I have written two or three posts analyzing social interactions before on this website attempting to come up with a coherent framework for it, this is the next in the series.

one of the most harmful ideas i’ve ever encountered was at my last job, where my boss was consistently like “keep your users in mind, always be asking them what they want”. that is dumb stupid wimpy person advice. neither him nor i are native stock michigander. but aren’t we supposed to, like, try to fit in as much as possible without denying essential elements of ourselves? i eat tacos sometimes, he can go to the ethnic asian mart sometimes. to take some (alleged) wisdom from the greatest michigander of the 20th century, Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

riffing on that advice: this post isn’t exactly intended for academic audiences, nor is it intended for a mainstream audience. it is a secret third thing. this may post may go over ground that has already been tread before by other people, but bear with me, i am trying to articulate something difficult to pronounce here, so to speak. i got some really good advice from a reader last week, that i need to explain what I mean more completely instead of going off things that I know what they mean but the reader might not. so this post is going to have a lot of explanations. i am trying to make a car, not a faster horse.

lets say iso and allo¹ are in a conversation in isolation with eachother. meaning, they are aware of eachother and there is no one else observing or influencing them. actually before we get into anything else i want to get that sticky phrase “in isolation with eachother” out of the way. it does not roll off the toungue. fortunately, there is a real-life construct where two people can be “in isolation with eachother”, and that is a “room”. a room is a supremely useful construct for talking about what we mean here. for the sake of the schelling point here, let’s imagine four walls, a floor, roof, window, and door. it serves as a physical form for there being only a few minds interacting with eachother.

so let’s say there are two minds in a room, and let’s say neither of these minds have interacted with eachother before. they first need to have a baseline of communication established first, and that is language. i don’t want to go down the whole field of linguistics rabbit hole, so let’s talk about the thing that comes after language, and that’s common knowledge. we can expect a common knowledge base between them, culturally in america it is movies, the bible, the iliad and oddessey, shakespeare, sports metaphors, the american revolution, and wwii. world war two implies the existence of the prequel world war one, so we’ll throw that in there too. there are also certain manners and decorum that is to be assumed, like shaking hands and saying please and thank you and nice to meet you and standing in line.

i was at the gym when i observed people who had never spoken to eachother standing in line to refill their water. and i thought back to kindergarden, when standing in line was the very first thing they taught us on the first day, even before the alphabet. perhaps standing in line is the single most important prerequisite to civilization. maybe this means the communists are more civilized than us. they are very good at standing in line for essential goods like bread.

but it can be expected that whenever i say something to someone like “a fight on the beach for 10 years” or “a fight on the beach after a surprise landing operation” or “the trump administration is the evil galactic space empire” or “out of left field” or “30 pieces of silver” or “12 followers” or “don’t forget to follow and turn on notifications” or “brutus is an honorable man”, they know what i’m talking about. it can also be expected that when someone says something like “AOC runs a mean pick 6”, then they are a complete idiot.

A good chunk of the common knowledge in America is from the schooling curriculum. Everyone learns the American Revolution at some point in school and reads Julius Caesar in junior year of high school. Well, most people. Some (not all) forms of alternative, homeschooling, and religous education take kids out of this stuff, leaving them to flounder like fish out of water when forced to integrate with mainstream society. it is an extremely effective way of keeping the next generation “in the fold”. there’s a whole state, utah, which is like this. it is extremely cruel and honestly i think there should be laws against it.

There are a few more pieces to common knowledge. One can reasonably assume common knowledge from their geographic area, race, way of dressing, and accent, but that is outside of scope here.

There is also a class of knowledge called mutual knowledge which could influence two minds in a room when they begin a dialogue for the first time. Perhaps they go to the same school or work at the same place; or one or both has a reputation that precedes them; or they have mutual friends, or they were introduced to eachother by somebody.

Besides common knowledge and mutual knowledge, there is nothing that those two have interacted with before their interaction. Law of identity. So there are two minds in a room. Iso and allo. Alice and bob. They can’t have talked about anything they haven’t talked about yet.

So Alice and Bob begin their dialogue. Suddenly everything that they bring up always goes in context of their relationship. This idea is pretty important, so I am going to term it with Latin, in contextu. Every time someone later refers back to something in contextu, it is always said with that in reference. That thing becomes a potential recurring topic of conversation.

Subtlety by Indexing

Let’s say someone connects two concepts in contextu. Makes a morphology, or whatever. For example, iso says “I always read books at night”. Than later, if allo says something like “you are probably tired because you may not be sleeping well at night”, than it can be reasonably assumed that reading books is indirectly being referred to here. if those two things are not explicitly said and connected in contextu priore, than even if allo says “at night”, it cannot be reasonably assumed by either that “reading books” is being talked about, and both agents will continue through the conversation as if it is not being talked about, even if they are both thinking about reading books. Also called metonymy.

If someone is not able to understand the metonymy, then they are retarted. being able to refer back to things in contextu is essential for relationships. any meaningful dialogue cannot happen if the participants need things to be mentioned explicitly and cumbersomely every time.

Subtlety by Antiphrasis

We could include all of figurative speech here, but to miss most of it, you’d have to be really dumb. Once you get to antiphrasis, some visible threshholds start emerging.

Subtlety by Talking to the Rabbit

What just became apparent here is a natural hierarchy emerges in conversation. Some people are not able to understand conversations in contextu, and some are. If you have got this far in this post, you are able to understand things in contextu. If you have gotten this far in the post, you probably don’t interact with anybody who doesn’t pass this threshhold. I am going to be building on an earlier framework I made named epistylometry to more formally establish this hierarchy. We will call it EL, for epistylometric levels.