notes on literacy

towards a better understanding of our literary–symbolic environs

Originally a painting by Robert Griffing (Friend or Foe), remixed by ChatGPT

I’ve been wanting to write something about “literacy” for years now, and I keep putting it off because it’s so daunting. So for starters I’m just going to compile a bunch of notes, tweets, threads, etc that I’ve written about it so far. I always appreciate comments, but I think I particularly want to solicit them on this post, so I can better make progress towards remixing and rewriting this into something effective.

1. reading the terrain

A while ago I read Work: A Deep History (2021) by James Suzman. It discusses how the Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert relied on remarkably sophisticated tracking to do their hunting– reading footprints, bent blades of grass, overturned stones, droppings and so on to reconstruct an animal’s path, speed, direction, and even emotional state. Suzman described this as a kind of poetry, with trackers developing an intimate sense of the animals’ state of mind.

Deeply seeing the landscape as a dynamic canvas required extensive generational knowledge of hundreds of ecological details. Adults would teach their children how to read the canvas of the desert for the footprint of animals. They’d do this leisurely on casual walks, telling stories, gossiping. The kids simply grow up learning to read the terrain, because it’s what everyone does. It helps with the hunting, but it’s also quite a bit more than that– I’d argue that it was their own form of literacy, their way of situating and locating themselves within their wider context. It’s not hard to imagine how details from their landscapes would surely sneak into their speech, their metaphors, their stories. It certainly informed their spirituality and cosmology.

How might our sense of ourselves– at all layers– be informed by the environments we inhabit, and the symbols around us?

2. the perils of plaintext

In a particular sense, twitter is the hardest of online mediums, because people are squishy but plaintext is not squishy. audio and video are squishier than plaintext. plaintext requires more interpretation than audio/video. skilled players use this feature well, but skill is rare.

Podcasters and youtubers rely heavily on their beautiful squishiness to get across to people – and this is also why a lot of them get pwned on twitter, because their squishy charm doesn't translate into plaintext, and they sound like assholes or idiots etc. (There’s an interesting implication here: a lot of what it means to be charming, is to say things that could be offensive, but to say them in a tone which is warm.)

Here’s an example statement: I could tweet "the problem is that you are a human being" and mean it with great love and humor, and someone could read it as something bleak and terrible.

One thing about audio/video conveying more squishiness, which is a pro in some ways and a con in others, is that people fall in love with you more quickly & intensely, or get more of an ick from you, and so on. Plaintext is probably still the best medium to be taken seriously for your ideas, rather than your affect or disposition.

shortform low-context high-volume plaintext is the most crazy way to do it, lol. a kind of extreme sport. in longform you get to define and contextualize your terms. here (on twitter) we just smash idea fragments into each other like some kind of crazed demolition derby. Personally I really enjoy the little puzzle of trying to convey the tone of a thought via plaintext. I’ve done it 250,000+ times and I still find it to be a fun, interesting challenge. Lately I’ve become more interested in the puzzle of trying to create more expansive reader experiences, but the pleasure of tweeting remains.

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I found the following note in one of my drafts about literacy:

Sometimes a little rephrase makes things much more agreeable. For example, saying “stress is the cause of health problems” is a clunky statement, and would invite dispute. “Stress often makes health problems worse, and stress relief often makes health problems less bad,” would be easier to agree with. If you get better with words, you might realize you could say ‘catalyst’ instead of ‘cause’, ie something like “stress is a catalyst in health problems”. Dexterity and nimbleness is very useful to have in the domain of speech and writing.

The ‘social literacy’ component here is that people seldom consider the possibility that someone else’s poor choice of words might be because of lack of finesse, rather than because they are an idiot ass hat. And even then, no amount of finesse will completely prevent misunderstanding, particularly in a lossy comms medium.

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a lot of twitter is people posting dramatically in a way that’s emotionally correct for them, but it translates poorly into plaintext where it’s technically incorrect and taken apart by pedants. this conflict is like the combustion engine that runs the place.

person having a drink and thinking “god do men/women even know that ______???” in an obviously hyperbolic reaction to some very specific thing a friend said, and then they just tweet it to get it out of their system, and it triggers a bunch of other ppl from different contexts.

then that goes viral and people disagree back and forth and write thinkpieces and it goes into the media and it’s all part of the grand theatre of humanity figuring itself out. it’s quite poetic and beautiful if you can zoom out and see the bigger picture.

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an interesting thing about a class of conversation we have on twitter is talking in vague veiled allusions- and at best somehow this can sometimes help people with a completely different problem than the one we had in mind, at worst it leads to tedious tangled misunderstandings.

huge part of navigating this well is to accept the lossy nature of contextless comms in plaintext. like, it’s really not fruitful to get mad at each other for misunderstanding contextless strings of text. that any understanding happens *at all* is remarkable.

a lot of surfing is about falling off your board into the sea. whether or not you enjoy the process kinda has a lot to do with whether you can laugh and enjoy the falling, with the conviction that you can get back on and try again. even a perfect surf ends when the wave does.

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the thing about "just ask a girl if you can kiss her" is there's a *universe* of difference between a subtext of "i'd really enjoy kissing you, and/but i'd also really enjoy myself regardless, no worries" and "please kiss me? oh god please say yes???", and that makes all the difference

if you're sufficiently advanced at vibing you can almost completely disregard any sort of instruction, the way an skilled improviser can literally smash a piano randomly and make music out of it. the problem is mfs are out of touch with their own feeling

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a fairly common mistake charismatic-offline people make on Twitter is tweeting rhetorical questions and then getting annoyed when people answer earnestly. this strikes me as a sort of “plaintext medium illiteracy”. if you made a tiktok instead it would be much less of a problem because people will be able to hear the tone in your voice and see your body language. although even then a minority of literalists will still answer the question.

speaking of literalists: it’s basically impossible to be clever-ironic-sarcastic on the open public internet without people choosing to interpret you as saying what you literally meant. this phenomena was understood since at least 1983, when Jerry Schwarz wrote on Usenet, “Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks. Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted… no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.” In 2005, Nathan Poe wrote, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.”

The internet does not care how clever your sarcasm is, or how obvious your irony is. It is a powerful Magic Mirror that will take you at your word. So you might as well say what you actually mean or joke about outcomes that you actually want.

3. Comms is lossy

“No matter how good you are with words, it’s inevitable that meaning is lost between your mind and someone else’s. Trying to communicate is like throwing a cup of water at a thirsty person’s face. It’s better than nothing, sure, and a teaspoon of water might hit their lips, but oh, God, there’s just so much water in the grass.” – Jacqueline Novak, How to Weep in Public

Comms is lossy.

Comms is especially lossy in context-collapsing plaintext media such as Twitter.

Failure to appreciate “comms is lossy” can cause a kind of brainrot. (“Brainrot” is a word that trades off accuracy for stickiness; it isn’t your literal brain that’s rotting, but people intuitively know what I’m gesturing at.)

Lots of people are functionally illiterate, roughly the way lots of people are functionally immobile. The first rule of literacy might be “Comms is lossy”.

It follows very naturally from “comms is lossy” that “misunderstanding is the default state”. (This is itself misunderstood.)

If you truly appreciate that comms is lossy and that misunderstanding is the default state then it becomes necessary to give people room to revise their imperfect lossy misunderstood statements.

It becomes necessary to be patient and kind in order to understand anything or anyone. People broadly don’t understand this because they are mis-educated, or arguably even educated not to understand it. But there have always been some people who get it, in every domain, and across every domain they say the same thing: observe without judgement. Great teachers of tennis, piano and acting all say the exactly the same things about judgement, ego, self-talk, instruction, etc and their impact on performance.

The faster everything moves, the more we have to learn patience.

A chaotic, high-collision, context-collapsing comms environment can be a place of great opportunity and great peril.

It depends on how nimble, agile, light-hearted and dynamic people are able to be. Typically, this takes training. You gotta be able to parkour around the psychofauna.

All comms is “pointing at the moon”.

All comms is “the map is not the territory”.

All comms is “all models are wrong, some are useful.”

"All comms is “how’s the water boys / what the hell is water?”

This is true of every facet of comms, including and especially internal comms.

A lot of people’s misery stems from clinging excessively to a static image of themselves, following a map of themselves and finding it leads nowhere, eating the menu instead of the meal and finding no nourishment, pointing at the moon of themselves and identifying with the finger.

“People who overzealously autocomplete what they think other people are saying, get confined in a stiflingly narrow social reality by their own limited imagination.” – this is an example of failing to understand that comms is lossy. This applies internally too; many people get impatient with themselves and think they “already know everything” about what they feel. Which leads to self-alienation. (Nietzsche: Your bad love to yourself makes solitude a prison to you.”)

4. on the work of cultivating shared understandings

Before I had a kid I wondered how the hell parents could understand toddler proto-speech. turns out the answer is quite obvious once you witness/experience it: the parent and the child work out a shared understanding ahead of time. “Yemon” “lemon?” <excitedly> “Yemon!!” 🍋

you repeat this across a wide range of nouns, have some repetition for some familiar grammar and turns of phrase, and you find that you perfectly understand “poh yemon indamuff”, and it’s only when someone else goes “what did he say?” that you realize you have a shared code.

and then you think about it a bit more and you realize that all communication is like this, all ingroups are like this.

it also gets me thinking about how much more a young kid can learn and think and grow in tandem with an adult who understands their language vs not. and, well. that also applies to scenes. we can learn and think faster together with people who care to know what we’re on about. it can then be a secondary challenge to translate those understandings to anybody else, but cultivating those understandings is the first challenge.

there’s also something to get into here about how kids display more complex language ability with their peers than on standardised/formalized tests. and why younger siblings pick up language quicker because there’s another yapper around them 24/7. Also consider musical families.

it’s also a bit wild to think about how surely shared understandings compound. like whatever base of shared understandings you build in the earliest years is surely going to have effects on your entire relationship, even if specifics are forgotten. “duh”, and yet.

misunderstanding is the default state, and blessed are those who take the time and trouble to try to understand.

also if you wanna understand why I have posted 200,000+ tweets it’s basically that I felt misunderstood as a child and have spent all my life trying to feel understood. and building shared understandings with my own child in this regard the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Reply via Coolstoryhansl: “When our boy was maybe 18 months, he kept demanding “Gee”. He got so frustrated at our guesses we eventually just carried him around the house playing hot or cold. He directed us to the fridge, where he finally could point to the Cheese.” – this is exactly the process. It might seem like a lot of work, but it is worth it to Understand.

5. literacy as the cultivation of ‘psychic defenses’

I don’t explicitly use this phrase but I have a huge body of work about developing psychic defenses! (part of how it works is that you don’t label it ‘developing psychic defenses’, because that itself attracts unnecessary attention/scrutiny).

I would say the fastest way to bootstrap psychic defenses is to seek to develop a diverse social graph. I don’t mean one friend group that has people of different ethnicities, I mean multiple different groups/clusters with different worldviews, cultures, priorities, interests. You’ll know you’re doing it right when the most important thing to one cluster of your friends is completely inconsequential/irrelevant to another cluster. Then you can alt-tab between those clusters to avoid getting pwned by any particular totalizing psyop.

In my model there’s at least two other major components to this. One is troubleshooting and stress-testing your internal narratives, assumptions, triggers, etc. basically cultivate internal integrity, diamond hands for your own soul. This is what I wrote Introspect (2022) about.

And the other is basically literacy, in the fullest sense. When bullshit gets past someone’s psychic defenses it’s often trojanhorsed via symbols, so you want some understanding of symbols, media, frames, to be able to protect yourself.

If you cultivate a high-res model of yourself, you will be harder to manipulate. (people with low-res models of themselves are relatively easy to manipulate and shepherd around for profit.)

If you cultivate high-res models of the opposite gender, you won't get swept up in totalizing/oversimplified gender discourse. this can require you to get past emotional knots of past grief/betrayal etc, it's all connected.

Other things that help: having a broad sense of history. You can read a lot of history a lot quicker than it happened, it's like binge-watching past seasons of current affairs. and you won't be as shocked or blindsided when it repeats.

Even activities like "do 100 thing", I feel cultivate psychic defenses in a way. Developing competence that takes time, such as in music or sport. You develop a sturdy patience, an understanding of how change happens. Scammers always try to put you under intense time pressure so you panic and fumble. Embodying "nah, cheers" is good defense.

6. On Dunking

On dunking: I think most dunkers dont think strategically or in terms of outcomes. i think most dunking is mostly a kneejerk re-assertion of one’s own identity + consensus-seeking with others who dislike the same thing.

identity, with both its private & social components, is v precious to most people. they will behave in seemingly irrational and unproductive ways to preserve it. they’ll get into ‘unnecessary’ conflicts, endure a loss of time/energy/money/peace, do free marketing for enemies…

the most critical thing in all of this imo is that people’s intuitions havent adapted to the modern media environment. dunking on something with your friends at dinner is NOT the same as dunking on something on the open internet. even people who know this will forget it when mad.

im not saying all dunking is bad or wrong. sometimes its the right thing to do. im saying most of it is ill-considered. and this actually results in an environment that strategic/savvy actors can exploit (somewhat) to their ends.

the tricky thing here is that its possible to go too far when it comes to courting dunks for profit. in my view, the important thing is not to lose sight of your actual goals. once you start modifying your positions to court dunks, you’ve gotten into the sticky wretched pit.

nothing is edgier than being earnest. you dont have to go out seeking dunks. simply be the most honest version of yourself you can bear to be, and you’ll attract dunks for it from someone somewhere eventually. then smile and do it again, more cheerfully.

over the years ive come to notice that there are “thresholds” at which status is contested. this seems true also for the status of ideas. there’s a phase in which a new idea must be subjected to mockery. it’s part of the test. to pass the test, its proponents must not flinch.

on the topic of dunking on jhanas, you could kinda parse it as a test to see if the jhanabros flinch. if they start freaking out, retaliating, embarrassing themselvea, etc, jhanas can then be dismissed as unserious. if they remain unflinching, the status of jhanas rise.

note i am not even commenting on the merits of jhanas or jhanabros or what the perceived status of the concept and its practitioners is or should be, and i dont have space/time to properly contextualize “these people/framings are not representative…”

im just describing my model (which i think is reasonably well-tuned, from years of observations, analysis, discussion, etc) of how these things play out. if you model this well it’ll help you gain status, be it for yourself or the ideas that matter to you.

do i like that the world is like this, that people are like that? eh. there are things about it that i find kinda gross. a more enlightened public would handle all of this much more graciously, but that is not yet the public we are. but perhaps we could become it.

the tragic/gross thing is that not-flinching is a skillset that can be semi-independent of a person or idea’s true merits and qualities. but people are impatient/busy/tired etc and will throw good actors under the bus for flinching and venerate bad actors for not flinching.

it can be somewhat discernable if someone’s non-flinching comes from a deep well of knowledge/love/compassion etc vs a sociopathic detatchment, but tbh that can take time too.

occurs to me that of the deepest core virtues in all of this is patience, temperance. its the rushing that typically causes needless blunders in all directions. and more generally, those who are playing longer games outlast those who are not

7. 13 things every skilled chaos-surfer understands

(original link):

1. How something appears to you may not be how it is.

2. What is said or shown may not be all there is.

3. What is true for me may not be true for you.

4. The same words may mean different things to different people.

5. What people say may not be what they mean. Because comms is lossy and language is messy, people’s intentions are murky even to themselves.

6. People often don’t even read what is there. They often see a few words and assume what they thought they saw. You can ask them to repeat things back to you and they’ll sometimes make up something completely different.

7. What is salient to me about some scenario may not be what is salient to you. Each of us have had a lifetime of experience that the other doesn’t have a lot of information about, and that experience informs what each of us identifies as important.

8. Essentially all entities are internally conflicted. This goes all the way up to nation-states and all the way down to families, friend groups and even within individuals. Anything that looks like a monolith with no internal conflict is almost definitely putting on a show.

9. Things change. Just because something was true yesterday and is true right now, doesn’t mean that it will be true tomorrow. Some things change much slower than others, but a rainbow, a person and a mountain are all temporary things. No status quo has ever lasted indefinitely.

10. Target fixation is real. People will miss something right in front of their face if they’re too focused on looking for something else. This gets 10x, 100x more intense when the thing is embarrassing or shameful in some way.

11. People can’t learn anything if they aren’t free to make mistakes. If you create even a small, temporary context where people can feel safe to make mistakes, that’s where a lot of magic can happen.

12. Misunderstanding is the default state. Acknowledging this means giving people grace, time and space to adjust their positions.

13. As long as you’re still alive, nothing you say ever has to be your final word on anything.

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Miscellaneous:

And now, for some scattered notes that I haven’t got time to edit right now. I’m leaving them in here, but I might subsequently edit them later. no guarantees. feel free to ask questions, leave your own notes and thoughts, etc

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literacy has network effects. increasing literacy increases wealth. there are many dimensions along which you can strengthen a network, one of the most fruitful ways is to improve the quality/density, ie by introducing the most skillful players to one another.

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Q: If you could fix just one thing with a magic wand with the most downstream positive effect, what would it be?

A: It’s a cluster of things around focus, perception, attention, framing, sovereignty, media literacy. It’s all the same thing. If people really understood how comms and perception are lossy, and really internalized that all the way through? Incredible cascades

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there’s a kind of gross-ish humor that works when you kinda let it slip out loud mid-conversation and everyone can be briefly scandalized— this doesn’t translate to plaintext because everyone gets to read it multiple times and you look more like a sick fuck with each re-read.

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When I was miserable, some people advised me not to be honest about that publicly in case it made people feel bad.

When I became happy and successful (on my own terms), some people advised me not to be honest about that publicly in case it made people feel bad.

Someone asked something like, have you spoken with the people who feel bad? I said, I’ve had a few versions of that conversation over the years– the saddest one is when they really lack the literacy to realize I’m not actually speaking to them personally. But more common is that they feel disadvantaged, excluded, etc.

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Q: have people really changed dramatically in the last couple of decades?

A: I think the media environment has changed more than human nature has changed! (although people have certainly changed within the new media environment). But the thing to understand is that the high-arousal emotional content that makes it to the top of media algorithms are not representative…

if you met 100 people who are 7 feet tall, you probably wouldn’t think “holy shit, the world has gotten freakishly tall”, you’d probably think “I must have stumbled onto the ultra tall person convention”

if you see 100 people crying on camera…? it’s more complicated of course, but

the vast majority of people going about their lives are sorta ok. having some struggles yea. but keeping it together mostly. millions of people could post “my life is kinda ok mostly. went on a date last week. kinda hopeful but wary” and each of it would have maybe 12 views

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If you’re “online enough”, sooner or later you will bump up against something that pokes at whatever your worst trigger or weakness or failing is, and you’ll have to figure out how to deal with that.

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“When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic: You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in busines to give people what they want. It’s the truth.” – Steve Jobs, in an interview with Wired (1996)

I’m always amused by Steve Jobs’ more pessimistic quotes from when he hadn’t yet returned to Apple. Later he would say things like, well people don’t really know what they want.

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Everytime i read something like “this kind of movie has done incalculable cultural damage” I think “people’s inability to contextualize media appropriately has made them susceptible to all manners of cultural damage”, and I think that’s where we can attempt to make a difference.

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Pope Pius XII in 1950: “...the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part of the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”

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most media is voyeuristic. every post is a peepshow. every smartphone is a magic mirror that lets you see what you otherwise couldn’t, and oftentimes probably shouldn’t. we are all perverts here to varying degrees and it feels good to shame those who are more depraved than us.

i’ve always thought that it’s a very interesting tightrope to walk: how to appropriately share intimate details in public in a way that isn’t unhealthy? it takes a lot of skill to manage. i find photography to be a helpful analogy: how to take intimate pictures that aren’t invasive?

Some people would respond with “why would you do that at all”, which is valid, but also consider the art that has moved you most deeply in life- your favorite movies, books, music, standup, etc – and how that required someone to pour their heart out for us to trample on

an essay draft im now unlikely to get to anytime soon is titled “Attention Whores” – i wanted to really earnestly and compassionately dig into this thing i’m trying to describe here. there’s something about quality vs quantity, being seen, the loneliness of celebrity, etc

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that’s all for now