Tag: analysis

Uncertainty in human social interactions

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

All human interactions entail some uncertainty and most entail a lot.

To deal with uncertainty, humans use heuristics (“rules of thumb”) that generally are based on what they perceive to be normal or required in the situation at hand. These heuristics come from experience, from role models, from organizational structures, beliefs and so on.

A recent study—Uncertainty about social interactions leads to the evolution of social heuristics—explores:

…an evolutionary simulation model, showing that even intermediate uncertainty leads to the evolution of simple cooperation strategies that disregard information about the social interaction (‘social heuristics’).

This study uses simulations to tease out how social heuristics and social cooperation evolve in very simple game scenarios.

If social games have rules, we can change how much uncertainty they contain and how best to cooperate within them.

This is essentially what FIML practice does. FIML greatly reduces interpersonal uncertainty between partners while increasing cooperation by having a few fairly simple rules.

When uncertainty is lowered and cooperation increased between partners, psychological well-being and understanding is proportionally enhanced. This happens because social interaction and communication are basic to human psychology.

The study linked above employs simulations to show a sort mathematically forced evolutionary outcome arising from initial settings. I believe FIML is similar in this respect, though the FIML game involves complex humans rather than simple sims.

I often wonder why no one has discovered the rules of FIML before. So many great thinkers, but not one found these key rules for optimal communication and psychological understanding. I believe there are two basics reasons for this: 1) FIML requires developing dynamic metacognition during real-time real-life communication events and this takes practice; and 2) most great thinkers that we know about today and hence could learn from also had great status, and this prevented them from noticing the deep flaws in interpersonal communication that FIML corrects.

Ambiguity and social hierarchy

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In this post I am going to contend that: linguistic ambiguity tends to lead to or produce hierarchical social systems.

By linguistics, in this context, I just mean language and its uses, though expressions, gestures, roles, and so on can also be factors. Of course, many other things–genes, wars, historical precedents, etc.–also produce hierarchical societies, but today we will just deal with language.

Another way of stating the contention above is: humans have adapted to linguistic ambiguity by forming hierarchies. Or human hierarchical societies have evolved as adaptations to linguistic ambiguity. A stronger way of saying that would be human hierarchical societies have evolved as adaptations to linguistic ambiguity and they exploit ambiguity to maintain themselves.

Another way of saying all that might be to say that in hierarchical societies linguistic ambiguity is good for the top people because it maintains the status quo. This happens because if the ambiguity matters in any way, it is almost always the top people who will decide what it means.

I am going to present a microcosmic example of this point. Please notice as you read this example that this kind of ambiguity is very common. Something like this will occur in your life very often, maybe as often as a few times per hour of conversation, maybe more.

This morning I was cutting some (store-bought) potatoes for breakfast. As I was doing that I said to my partner: “The potatoes from our garden are so much better than these store-bought ones.” All I meant was that. I had no further implication in mind.

My partner (my FIML partner) did a FIML query and asked me: “Did you say that to make me feel good about our garden?” I replied: “No, I did not.” After which she said: “Because if you had I would have felt bad because I was very careful when I bought those potatoes so I would have felt that you were criticizing my shopping.”

This example shows very clearly that the only way to resolve the ambiguity inherent in my statement is to fully discuss the statement–why I said it, what I meant by it, and what I didn’t mean by it. Anything less would leave a puzzle in my partner’s mind.

This example also shows the value of trivial incidents for FIML practice, something we have emphasized many times. That this incident is trivial and small (just a single sentence) makes it perfect material for a FIML query. If the incident were larger, it would be harder to isolate and agree upon data points. As it was, my partner and I were able to clearly remember what I had said and how we both understood that statement very differently. As it was, we were able to clear up the ambiguity very quickly. No, I was not implying criticism. Yes, I do appreciate your careful shopping. Yes, these are excellent store-bought potatoes, but they aren’t as good as the ones we grow in our garden.

Everything was clear and we both experienced a resolution, my partner more than I because I had not initially noticed the ambiguity in my statement or the effect it had on my partner.

That’s a good example of a FIML query. And it is a good example of how a FIML query can lead to an extensive discussion. The extensive discussion in this case is how even very minor ambiguities like the potato incident can lead to or support hierarchical social structures.

In most non-FIML homes, I am pretty sure most people would not have inquired as my partner did. Most people would probably not say anything. Not saying anything would maintain whatever status quo had been established in that home.

If our home were a hierarchy and I were the top dog (and we did not do FIML), my partner would be forced to wonder silently about what I meant about my potato comment. Maybe she would suffer or feel confused or resentful. It is natural for humans to interpret language in a self-centric manner and it is natural (normal) for humans to be a little paranoid about what they hear. If my partner were the top dog and I had said that, she might question me in an aggressive manner or accuse me of being ungrateful. In that case, I would probably be forced to apologize and claim that I hadn’t meant it that way. Going forward, I might become more wary about what I said around her.

So, not inquiring, not resolving small linguistic ambiguities maintains the status quo. If the status quo is a hierarchy, it will be maintained.

If the status quo is not hierarchical, other problems will result from not resolving ambiguities even as small as the potato example. In the example of partners who live together, partners will feel a mounting sense of confusion and uncertainty as ambiguities like that accumulate. It will be harder for them to trust each other. Kind motives may be misinterpreted as being aggressive, and so on. In time, things may get so bad partners will separate or stay together but divide their lives into separate spheres of influence. If they separate, no status quo has been maintained (demonstrating my main point). If they divide their lives into separate spheres of influence, they will essentially be dividing their lives into small hierarchical spheres of influence (ditto). The garden is yours. The basement is mine. Et cetera.

Some hierarchy is inevitable and desirable between friends or in the home. But for close relationships, less hierarchy is better for most people because it is through egalitarian relationships that we learn the most about ourselves and each other, and it is in these sorts of relationships that we develop the most.

In hierarchical societies, generally speaking the person who is higher up decrees the resolution to all ambiguities. Do what the boss says. Just do what you’re told. She’s in charge. He is infallible, etc.

One reason hierarchies get away with decrees like that is it would simply take far too much time to resolve every ambiguity in a perfectly egalitarian way. Thus, almost all humans today are well-adapted to living in hierarchies. I am sort of OK with that in many professional and business contexts.

Where I am not OK with it is between close friends or couples, except for a little bit here and there depending on context (for example, one partner has special knowledge or experience the other doesn’t have). I suppose many people are very content living in a hierarchy in their own home, but that’s not for me. I don’t want my partner obeying me or being afraid of me and I don’t want to obey or be afraid of her either.

From this small potato example, I hope readers will be able to extrapolate to the formations of social groups. Surely social groups formed in many places at many different times. As history moved forward in time, less well-adapted groups were dominated by groups that were better adapted. And that is why the world is run by hierarchies almost everywhere.

One consequence of this is it affects the individual psychology of all of us who live in hierarchical societies. This may make us intolerant of ambiguity. It may make us view our private lives through hierarchical lenses. Without FIML, our massive training in hierarchical systems will lead to confusion and suffering in our private lives. The inevitable ambiguity will eat away at us if we have no way to fully deal with it.

Another consequence of living in hierarchical societies is people who for one reason or another don’t quite understand the rules will often be judged as mentally ill, dangerous, trouble-makers, outlaws, and so on. In very rigid societies you can be sent to a gulag or be burned at the stake for not conforming. In less rigid societies, you will be fired or ostracized.

USA holds the best cards — Kyle Bass

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

4:10 AM · Oct 11, 2025

__________

Also Kyle Bass: ‘The path forward certainly feels like an inevitability of war.’

Bass is fairly reliable and does not have stars in his eyes vis-a-vis China, which is a very good thing.

I would hope USA has other ways to get rare earth minerals.

This move by China has been brewing for a long time and it has been a well-known option all along.

As for BRICS becoming stronger if USA responds vigorously, Bass has this to say:

‘The BRICS are akin to 5 garbage trucks backing into each other. Reserve managers won’t go there and China will collapse in the meantime.’

For decades I have watched Westerners being overly intimidated and/or impressed by China. This is a natural form of what might be called ‘culture shock’.

Everyone who studies Chinese starts out this way, super-enamored. It takes years of study to see their weaknesses and faults; their real humanity.

The best thing China has going for them is ethnic/ racial cohesion.

Sun Yat-sen taught this over one hundred years ago and it has become gospel in all Chinese communities everywhere.

It is a foundational part of Chinese education everywhere.

In the West, we have mistakenly gone the other way and are fast destroying ourselves with endless self-criticism and resignation.

The ‘culture shock’ aspect of this is societies affected by it typically feel despondent, even hopeless because the confronting culture is new and seems indominable.

Japan and China both reacted this way when first confronted by the West.

Japan figured things out more quickly than any other society in the world and succeeded in modernizing without losing their Japanese identity.

China today is still reeling from its self-perceived ‘Century of Humiliation’.

The West today is akin to Japan in, maybe, 1885 in our understanding of the ‘culture shocks’ we are experiencing.

Another big factor in the West is we are infested with powerful and hostile parasitic subcultures, literally high-end gangs, who are actively seeking to destroy us as they feed on us. ABN

The Public Execution of Charlie Kirk — Laurent Guyénot

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While Chris Martenson has, I believe, conducted a conclusive scientific ballistic analysis to prove that the sniper who killed Charlie Kirk was on a different building than the alleged shooting position of Tyler Robinson, other researchers continue to accumulate circumstantial evidence that, in the weeks preceding Kirk’s death, his pro-Israel backers were trying to blackmail and threaten him into abandoning his recent criticism of Israel.

They feared that Kirk would follow the path of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and draw millions of his Gen Z followers behind him.

After inviting Carlson on Turning Point in mid-July, Kirk was thinking of inviting Owens, who is now on the frontline in the battle for the truth about her friend’s “public execution”.

Meanwhile, il is becoming public knowledge that, in the words of “someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk” and spoke to Ron Unz, “everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader.”

Here, I recap what I think are the most important established facts. I have borrowed much from Sam Parker’s long investigative tweets on the subject (here, here and here), and I strongly recommend following him on X.

link

Guyénot is almost always interesting.

In addition to his work, I also recommend Candace Owens on this subject.

She is very good at reasonably analyzing the interplay between individuals and groups and then speculating on what she finds.

The episodes linked below are especially good.

She has a good grasp of the sociology of the groups involved and the probable/ possible motives of individuals therein.

Owens expresses herself clearly and often with scathing humor. She has undeniable rhetorical talent. ABN

TPUSA RESPONDS: Yes, The Text Messages Are Real. | Candace Ep 249

Charlie’s Final Hours. What Else Is Josh Hammer Lying About? | Candace Ep 250

The Unraveling Stillness: Flux as the Hidden Pulse of the Universe — DJCampbell

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The Unraveling Stillness: An Introduction to Flux Wisdom Field Theory

We do not begin with things. We begin with a tautology so fundamental it precedes existence itself: Nothing can’t exist. Perfect, absolute stillness is an unstable fiction; the slightest potential for difference, a whisper in the void, unravels it. This primal instability, this ceaseless becoming, is Flux. It is not a substance moving through space, but the very genesis of space, time, matter, and meaning as an ongoing process.

This is the foundational premise of Flux Wisdom Field Theory (fWFT), a conceptual framework that stretches from the deepest questions in cosmology to the intimate nature of consciousness. It proposes that the universe is not a collection of objects governed by laws, but a self-organizing, self-revising informational structure in constant, creative motion. The theory offers a compelling narrative that seeks to unify the measurable world of physics—addressing concrete problems like the Hubble tension and the nature of dark matter—with the experiential world of life, thought, and wisdom. It reframes reality as an endless dance of ripples on a cosmic pond, where interference gives rise to pattern, and resonance gives rise to form. From the quantum foam to the murmurations of starlings and the flash of human insight, fWFT suggests we are witnessing the same fundamental dynamic: the elegant, infinite unfolding of instability into interaction, and interaction into being.   The Axioms of Becoming The architecture of fWFT rests on a set of five core axioms that describe the behavior of Flux. These are not arbitrary rules imposed from without, but are presented as the intrinsic, unavoidable logic of a universe where true nothingness is impossible.

There cannot be nothing. This is the origin story. A true void, a perfect null state, is a logical contradiction because it has no potential to persist. The universe exists simply because “nothing” is not a stable option.   Flux cannot be still. As a direct consequence of the first axiom, the ground state of reality is one of “never-stillness”. Uniformity is dynamically unstable. A tiny disturbance, a single “wrinkle in the void,” is inevitable and all that is needed to initiate the cosmic dance.   Interaction creates loops. When distinctions arise from the flux, they influence one another. This interplay is not linear; it creates feedback, recursion, and self-referential patterns. These informational “loops” are the seeds of structure, memory, and identity.   Interference produces resonance. As ripples of flux propagate, they overlap. This interference is not mere noise; it is where creation occurs. Waves amplify and cancel, and through this dynamic interplay, stable, self-reinforcing patterns—resonances—emerge from the turbulence. A particle, a planet, or an idea are all forms of resonance.   Resonance decays, seeding further ripples. No structure is permanent. As resonant patterns eventually decay, they don’t simply vanish. They dissipate back into the field, releasing their stored information and energy as new, smaller-scale fluctuations that seed the next generation of structure.

These axioms depict a universe that is perpetually bootstrapping itself into existence. It is not a machine set in motion long ago, but a living, breathing process of continuous creation and dissolution, where every ending is a new beginning.

Continue reading “The Unraveling Stillness: Flux as the Hidden Pulse of the Universe — DJCampbell” →

I said on the day of the Qatari strike that the attack will be great for Palestine. Since then we’ve seen an aggressive systematic overturn on Israel’s interests — Evan

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I said on the day of the Qatari strike that the attack will be great for Palestine. Since then we’ve seen an aggressive systematic overturn on Israel’s interests.

This is a great article. Everyone should read it.

I’ve copy pasted here as its behind a paywall;

Two weeks before he went to the US to discuss a Donald Trump-backed plan to end the war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of his far-right followers in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and made a vow. “There will be no Palestinian state,” he said. “This place is ours.” Now, sitting in a hotel room in New York with his closest advisers and US interlocutors, he was looking at a draft document for a peace plan that ended with the exact opposite: a “credible pathway”, however vague, to a future Palestinian state. “The sting was in the tail,” said a person briefed on the meeting, which took place in late September. “It felt like a final betrayal.”

It wasn’t the only sting. Trump’s draft document was the result of a frantic round of lobbying by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other influential Arab and Muslim countries, that also tapped into the president’s anger over Israel’s September 9 strike targeting Hamas’s political negotiators in Doha. The diplomatic push was also aided by the renewed influence of Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner. Their goal, said people involved in the process, was to deliver for the US president twin political and personal ambitions. Trump wanted to secure the release of the 48 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, end the war in Gaza and also keep alive his dream of brokering a grand rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The timing was not arbitrary, said two Israeli officials involved in the talks. Trump made clear that he wanted the war to end by the second anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the conflict. The Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump covets, will also be announced this month.

“From very early on, Trump understood that the hostages are the keys that open all doors in the Middle East,” said a former Israeli diplomat who liaised with Washington on behalf of the captives’ families.

Trump had met with released hostages, knew some by name, and followed their recovery from months in captivity — a personal connection far surpassing that of Netanyahu. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, texts regularly with the families waiting for their loved ones. But to get all the hostages out at once, and set his grand plan for the Middle East in motion, Trump needed Netanyahu to make concessions and a postwar plan. This was necessary not just to convince Hamas — for whom the hostages are the only real source of leverage — but also to appease Washington’s Gulf allies, who Netanyahu had alienated with Israel’s belligerence across the Middle East.

Among the most influential was Qatar, which hosts Hamas’s political office and has been central to two years of mediation efforts, said people involved in the negotiations. Israel’s attack on Doha, a US ally, just as Hamas was studying a ceasefire proposal from Witkoff, infuriated Trump. Indeed, when Netanyahu finally made it to the White House on September 29 — days after Trump had already presented his peace plan to Arab leaders — the president handed him a phone receiver and listened in as Netanyahu humbly apologised to Qatar’s prime minister. The strike on Qatar “actually opened the door for all of this,” said a former US official who maintains contact with leaders in the Middle East. The strike was humiliating for Trump, but “it allowed him to say, ‘you guys fucked up, and I’m bailing you out here, and I’m done,’” the official said, satirically characterising Netanyahu’s subsequent Oval Office apology to Qatar as “a hostage video”.

While Netanyahu and his team tried watering down some elements of what became Trump’s 20-point peace plan — especially the reference to a Palestinian state — a Qatari technical team sat not far away in the White House, said a person familiar with the events.

“It was impossible to change more than a few words here and there,” said a second person who read drafts of the plan. For instance, Netanyahu and his negotiators had sought one major concession — an opportunity to return to fighting if Israel decided Hamas had broken some clause of the agreement. The team was told, in no uncertain terms, “to stop looking for loopholes”. “Trump himself had guaranteed [to the Arabs] that Israel would not start the war again,” the person said. This pledge was verified by a second person familiar with conversations between the White House and Arab officials. And so nestled between the dry legalese of the peace plan were proposals that would be anathema to the far-right and messianic parties that prop up Netanyahu’s coalition, and who have vowed to expel Palestinians from Gaza and resettle it with Jews. Now, the document ruled out forced displacement and said Gazans would be free to leave the besieged enclave, and to return when they wanted. Hamas fighters could be granted amnesty if they gave up their weapons and agreed to “peaceful coexistence”, instead of being hunted to death. Not only would Israel not be allowed to occupy or annex Gaza, it could not build settlements there. The UN, reviled by Netanyahu, would be allowed back to feed Palestinians starved by Israel’s blockade. Still, there was enough in the document for Netanyahu to save face. Hamas would be barred from Palestinian governance. Its fighters would be disarmed and the strip demilitarised.

A committee of Palestinian technocrats and an international supervisory body chaired by Trump would run Gaza temporarily, not the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank. An international force would provide security. But most important, said two Israeli officials, was the language Trump used when announcing it — if Hamas rejected the deal, he said, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas”. Standing next to him, Netanyahu looked subdued. He had grappled with and outmanoeuvred three American presidents — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now he faced intense pressure from the president he had confidently declared to be “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”. Though Trump has long unnerved US allies with his transactional approach to politics and mercurial decision-making, Netanyahu had seen the US leader and his fervently pro-Israel political base as reliable sources of support. But earlier this year Trump surprised him with the announcement that the US had been holding indirect talks with Iran, then embarrassed him by reminding him that Israel was propped up by billions of dollars in US aid. “The rule of thumb is Donald Trump’s interests come first,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. Before Trump, Netanyahu expanded settlements over Obama’s objections, and slow-rolled peace talks under Clinton. Referring to demands from Biden on the conduct of the Gaza war, Oren added: “And with president Biden who famously said don’t, don’t, don’t — and Israel did.” “But with Donald Trump, when he says don’t, then you don’t,” said Oren. “And now that’s the rule [even for] Israel.” He pointed out the expletive-laden public scolding the president administered when Israel bombed eastern Iran after Trump declared a ceasefire that ended a 12-day war between the regional enemies in June.

Days after his White House visit, where Netanyahu stood alongside Trump and said he supported the plan, the mood turned sour for the Israeli prime minister again. Back home, he had sold the Trump proposals as a victory for Israel — a “take it or leave it” option for Hamas, with US blessing for Israel to annihilate the militant group as the cost of rejection.

But on Friday, when Hamas cherry-picked the part of the deal that appealed the most to Trump — the release within 72 hours of all the remaining captives, alive and dead — while sidestepping the more contentious elements, Netanyahu found himself cornered. “Suddenly, there was a fundamental change in the situation. Earlier, Hamas had three choices — it could surrender, it could abjure terror, or it could die,” said Oren. “Now, it has a fourth choice — to negotiate. And while they negotiate, Israel has a red light.” Shortly after Hamas’s statement, Trump ordered Israel to “immediately” cease military operations in Gaza while talks continued. In a phone call with Trump, first reported by Axios and confirmed by an Israeli official, Netanyahu tried to convince Trump that Hamas’s qualified acceptance was a delaying tactic. Trump snapped back: “Why are you so fucking negative?” Axios reported. Days later, Trump publicly hammered the point home, telling an Israeli reporter that it did not take much to convince Netanyahu to accept the situation. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice,” Trump told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “With me, you got to be fine.”


If this account is true, Israel does not control Trump. Great read. ABN

The limits of general semiotic analyses as applied to human psychology

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Much of the work done in human semiotics involves analyses of semiotic codes.

Semiotics and semiotic codes are often treated like language or languages for which a grammar can be found.

One obvious problem with this sort of approach is semiotics indicates a set that is much broader than language. Stated another way, language is a subset of semiotics.

Human semiotics also include music, imagery, gesture, facial expression, emotion, and anything else that can communicate either within one mind or between two or more minds.

It is very helpful to analyze semiotic codes and it is very helpful to try to figure out how cultures, groups, and individuals use them. We can compare the semiotics of heroism in Chinese culture to that of French culture. Or the semiotics of gift-giving in American culture to that of Mexican culture. We can analyze movies, literature, science, and even engineering based on semiotic codes we have abstracted out of them.

We can do something similar for human psychology.

Analyses of this type are, in my view, general in that they involve schema or paradigms or grammars that say general things about how semiotic systems work or how individuals (or semiotic signs themselves) fit into those systems.

This is all good and general analyses of this sort can be indispensable aids to understanding.

General semiotic analyses are limited, however, in their application to human psychology because such analyses cannot effectively grasp the semiotic codes of the individual. Indeed general analyses are liable to conceal individual codes and interpretations more than usefully reveal them.

This is so because all individuals are always complex repositories of many general semiotic codes as well as many individual ones. And these codes are always changing, responding, being conditioned by new circumstances and many kinds of feedback.

Individuals as repositories of many codes, both external and internal, are complex and always changing and there is no general analysis that will ever fully capture that complexity.

For somewhat similar reasons, no individual acting alone can possibly perform a self-analysis that captures the full complexity of the many and always-changing semiotic codes that exist within them.

Self-analysis is far too subject to selection bias, memory, and even delusion to be considered accurate or objective. The individual is also far too complex for the individual to grasp alone. How can an individual possibly stand outside itself and see itself as it is? Where would the extra brain-space come from?

How can a system of complex semiotic codes use yet another code to successfully analyze itself?

Clearly, no individual human semiotic system can ever fully know itself.

To recap, 1) there is no general semiotic analysis that will ever capture the complexity of individual psychology, and 2) no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of the semiotic codes that exist within them.

Concerning point two, we could just as well say that no individual acting alone can ever capture the complexity of their own psychology.

We are thus prevented from finding a complex analysis of human psychology through a general analysis of semiotics and also through an individual’s self-analysis when acting alone.

This suggests, however, that two individuals acting together might be able to glimpse, if not grasp, how their complex semiotic codes are actually functioning when they interact with each other. If two individuals working together can honestly observe and discuss moments of dynamic real-time semiotic interaction between them, they should be able to begin to understand how their immensely complex and always-changing psycho-semiotic codes are actually functioning.

An approach of this type ought to work better for psychological understanding of the individuals involved than any mix of general semiotic analyses applied to them. Indeed, prefabricated, general semiotic analyses will tend to conceal the actual functioning of the idiosyncratic semiotics and semiotic codes used by those individuals.

The FIML method does not apply a general semiotic analysis to human psychology. Rather it uses a method or technique to allow two individuals working together to see and understand how their semiotics and semiotic codes are actually functioning. ABN

A signal-based model of psychology: part two

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If we consider humans to be complex signaling systems or networks, then it is readily apparent that each human network signals within itself and also is connected by signals to other networks.

In A signal-based model of psychology: part one, we said:

the only significant interpersonal signaling data we can really know with significant certainty are data noticed, remembered, and agreed upon by two (or more in some cases) people engaged in significant interpersonal communication (signaling).

More recently, in Indeterminacy of translation and FIML, we discussed W. V. Quine’s thesis, which describes;

the fundamental impossibility of determining what anything means well enough to “translate” it into another context, a next sentence, into another person’s mind, or even “translating” your own speech from the past into the context of your mind today.

When we analyze a person based on vague ideas like “personality,” “psychology,” or “cognition,” we are principally assigning ambiguous referents to amorphous categories. We have more words but not much more understanding.

Cognition is a huge grab-bag of a word that means almost anything, as do the terms psychology and personality.

If we replace these terms with the concept of signaling networks, we gain specificity. For example, rather than analyzing the “cognitive-behavior” of a person we can more easily and profitably analyze their signaling.

The advantage of examining signaling rather than “cognitive-behavior” is signals are quite specific. They can usually be defined pretty well, they can be contextualized, and their communicative intent can be determined with reasonable specificity.

To be most effective, signaling analysis works best if we abandon the idea that we can accurately analyze the signals of someone else, especially if we do not analyze our own signals at the same time.

Moreover, a signaling analysis will work best if we do it with:

  • someone that we care about and that cares about us
  • someone with whom we can be completely honest and who will be completely honest with us
  • someone who is willing to spend the time to do the analyzing

Sad to say, it can be difficult to find two people who fit together in those ways, but that is how it is. Much of this problem is due to social expectations, which presently greatly reduce opportunities for clear, honest communication. And much of this is due to how we normally conceive of a person, as a bundle of vague things that cannot be pinned down.

The ideal signaling analysis will be done between close friends with the above qualifications. A signaling analysis will not work well, if at at all, if it is done between a professional and a patient. A professional psychologist would do the best for their patient by teaching them how to do signaling analysis with a friend. If they don’t have a friend, maybe one can be found; if not, a different approach should be used.

But you don’t have to have “problems” to do a signaling analysis. Everyone will benefit from it.

Signaling analysis works because partners learn to work with good data that has been generated between them during real-life situations. Having this data allows partners to do micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis on it. And these different levels help them see the specifics of a particular signal exchange, the immediate context of the exchange, and the larger social or historical context from which the exchange has derived some or much of its meaning.

For example, if clear data on a tone of voice has been agreed upon, both partners can then explain the micro antecedents and context of that data, the meso context of those antecedents, and if necessary the macro context that gave rise to either or both of those. The same outline applies to all micro data, be it tone, gesture, word choice, body language, reference, etc.

With practice, a new way of understanding communication will arise in partners’ minds. Rather than having a vague “cognition” about some poorly-defined “emotion” or “personality trait,” partners will find that they can benefit much more by simply analyzing what actually happened based upon data they both agree on.

It is very important for partners to do many analyses of specific micro-data, a single word or phrase, a single tone of voice, a single gesture, etc.. The reason for this is we can’t accurately remember much more than that. When we try to do more, we are pushed immediately out of specific micro data into vague meso or macro generalities that constitute nothing more than general categories with general references to other general categories. Rather than analyzing something that has actually occurred, we instead argue about general emotions, vague traits, unsubstantiated assumptions about “personalities,” and so on. ABN

A signal-based model of psychology: part one

A signal-based model of psychology: part two

A signal-based model of psychology: part three

A signal-based model of psychology: part four

first posted DECEMBER 12, 2014