Trying to translate when people talk past each other

Posted on Dec 17, 2024 in English Essays, English Posts | 0 comments

Sometimes two people are talking past each other, and I try to help them understand each other (with varying degrees of success).

It’s as if they are looking at the same object, but from different angles. Mostly they see the same thing – most of the words have shared meanings. But some key words and assumptions have a different meaning to them.

Often, I find that one person (call them A) has a perspective that’s easier for me to understand. It comes naturally. But B’s perspective is initially harder. So if I want to translate from B to A, I first need to understand B.

I remember a time when I sat listening to two people having a conversation, both getting increasingly agitated and repeating the same points without making progress. Four of us were playing a cooperative board game together. The situation was something like…

(I don’t remember the exact details anymore, and communicating the exact details would require explaining game mechanics that aren’t important in this context, so I’ll give a partially-fictional version that tries to have the same rough shape as the original situation)

We had been making plans about our next move. Person A had promised that they would make a particular play. When the time came, they noticed that there was a better play they could make instead, so they did that. Person B became upset. The conversation went something like:

A: I’ll make this play.
B: What? That’s not what we agreed on.
A: That doesn’t matter – look, this play is better because it has these consequences.
B: You can’t just say that it doesn’t matter, you promised to make a different play.
A: But this play would have a better outcome in terms of what we all want.
B: Yes but you promised to play differently, you can’t just ignore that. Our previous agreement matters.
A: Okay if you don’t want me to play like this, I can still play the way that we originally discussed, too.
B: That’s not the point, you can play the way you intended now.
A: ??? So… It is okay if I make this new move?
B: Yes but my point is that you promised to do the move that we previously discussed.
A: … but that doesn’t matter since the new move is better?
B: It matters! Kaj was counting on you to make the old move, and he needs to be able to count on you when doing plans!
A: But Kaj can just do this other thing instead now, and that’s even better? This is better for both Kaj and everyone than if I did the thing that we originally planned.
B: That’s not my point.
A: I don’t understand, but I can go back to the original plan if you want?
B: No, like I said, you can play in the new way, I don’t care about that.
A: ???

I was listening to this, puzzled. A’s perspective was easy to understand. I didn’t get B’s.

But… B’s objections were not random. They had structure, a consistent shape. I could intuit a rough feel of that shape, even though I didn’t get what exactly that shape was.

A and I were thinking about things in terms of the game. Our previous plan had been aimed at achieving good play. A had come up with a better plan, so it didn’t matter that we had previously planned to do something that turned out to be worse.

But B’s disagreement didn’t seem to be about our actual plays at all. A had even offered to just revert back to the original plan, but B had said that it didn’t matter to them what A would play. Even though this whole argument had started from B objecting to A’s new play? That didn’t seem to make sense…

…not from the perspective that I was currently inhabiting. So I needed to let go of that perspective, try on another…

What was the other perspective? If it wasn’t about the physical world of the game, it was about the social world. Something about promises, trust, being able to rely on another…

Then I had a flash of intuition. B was insisting that what we had agreed upon before was important. A was saying that the previous agreement didn’t matter, because the consequences were the same. That was triggering to B; B perceived it as A saying that he could unilaterally change an agreement if he experienced the consequences to be the same (regardless of whether he had checked for B’s agreement first).

B was saying that it didn’t matter what move they ultimately played, that was all the same, but she needed A to acknowledge that he’d unilaterally changed an agreement, and she needed to be able to trust that A would not do that.

With that, I could imagine another shape behind B’s reaction. Some betrayal in her past, where someone else had unilaterally changed an agreement because they thought the consequences were the same, when they were very much not the same to B, and then rejected B’s objections as invalid… that this situation was now reminding her of.

Viewed from that perspective, everything that B had said suddenly made sense. Indeed, what A actually played or didn’t play wasn’t the point. The point was that, as a matter of principle, A could not unilaterally declare a previous agreement to not matter without checking other people’s opinions first. Even if everyone did happen to agree in this case, sometimes they might not, with much more serious consequences. And if people always had nagging doubts about whether A’s commitments were trustworthy, that would be damaging.

Basically, B needed to know that A wouldn’t become Darth Vader.

So people typically talk past each other because there are two internally consistent, but mutually contradictory, views about what matters. In this case, the views were “how our moves affect the state of the game” and “whether people can be trusted not to unilaterally change previous agreements”. Seeing what’s going on requires being able to grasp both perspectives.

This kind of thing is easier if the conversation has happened over text. Then I can read through the conversation again, try to feel the implicit shape in the different messages… see if my mind could settle on an interpretation that would cause a particular message to make more sense, and then see what happens if I also read the rest of the messages through that interpretation, see if that would reveal more hints of how to interpret them, until the whole thing snaps into place as a logically consistent whole

It doesn’t necessarily always snap into place all at once. Sometimes it’s more like… I have a key intuition of what’s going on. That’s like a central structure made up of several interlocking puzzle pieces. Then I take individual messages – pieces that don’t yet fit the central structure – and turn them around in different ways to see if there was a way to make them fit, until there is nothing left to explain. Often I do that by starting to write an explanation, and gradually find the way to connect the remaining pieces to the explanation.

Understanding both perspectives is one challenge. Then there’s the challenge of translating from one perspective to another. Suppose that C and D are talking past each other. Once I’ve figured out D’s perspective, I cannot simply inhabit it and speak to C from that perspective in order to explain it. That’s what D has been doing all along, and it hasn’t worked!

Suppose that from listening to C and D argue about something that has to do with the Moon, I’m starting to get the sense that D thinks about the Moon as food that you can eat. Now it might be that my mind, anchored in a perspective where the Moon is a piece of rock, immediately rejects this – no you can’t eat the Moon, that’s nonsense. And C’s mind is doing that very same act of immediate rejection.

But if I allow my mind to come loose from that perspective and suspend that objection for a moment, then it might occur to me that “eating the Moon” would make sense if D was actually referring to Moon Cheese. And then with the hypothesis of “when D says Moon, they mean a type of cheese”, suddenly everything snaps into place and makes logical sense.

If I now try to translate to C, I need to stay mostly in D’s perspective to see why their words make sense, while also letting in enough of C’s perspective to see what things don’t make sense to them and what I need to explain.

Sometimes I let in too much of C’s perspective, with the result that D’s perspective in my mind collapses, replaced by C’s. Just as I’m explaining that “when D says this, they mean that they intend to eat the Moon”, I snap back into seeing the Moon as a big rock, and my explanation stops making sense to me. Then I have to pause and bring myself back to D’s perspective.

But if I don’t let in enough of C’s perspective, then I can’t do the translation. If it seems obvious to me that of course you can eat the Moon – and I slip into D’s mindset where “by the Moon, I mean Moon Cheese” becomes so obvious as hardly be worth saying – then C will just find my explanation nonsensical (because of course you can’t eat the Moon, rocks are not edible and it’d be too big for anyone to eat anyway).

Usually what I try to do is to convey a view under which D’s words make sense, and encourage C to try it on. “Look at what they said from this perspective, and now everything makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Sometimes that leads to a breakthrough of mutual understanding. At other times C seems incredulous and doesn’t want to accept the other perspective. Sometimes I myself actually failed to understand what D meant. But usually at least D is happy for finally having been understood, even if C still doesn’t get it.

When C expresses doubts, it’s often like they can kind of grasp the idea intellectually, but they still lack the key intuition that makes the thing *really* make sense. Their response is more like “Well I can kinda see that story if I squint, but still, huh? I don’t really see how that makes sense.”

That’s a little frustrating to me. The thing feels so perfect and logical in my mind, but C still doesn’t really get it. Possibly I could help them out if we continued talking, but often everyone is pretty exhausted at this point and D finally feeling like they were heard resolves enough tension that people can agree to move on. And often D is sufficiently relieved and grateful that it feels worth it anyway, even if it’s a little bittersweet.

(That was the case with the board game. I wish I could end this by saying that at the end I got them both to perfectly understand each other, but alas.)