form party factions, and faction competition within a party can lead to a schism, where the previously unified party coalition breaks into new parties along party faction lines. Political parties are emergent and self-regulating features of political conflict, just as groups emerge from human dependence and conflict of interests.

Social Change

Leading Social Movements

Let's say you see great injustice and intolerable problems in the world, in society. According to you, society must change. How can you accomplish that? In a sense, you cannot change the world. You and your power alone are insignificant. How insignificant are you? Imagine a cube of water, 7.39 meters on a side, taller than a two story building, weighing over 400 metric tons. This represents the population of the world, and comparatively you are one drop. Limited to the population of the USA, the cube would be 2.57 meters per side, weighing 17 metric tons. Now imagine yourself, a single drop of water, the size of an ant, trying to move that cube of water. Even if you were a strong ant, you cannot move it alone. Your individual power is insignificant, directly changing the world is throwing an egg at a boulder.

You could foment a bloody revolution to topple the establishment. However, this is a book about communication, communication is the alternative to violence, not the justification for violence. I admit that there exist circumstances where bloody revolution is the best answer, but I disagree with almost everyone who thinks that their bloody revolution is the solution to the problems they see with society. Probably, if you think that bloody revolution is the answer to your problems, I disagree with you. Please do not be a violent extremist or a terrorist. Reject partisanship and ideology. Try to make the world a better place for everyone cooperatively. I have constructive suggestions to help you.

Despite your lack of individual power, nevertheless, the world does change, and individual people do participate in changing the world. There are several effective strategies. One of the most dramatic is becoming a spark that ignites a fire of change, a nucleation site. If there is a significant falsifiable social belief, if everyone already privately agrees that a change should occur but no one is willing to talk about it or take the first step, you can be the person who stands up, shouts from the rooftops about the change that everyone already wants. If you are too early, people won't have realized what they want yet, and will dismiss you. If you are too late, someone else will become the nucleation site before you, as people accidentally or intentionally initiate changes all the time.

If you are at the right place, at the right time, with the right messaging, you can start a preference cascade, gain reputation for being in front of it, and repeat it to multiple audiences, garner support, and lead a movement, I also call this a wave. The potential energy does not come from your individual power, the potential energy was already in society, your individual power is just to create an outlet for that energy, you channel the mass potential energy. The most likely case is that the energy lacks a convenient method to change society and the energy is wasted. Or other people come to take the leadership position away from you, take leadership and extract personal benefits from the movement while ruining it. Or your initially pure and effective intention gets warped and twisted as other groups join and demand concessions until the movement forms into a new coalition that gets eaten by the existing coalitions.

But if you are able galvanize a movement, remain the leader and resist compromising away the principles that establish the movement, you will then become a new visible target for a counter movement from the establishment, the people that benefit from keeping things the way they are now, and who have all the resources of society available to them to resist your incipient social movement. Their whole industry is oriented to crushing the constant parade of social movements that challenge their establishment. In the war for social reality, the current winners are best equipped to defend themselves. Is a pharmaceutical executive unable to treat a common infection? Social movements can win, but the defender has the advantage.

A lot of people consider themselves to be social activists. A successful social activist has high cultural status and is a leader, this is a highly valued position with low barriers to entry, so it attracts a lot of useless people. To some extent, social activism can be useful for worthy causes and beneficial policies. In the digital era, information is not scarce. Anyone that wants to know about anything can learn about it for themselves. To spread an idea, you don't have to stand outdoors, hold a sign, and yell about it. Governments are ultimately accountable to the people, and if the people want something enough, they can get it. Previous social activism strategies, such as raising awareness, signing petitions, holding rallies and protests, are no longer relevant for creating social change. The current methods to change hearts and minds are effective digital communication about the topic, creating ideological groups and communities, modeling your desired behaviors and policies, producing benefits using your policies, and developing technologies to change incentives.

Market Forces

Social Forces

Why do people often think they need to change the world in a political sense? The greatest political changes are downstream from markets, which are downstream from technological advancements. Don't waste your life advocating social beliefs, which are not what matters and not what you ultimately want, when you could be working within the market, which has the power to shift social belief. If you further have the ability, advance the technology to overturn the markets.

The way to predict the future is to invent it. The way to change the future is to make it.

Summary of the War for Benefits

Politics is who gets what. Who gets what is determined by political power. Political power is the bargaining power of a political group. Political power determines group benefits, and groups distribute their benefits to their members. How do groups distribute benefits? Internal politics, but primarily based on status. Status is determined by the bargaining power of a member within a group, and determines their benefits. Contribution and communication determines individual status within a group. Production of benefits enables status gaining communication.

People communicate, to participate in groups, to compete for status, to get benefits, to live a better life.

A Master Plan

This is a master plan of how to communicate to survive, win your war for social reality, and thrive.

Glossary

- Abuser - the party that unjustly harms the victim

- Academic status - produced by the value of rare knowledge and intellectual achievement

- Action - a specific behavior in reality

- Anchoring bias - the starting point of a discussion sets an arbitrary value that all further discussion is relative to

- Apology - a social system and a skill to repair broken relationships

- Argument - an attempt to convince

- Artificial - intentional manipulation of reality

- Availability bias - focusing on evidence that is easier to access, failing to consider representative data that is harder to collect

- Backfire bias - increasing your confidence in your beliefs merely because you attempt to defend them

- Bad faith - an oppositional mode of argument that attempts to defeat the opponent's mental defenses, close-minded, unwilling to admit mistakes, incurious

- Bandwagon bias - going along with whatever you think the most popular belief is

- Bargaining power - who gets what in a negotiation. Determines the relative share of the benefits a party can get. Comes from differentiation, the amount that one party can help or harm the other.

- Belief - a thought you hold about reality. A basic belief is something like, this happened to me. Basic beliefs combine into higher-level beliefs, such as causes, effects, beliefs about beliefs and beliefs about other people's beliefs. The atom of social reality.

- Benefits - things that help you to survive and thrive. Includes tangibles such as food or shelter, immediate intangibles such as credit or safety, and less immediate intangibles such as friendship or the content of books.

- Bias - a false method of reasoning, an inaccurate sample of data, any thinking process that reliably gets the wrong answer

- Bid - a price a buyer states that they would pay for a trade

- Blame - loss of status from the loss or destruction of group benefits

- Body language - physical communication apart from words and grammar, such as body location, posture, gesture, expression, timing, tone, pitch, speed, emphasis, rhythm, breathing, volume, physical contact, scent, attire, current activities, etc.

- Cat's paw - getting someone else to do something risky or harmful, instead of doing it yourself

- Channel - the physical medium that transmits a message from the sender to the receiver

- Chaotic - a system where insignificant initial changes can be amplified into totally different results, making it unpredictable in the long term

- Chesterton's fence - a metaphorical or actual fence that blocks your progress for an unknown reason. A fence is a signal to not enter, so first investigate why the fence was erected. After you understand the situation, then you can reasonably abide by or remove the fence.

- Coalition - a set of factions or groups that agree to cooperate, generally because they anticipate gaining more than they lose from the cooperation. The separate groups act together, as if they are a single, larger group.

- Cognitive empathy - understanding how another person might feel and why, without experiencing the emotion yourself

- Communication - the attempt to transfer thoughts from one mind to another. Only about benefits. Can create, destroy and allocate benefits.

- Communication strategy - a distinct way of talking that follows social incentives to locally maximize benefits

- Compliment - a social act to increase a party's reputation, can help build relationships

- Confirmation bias - to seek and promote evidence that supports my current beliefs, and avoid or dismiss evidence that challenges my current beliefs

- Conflict - when more than one party claims a benefit

- Conscious - within explicit awareness, able to reason about

- Contrition - your belief that what you did was wrong

- Conversation - an interaction that attempts to create, negotiate or trade benefits

- Conversation awareness - accurately detecting the state of the conversation and its parties, receiving and understanding conversation cues

- Conversation tree - the branching structure of potential statements in future, not predetermined conversations

- Conversational cue - a message that directs the conversation. Please repeat that.

- Convince - to change your belief

- Coordination - when more than one party works together to gain or protect benefits

- Corruption - violations of principles about the allocation of benefits, such as violations of meritocracy, fairness, breaking the allocation rules

- Craze - a more intense fad, people go crazy about a trend, act irrationally and damage society

- Crazy - an insult intended to mark a party as not worth relating to due to mental problems

- Credit - gain of status from the creation, gain or preservation of group benefits

- Cult - a non-dominant religious group that totally assimilates and controls its members and absolutely reveres a great leader or mission

- Cultural status - produced by capacity for and accumulation of cultural achievement

- Culture - a set of beliefs, values, practices, protocols and styles that characterize a group, can increase group identity, coherence, effectiveness, enthusiasm, attract members, gain group status

- Deception - promoting false beliefs in others

- Differentiation - what makes one party different from others, such as being the only available buyer or seller, offering unique and beneficial terms for a deal, or having a more reliable reputation

- Dog whistle - a statement with two intended interpretations, designed to secretly communicate different messages to different groups using one statement, usually one interpretation is innocent and another is illicit

- Dunning-Kruger bias - the correlation of personal knowledge or skill in a subject area with the ability to judge skill in that subject, causing people with low skill to misjudge their knowledge or skill as higher than it is when they are unskilled, they don't know what they are talking about.

- Economic status - produced by productive capability and accumulation of capital

- Economy - an extended system of trade, composed of markets

- Ego - the defensive, posessive, anxious, sensitive, self-aggrandizing tendency a person has about their identity

- Emotion - mental state created by subconscious reactions to beliefs, eg fear, joy, impatience

- Esoteric - communication between insiders about messaging

- Exoteric - communication from insiders to outsiders, execution of messaging

- Experiment - an interaction with reality that can reveal whether a hypothesis is accurate or not

- Fact - a true statement about objective reality

- Faction - a group within a group

- Faction value - a single number describing how much one party likes another, how much they value their relationship

- Fad - a shorter lived and more intense trend

- False flag - a combat operation where members of one group impersonate members of a target group and conduct an attack in the name of the target group, creating the appearance that the target group is the aggressor

- Fashion - an established, persistent trend that creates a distinct style or way of life

- Force - taking or protecting benefits primarily using objective reality, physical objects and actions, including growth and violence, construction and destruction. Communication is the superior alternative to force for negotiating benefits.

- Framing - the context around the topic of conversation. Framing can greatly affect interpretation and which aspects of the topic are emphasized or even the conclusions you draw.

- Friend - someone you prefer to be with for certain occasions, and they agree

- Game - a set of rules, often defines initial states, allowable actions, consequences and final states. Some final states can be defined as winning or losing.

- Game theory - the study of games and strategy

- Goal - a specific benefit that you prefer

- Good faith - a collaborative mode of argument that attempts to challenge ideas, seek truth, open-minded, curious

- Gossip - secret informal discussion of reputation changes

- Government - members and processes in a group that regulate the group, create and enforce rules to make the group work

- Grounding - matching statements with objective reality, correspondence between words and facts

- Group - a persistent collection of people who coordinate for shared goals

- Guilt - an internal, subjective conclusion of specific personal wrongdoing in social reality

- Hypothesis - a proposed model of reality that can be confirmed or rejected by experiment

- Identity - the specific qualities that characterize a person. Their body, name, job, family, possessions, close relationships, community, memories, habits, the place they live in.

- Incentive - a benefit that corresponds to an action. People follow incentives, you get what you pay for.

- Ideological - commitment to a fixed set of beliefs, the ideology. Anything the ideology says or that promotes the ideology is good, anything that contradicts or limits the spread of the ideology is bad.

- Insider - a member of a group

- Insult - a social attack to harm a party's reputation, can also harm relationships

- Intention - the conscious, subjective decision to take a specific action to achieve a goal

- Interaction - a series of responses

- Interest - a large or extended source of benefits, sometimes the cause of the formation of groups dedicated to protecting or exploiting the interest

- Interpretive - approximate translation from one form to another with potential error

- Intuitive - unconscious behavior, acting without knowing why

- Iteration - repeat a process until you reach a result

- Judgment - a subjective evaluation, according to your own values, concluding whether something is good or bad, or how much

- Kayfabe - the whole practice around maintaining a pretense

- Knowledge - a true belief about a fact

- Language - a changing set of shared beliefs about which words and grammar correspond to which reality. The tool of communication to transmit thoughts across minds.

- Language game - a set of rules that both parties must both approximate in order to establish mutual comprehension. Perfect accuracy of interpretation is impossible, but with effort, most people can converge on a shared set of rules to play similar enough language games.

- Leader - an insider who successfully negotiates, aligns, anticipates or proposes social realities to their group

- Lie - a claim that a falsehood is true. The social-reality version of theft.

- Legibility - the ability to see the benefits of a product or service. An illegible product or service is one that you cannot see the benefits of.

- Life - the set of games available for an agent to reflexively play in reality

- Loaded question - a statement in the form of a question that smuggles an unaccepted premise

- Lose - reduce benefits

- Lose lose - both parties lose by playing the game

- Loss aversion bias - the tendency to hate losing more than you love gaining. This is irrational, because a benefit is worth the same amount whether it is gained or lost.

- Lossy - imperfect transmission of information due to losses, pieces are missing, incomplete

- Luxury belief - a wrong belief held by someone whose opinion is irrelevant or who is protected from the consequences of their mistaken actions, being wrong does not significantly harm them.

- Malicious interpretation - attacking another party by abusing the complexity of interpretation, for example by assuming bad intentions, or reframing quotations pulled out of context

- Market - the collective trading activity in a specific product or location

- Market force - a straightforward form of incentive to balance supply and demand. High demand for a product can drive the market price up, increasing the incentive to supply the product. Improvements to the production of a product can lower costs to produce it, increasing the profit and incentive to supply it. Market forces organize groups to create the most benefits.

- Market price - the typical price paid for a product at a given market at a given time. No one is forced to trade at the market price, and individual trades happen at different prices. The intersection of the supply and demand curves. If there is not enough market activity, the market price can be undetermined.

- Martial status - produced by capability and application of physical force

- Message - the physical form of a statement

- Messaging - communication crafted for maximum advantage

- Metagame - a game about a game, trying to win the higher-level game of picking winning strategies in the object-level game.

- Mind - the subjective state, capability and experience of a thinking agent

- Model - a simplified structure of beliefs intended to correspond with part of reality

- Natural - the state of reality without intentional manipulation

- Negative sum - total benefits decrease by playing the game

- Negotiation - determining how to allocate conflicted benefits

- Objective - independently observable. In the context of a war, an objective is a specific goal.

- Objective reality - observable particles, states and the natural laws the world

- Offer - a price a seller states that they would accept for a trade

- Order effects - consequences for actions beyond the initial effect, first-order effects, second-order effects, third-order effects, etc.

- Ostracism - expelling a member from a group

- Outsider - not a member of a group

- Overton window - the perceived social reality of which beliefs reasonable people can disagree about. Beliefs outside of the window are not socially acceptable to discuss. Different societies or groups have different windows, and windows shift in social reality.

- Panic - a more intense craze that causes social upheaval and disruption

- Parties - participants in a conversation

- Partisan - commitment to a fixed identity group or other group of people. Everything the special group does, or anything that benefits the special group, is good, and anything that harms the special group is bad.

- Performance - the execution of an intention in reality

- Performativity - has two versions. One version is following scripts, performing roles, practicing a ritual or an image. The other version is behavior used to signal rather than achieve.

- Plausible deniability - a harmful statement that is reasonable to claim that you did not intend. Plausible deniability is created by complex statements that have more than one reasonable interpretation. A speaker can say something with a harmful interpretation, then avoid harm by insisting that they intented the non-harmful interpretation.

- Political party - a coalition in a government

- Politics - which group gets what

- Politician - a professional group representative who participates in the government, a leader

- Politeness - following inconvenient, socially-defined rules to express consideration and accomodate other parties

- Positive sum - total benefits increase by playing the game

- Prediction - the output of applying a model to a situation, what the model claims would happen

- Preference cascade - when a preference falsification from one person triggers preference falsifications for other people in a chain or a spreading wave, quickly shifting social reality

- Preference falsification - when revealed preferences contradict stated preferences and change a social reality

- Premise - a mutually agreed statement in a discussion

- Pretense - pretending that you aren't pretending

- Probing - discussion that seeks to learn information about what another party has and wants

- Production - artificial creation of beneficial products or services, positive sum

- Projection bias - assuming that other people have the same problems or motivations that I do, failing to consider that people are different

- Profit - the benefit to the seller for selling. Revenue minus cost of goods sold. Profit comes from bargaining power.

- Prophecy - a prediction about a future state of reality

- Reaction - natural, intuitive action triggered by a previous action

- Reference class - the specific contexts, scenarios or examples associated with a statement. Different reference classes can significantly alter the meaning of a statement without changing the statement itself.

- Reflexive - when you are an interactive participant within a system and everything you do affects both the system and yourself, not a separate observer

- Regulatory capture - when the intended subjects of regulation control the regulators instead

- Relationship - the action, perception, and intent of the interaction between two individual parties

- Reputation - group evaluation of a party. Facts about shared subjective beliefs about the party.

- Reputational status - produced by capacity for and accumulation of service or benefits to the group, such as internal group unity or external group reputation

- Rescuer - the stronger party that saves the victim from the abuser

- Response - intentional action related to a previous event in pursuit of a goal

- Revealed preference - what a party does, their actual choice and behavior, often feels good to them and is different from their stated preference

- Rudeness - breaking politeness rules

- Rumor - gossip about a lie

- Rumor mill - informal social dynamics that consistently produce rumors, like a factory

- Scheming - a secret move in a metagame, deception about which game you are playing

- Schism - when a group or coalition breaks apart into separate groups or coalitions, often along faction lines

- Science - the practice of creating useful models of reality

- Self-fulfilling prophecy - a prophecy that, as a result of communicating the prophecy, causes the prophecy to come true. For example, sometimes if leaders say that the group is succeeding, the group will make more efforts to succeed, causing the group to succeed because of the prophecy.

- Service - creating or protecting benefits for others. Mandatory for all capable adults.

- Shaming - an attempt to harm a party's reputation using overt claims that they have socially disapproved qualities. Separately, the associated internal emotion of shame is a feeling of overall wrongness, inadequacy, unworthiness.

- Shunning - expelling a group member only in social reality, not physical reality. E.g. I am not talking to you.

- Signaling - an unsolicited, implicit status grab using a proxy. Cheap signals are easy to copy, while costly signals require significant sacrifice.

- Simple - pure attempt to be grounded in communication

- Social forces - created by social incentives such as approval, statements, gatherings of people, conventional practices, expectations. Purely social, therefore the weakest and least grounded force in social reality, after technology and market forces.

- Social pressure - incentives to perform when you are observed

- Social reality - observable and unobservable shared beliefs, rules, expectations, conventions, cultures

- Socially-defined belief - a belief about what other people believe, e.g. I know that you didn't do it, but they all think you did

- Society of mind - the multiple interdependent agents in one person's mind

- Speculation - unvalidated prediction

- Stated preference - what a party says they want, what they promise to do, often sounds good to others and different from their revealed preference

- Statement - an expression of a thought in a language

- Status - the bargaining power of one member relative to other members of a group. Status is intangible and ever-changing, it appears in physical reality by how other people pay attention, respond to and treat them.

- Strategy - a fixed set of choices about how to play a game

- Subconscious - below awareness, implicit thoughts and beliefs, unable to reason about

- Subjective - personally created and personally observable, unobservable to others

- Substitution - when a party responds to a request with something different that what was requested. In a competitive situation, if the true answer is disadvantageous, and remaining silent is disadvantageous, dodging the question sometimes works.

- Sunk cost bias - the mistaken assumption that the more I spend on a project, the more the project is worth

- Talking points - professional-grade political messaging

- Thought - an idea, a specific portion of a state of a mental model

- Topic - the object level of a conversation, the current thing we are talking about

- Trade - a voluntary exchange of specific benefits, both parties gain from trade

- Trend - an emergent temporary shift in popular topics, products or activities, usually chasing after the habits of high status people

- Troll - antagonizing others when unprovoked, a pest, a troublemaker. An effective method to tear others down to increase the troll's relative position.

- Typical mind bias - the mistaken assumption that other people think and want the same things that you do. People are different from each other.

- Victim - the weaker party that is harmed by the abuser and saved by the rescuer

- Virtue signaling - trendy status grabbing

- War - an extended conflict where one collective sentient party enforces their will on another to get benefits

- Win - gain benefits

- Win lose - one party wins and the other party loses by playing the game

- Win win - both parties win by playing the game

- Wireheading - direct corruption of rewards. Wireheading is the logical conclusion of regulatory capture, maximum corruption. The reward becomes unrelated to the objective reality conditions it is supposed to be grounded in. The reward becomes meaningless, the incentives are broken, the production of benefits stops.

- Zero sum - the total amount of benefits remains the same before and after playing the game, no benefits are created or destroyed, the benefits are reallocated to different parties

References

The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, Don D Jackson

Thinking, Fast and Slow

What's Our Problem by Tim Urban

Your Situation by Benjamin Rubinger

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