Trying to translate when people talk past each other
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.)
Circling as practice for “just be yourself”
I mentioned on Twitter that to a significant extent, Circling taught me what “just be yourself” means to such an extent that I have a consistently good time on dates because I don’t feel like I need to perform. Somebody asked me to elaborate, so here’s what I wrote in response:
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For those who don’t know, Circling is… a practice that’s infamously hard to try to describe or define. That’s because it’s structurally anti-structure and anti-expectation, which is what allows for “being yourself”.
(At least, that’s my experience. There are different schools of it; my experience is from the Circling Europe style and may not apply to others.)
Many activities have rules: “soccer is played by two teams that…”. Circling mostly does not have rules, though it does have principles.
It’s done by people coming together and sharing their experience of what’s happening.
One description is “sharing what it’s like to be you, while finding out what it’s like for others to be themselves”. In any social event, a person will be thinking and feeling many things, and only sharing some of them. Circling is an invitation to share more of one’s experience. For example, if I was at a party, I might have thoughts like
“Oh I’m glad that he said that”
“I’m a little bored by this conversation”
“I think she was annoyed by that comment”
“I have this funny anecdote but I have to wait to say it, I hope the moment doesn’t pass by”
Normally I would keep all of those to myself. But Circling is an invitation to share my experience, so I might say some of them. And it’s also an invitation for me to ask about someone else’s experience, if I e.g. say something and then wonder what they felt about it.
Important caveat: there’s no obligation to share more than what you’re comfortable with. There’s a common misunderstanding of Circling as obligatory openness. But “I don’t want to answer that” is also a sharing of your experience.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not. I once heard someone say that if you’ve Circled once and think that you now know what Circling is like, that’s like having seen a single movie and thinking that you now know what all movies are like.
This is because things may go completely differently in different groups.
In one group, I ignore a question and the conversation moves on.
In another, I ignore a question and someone shares that they appreciate me following my interest.
In another, someone gets annoyed at me.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
- If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
- If it’s quiet, someone should speak up.
- If someone says they’re upset about what someone else said, someone should apologize.
Circling is a group conversation about your current experiences where you all adopt the convention that no statement is ever an implicit bid. E.g. if I say “I feel angry at you”, that usually implies all sorts of bids, like “You should apologize” and “Others should take my side”. In circling everyone agrees to interpret it merely as “I am contributing to the conversation by reporting my current experience”.
This is what makes Circling both freeing and difficult. You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to. But if there are no social conventions dictating what you _should_ say and it’s your own choice, what will you say?
This can be excruciating. A form of Circling that takes the freedom to an extreme is called Surrendered Leadership, where the facilitator imposes minimal control.
If some people want to break off from the rest of the circle and go do their own thing? They can do that.
In one SL event I was at, everyone just arrived and sat down. For several minutes, nobody said anything; there was no intro, no preamble, no nothing.
I forget what someone’s first words were, but they might have been something like “I’m feeling impatient for something to happen”
Someone may have shared their gratitude for having another express the same thing they were feeling, and things went on from there.
I tend to be sensitive to social expectations and things like turn-taking in conversation. With no rules for that, I could speak as much as I wanted, if I was okay with taking the space from others… but I also couldn’t use those rules for guidance on how much to speak, nor could I rely on those rules to make sure that others would give me the space I wanted.
That got excruciating. One part of me wanted to take up space and another wanted to regulate it, but didn’t know how.
But, it also got magical. There’s really no other word to describe it.
Something very peculiar can happen if a brain realizes that none of its normal expectations apply and it has no idea of what to expect. The mind can drop into a state of just not knowing, and simply being open to anything that arises.
With no expectation of being judged by others, there is no fear.
With no expectation of needing to say the right thing, there is no self-judgment.
With no expectation that the next moment will be dull, there is no boredom.
With no expectation that the next moment will be predictable, there is curiosity of what it will be.
It feels like an altered state. I like to imagine it as a throwback to a young child’s state of mind, where experience hasn’t yet calcified perception and everything is novel.
It’s hard to maintain. Any expectation, including “I’m going to be without expectation” will bring in structure that the mind coalesces around. Trying to explicitly maintain it brings in the expectation that it needs to be maintained.
Even in Circling, I’ve experienced it rarely.
But having experienced it, my bodymind carries a memory of the vibe involved. An echo of what it’s like to drop any self-imposed expectations and demands, to drop into a state where I can just report on my experience and share and say what feels natural.
Since then, whenever I’ve been on a date with a stranger, I’ve been able to drop back into that. With no need for the date to lead somewhere in particular. No need to present myself in a particular way. Simply relaxing into a sense of just being and enjoying their company. (And I daresay that they’ve enjoyed those dates, too.)
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At this point, for anyone who thinks that Circling sounds really scary: I’ve focused on describing the most extremely free version of it. I wouldn’t suggest starting out with that. There’s “birthday Circling” with some more structure, that’s easier to begin with.
A good Circling group will also start out with warm-up exercises that help you get into it, so you don’t need to dive into the full thing right away with no idea of what to do or how to be.
(The term “Circling” also got recently trademarked so if you want to try it, it’s also being done under other names like “relatefulness” and “transformational connection” these days.)
My 10-year retrospective on trying SSRIs
In 2014 I got on SSRIs the first time, and they were amazing. I wrote online about how I suddenly had energy to do things, could concentrate on stuff, and generally just felt better and happier.
I now got a message from someone who’d found my writings and was wondering what my experience with antidepressants was now, 10 years later.
I wrote this reply to them, and thought I might as well share it with others:
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Hi, that was indeed me!
I was on SSRIs for about a year after writing that comment, after that it felt like they started losing some of their effect but I also thought I felt better for other reasons, so I stopped using them. Then I was off them for about a year or two and started feeling bad again, so I got back on them. They had similar effects so I kept using them for a year, until I again got to the “I think they’re losing some effect and I’m also feeling better for other reasons” stage, so I again stopped them.
Eventually my old problems started coming back again, but I also started making more progress on those problems with therapy. By this time I had the feeling that even though the SSRIs were great, to some extent they suppressed my problems rather than solving them.
For example, deep down my self-esteem was still based on getting others to like me to an unhealthy extent – of course everyone wants to be liked, but *most* of the things I was doing had some undercurrent of “how could I get others to like me more this way”. The SSRIs didn’t really change that, but they shifted me from being very pessimistic about that ever working, to feeling more hopeful that “okay I just need to do this thing and then more people will like me”, and then I had more energy to keep doing things again. But the things that I was doing, still had an unhealthy obsessiveness going on.
Since then therapy-type approaches have helped me fix more of that underlying issue. (I had one particularly big breakthrough in 2017, which I described here, and a later follow-up to it here.)
I still struggle with some of my old problems – particularly anxiety, loneliness and occasional depression – but quite a lot of them have gotten better to the extent of being non-existent, e.g. my self-esteem is much better and on more healthy ground these days.
On a few occasions when I’ve had particularly rough patches I’ve tried antidepressants again, most recently for a brief period last year, but they don’t seem to have the same effect anymore. Maybe I could have just increased the dose, but I was afraid that that’d make it harder to access the core of the problems therapeutically, if the SSRIs ended up burying it deeper.
I’m still very glad that I originally got on them though, since they viscerally showed me that life could be much better and gave me hope!
One thing worth noting is that at some point, the level of physical pleasure I experience from orgasms seemed to have dropped quite a bit. I’m not entirely sure when exactly that happened – I was single for a while, and then at one point when I got into a relationship again, I noticed that sex with my next partner didn’t feel as satisfying as it did with my previous one (and this never recovered), so the decline must have happened sometime between those two relationships.
I can’t know for sure that it was caused by the SSRIs, but a long-term loss of sexual pleasure is a known side effect and the timing would roughly match. Another side effect that I got, that persisted even after I stopped using them, is grinding teeth at night (but I got a mouth guard from a dentist that prevents the worst off it). Personally I feel like these side effects were worth it – I was really, really badly off when I got on the meds – but I could easily imagine someone feeling differently, if they weren’t equally miserable.
Games of My Childhood: The Troops
The Troops (Finnish “joukot”, could also be translated as “the armies” or “the forces”) was a game of pretend that I played the most with my friend Eero; I believe Aleksi also joined in.
The central premise was that each time that you played a video game and killed, recruited, rescued, built, or otherwise destroyed/obtained an enemy, character, or unit in that game, it went into an alternate dimension where it became loyal to you. In other words, it joined your troops in that dimension. The same was true for buildings that you built or destroyed, equipment that you found or bought, cities that you conquered, etc..
This meant that whenever we were playing a game, we were not just playing a game: we were also accumulating resources that persisted between games. We could also combine resources from different games. For example, I might kill a number of soldiers in a game such as Snake’s Revenge on the NES, and then produce a number of laser rifles in a game such as X-Com for the PC. I could then decide that the soldiers I’d gotten from Snake’s Revenge were now armed with the laser rifles from X-Com, making them significantly tougher.
At first, my and Eero’s troops were separate, and we would occasionally trade units. For example, he had beaten the game Star Wars on the NES and destroyed a Death Star; I had beaten the game Snake’s Revenge and destroyed a Metal Gear, a walking robot armed with nuclear missiles. We agreed to trade one of his Death Stars for one of my Metal Gears. He later commented with amusement that this was probably not a great deal for him, given how much more powerful a Death Star is.
I took these trades seriously. Once, I traded a number of tanks from the NES game Top Gun: The Second Mission for something that I’ve forgotten. After we had already agreed on this trade, I became worried – exactly how many tanks had I destroyed while playing Top Gun? I wasn’t sure if I actually _had_ as many tanks as I had agreed to give to Eero. So then I had to load up the game and start destroying tanks in it, until I was sure that I had at least as many as I had agreed to trade. This clashed against my bedtime, but when I explained the situation to my mom, she somehow agreed to let me play until I had satisfied my objective (though I’m not sure if she really understood what it was all about).
Different games had different scales, which was an obvious problem. Unlike me, Eero wasn’t very much into strategy games. He complained that it wasn’t particularly fair that in a strategy game, you might acquire lots of units such as tanks at the click of a button, while in an action game you might need to spend a lot of time fighting them one by one.
I agreed that this wasn’t fair. But I still wanted to keep the units that I got from the strategy games. I thought that as compensation, units acquired from strategy games would be weaker than corresponding units acquired from action games. How much weaker? Compared to action game units, strategy game units would be able to take one less hit from the weakest weapon in _any_ video game.
Of course this was a ridiculous “weakness” that wasn’t actually any compensation at all. So I’m not sure if I actually ever told Eero of this compensation, since he would obviously have objected. It can be that I just thought of it in my head and figured the matter settled that way, even while feeling slightly guilty about it.
We both knew a bit about programming and used QBASIC to make simple text adventures. By mutual agreement, it was forbidden to just make your own game where you could kill 99999999999999999999 planets at the click of a button, or whatever. However, any units or resources gained from “real” games while using cheat codes or the Game Genie cheating device still counted, because we did cheat a lot and liked to keep those resources. Though I suggested a special case where, if you used a cheat code to instantly create resources from thin air, those didn’t count. I think this was mostly for the Heroes of Might and Magic II cheat code that instantly gave you 5 black dragons, which felt a bit too cheap even for me.
There were some other special case rules too. I think that unique named characters (such as Grand Admiral Thrawn from the PC game Star Wars: Rebellion) could only join your troops once, even if you played the game multiple times. But more generic “unique” units, like the end boss of a particular level, could be acquired many times if they didn’t have very much of a unique personality specified. I think the intent here was just something like, would it feel weird if there were several instances of a particular unit running around? Having several Grand Admiral Thrawns running around would feel weird. But having several different Killer Moth assassins (a level boss from the Batman game for the NES) would not feel weird, we could just think of them as generic Killer Moth assassins. However, troops belonging to different people could each have their own copies of Grand Admiral Thrawn.
Any units acquired directly from a game would always be completely loyal to us, even if that game had some kind of loyalty mechanic where units could become traitors. However, once they were a part of our troops, some of them might have children together. Any children born this way would _not_ be automatically loyal, but would just have their views and loyalties determined by normal psychological factors.
I think it was also so that any units or technology acquired from a game would not need active maintenance or food, but anything that was separately built or otherwise created by our troops would require it.
Eventually me and Eero agreed to join our troops together, so we no longer needed to trade and any games we played would benefit both. (I don’t think we ever thought about what happened to overlapping unique characters when we merged our troops. Possibly they got merged, too.) This led to a common joke when playing a game together – “what use will our troops have for X”, where X was some silly thing that really only made sense within the context of that particular game, or was obviously very underpowered. Later we also merged our troops with those of Aleksi; we also explained this thing to a few other kids in our neighborhood and asked if they wanted to join their troops to ours, and they agreed. This was often an easy gain, since they weren’t actually invested in our game so they might just say “oh okay whatever”, and then we’d have everything from the video games they played.
One kid who we did _not_ join our troops together with was a particular boy who was a bit of a bully. Neither of us liked him very much. Instead, we thought of different ways in which we would attack his troops and completely destroy them. (We never told him about this game nor about the fact that we were destroying his troops within that game, but rather just kept our revenge to ourselves.) I forget most of the different ways in which we destroyed him – nuclear missiles might have been involved in one – but at one point we decided that he had rebuilt his surviving forces in an underwater base. I remember the mental image of us sending submarines to that underwater base and shooting torpedoes right through its windows, destroying it as well.
The scale issue from strategy games caused some other conceptual issues as well. The original idea was that everything we acquired from games, we collected into a single enormous base on a massive planet where the units from everyone’s games went. But what about strategy games like Master of Orion II or Star Wars Rebellion, where you could get entire planets from? Or for that matter games like Civilization II, that would give you cities? I don’t think I ever reached a fully satisfying answer to this question, and instead just concluded that those planets and cities were located “somewhere else” in the Troop Dimension, outside the Main Planet.
I also remember thinking about the fact that different games clearly had different laws of physics (or different laws of magic). How would e.g. technology from two different sci-fi games with different underlying physics work, if they were both brought to the same dimension? The answer I settled on was that each unit would basically create its own pocket universe that moved with it. So that the laws of that universe applied to that unit while laws of other universes applied to other units. I also had some thoughts about how damage by weapons from different universes would be converted to a common scale, but I don’t remember what I concluded about this.
Finally, we ourselves could also travel to the dimension where our troops were located. I don’t think we made much use of this, but I did have a text document where I had compiled a list of various equipment that I personally carried with me while in the Troop Dimension. Some items included various magic items from Might & Magic VI, a portable shield generator from X-Com Apocalypse, a lightsaber from a QBasic “lightsaber creator” program I’d written (slightly bending the prohibition on text adventure gains here), as well as a plasma pistol from either Fallout 2 or the original X-Com. Had to be ready to defend myself, after all.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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