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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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There's a related and well known pattern in relationships, where men focus on fixing things while women talk to feel listened to, understood and valued. Similarly, it's much easier to debate a man and even vehemently call him wrong, and then pat him on the back and grab a beer afterwards. With a woman it usually gets interpreted as an attack on a deep personal level.

I have noticed a similar pattern among people I interact with, but it also overlaps strongly with the divide between those in STEM (especially engineers) and those in more Humanities-adjacent fields.

I like to categorize the patterns of discourse as "n-dimentional social chess". Imagine that you are part of a group of people who together are playing chess against an online opponent. The group discusses strategies for their upcoming move.

  • "Zero-dimensional social chess": you focus solely on the merits of the proposed strategies in defeating the online opponent. It doesn't matter who proposed which strategy; you evaluate each proposed strategy solely on its own merits.

  • "One-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what. You are doing this to help you evaluate the merits of proposed strategies (like, giving more weight to strategies proposed by people with more experience playing chess).

  • "Two-dimensional social chess": you keep track of who said what, and how they said it. You are doing this because you are aware that, within your group, people are jockeying for social status. So you keep track not only of who said what, but what that means for everyone else in terms of social status within the group.

  • "Three-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it). You are doing this because you are aware that the group members are jockeying for social status, and you also assume that they know that everyone else is doing it too. Therefore you expect to see shifting alliances, communicated subtly through the phrasing of support, or withholding support where it was expected.

  • "Four-dimensional social chess": you not only keep track of who said what (and how they said it), but also who didn't say what (and how they didn't say it), but also have a good working theory of the level of n-dimensional social chess that each person in the group is at.

I find that (at least in my social circles) most engineer groups (and majority-male groups) tend to play two-dimensional social chess; most humanities-adjacent groups (and majority-female groups) tend to play three-dimensional social chess. People who move fluently between engineers and humanities circles either play four-dimensional social chess and code-switch, or play one-dimensional social chess and are blissfully unaware of the status games.

The trope of a frustrated girlfriend saying "If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!" would be my example of a situation where the girlfriend by default plays three-dimensional social chess and can't imagine that others (including her boyfriend) don't. So she's definitively not playing at four-dimensional social chess, since she fails to have a good working theory of her boyfriend's level.

[Edit: Edited the lower categories, upon further reflection. Zero-dimensional social chess is just chess, with some pooling of strategies. One-dimensional social chess takes relative expertise into account, but it's still all about the chess. With n>1, the "social" part becomes a competing goal.]

This reminds me a bit of Ben Hoffman's version of Simulacra levels.

Four-dimensional social chess

So which of any group routinely plays Four-dimensional social chess?

"If you don't know what's wrong then I am certainly not going to tell you!"

I view this as the girlfriend trying to force the boyfriend to maintain a detailed model of her emotional state, and to proactively make sure he knows what he needs to do keep her happy. Simply telling him when and what she's unhappy about is much less work for him, but more work for her, and there will inevitably be opportunities to make her happy that neither will notice unless he's paying attention.

That phrasing might sound retarded, and sometimes girlfriends massively overestimate how easy it is to guess their emotional states, but sometimes I think it's a reasonable bid for more consideration.

I view it as the girlfriend trying to get the boyfriend to make her tell him what’s wrong when she doesn’t want to do it voluntarily for whatever reason.

Heh, could be. I have fights with my wife that go: Me: Just tell me what you want! Her: I can't, because you don't want to listen!

Or she just wants to go in a fishing expedition to ready the troops when the next discussion (fight) happens.

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