Book Day 20: A brief note about failures of legibility
“When Mamdani is in charge, there will be places for people like you”
“What?”
“A place where you can wear a graham cracker hat, and a graham cracker shirt, and graham cracker pants.”
“What?”
“A restaurant. You will work in a restaurant. There will be all sorts of jobs.”
Today I have to do other writing, and so this will be quick.
There are many ways to create failures of legibility.
Let me explain.
One is by staying inside your own bespoke system, in your mind. You come up with all new meanings of terms.
Love, faithfulness, betrayal, safety.
You create new meanings of those terms.
Love is a feeling you have when you feel you know someone or they have become “humanized” for you rather than being a stranger. Love is something you can have for many people.
Okay. That’s a definition. Does anybody in your life agree on that definition, or is using that definition to do any kind of coordination? If so, cool. If not, then you would have to explain how your definition fits into any schema.
“Well, you tell your friends and partners, it fits into my own schema.”
Okay. Can you explain the rest of the schema?
Love is something that is good to feel a lot of. It is like a Christian love, a seeing, a knowing. Often you can’t help it, and you have to work to cultivate it.
Okay. But how does it relate to sex? Is sex an expression of that love? Is sex something else?
Oh, sex can be super casual. You can have sex without love.
Okay. That’s great. But wouldn’t in the act of sex you be knowing a person more? Seeing a person? Humanizing them by seeing them in a certain kind of intense vulnerable position?
Yes, you would be. But that doesn’t mean there are any strings attached. That doesn’t mean there is any commitment.
Okay. But you defined love in a different way above. You defined love above not in any way that has any connection to commitment. Is there another definition of love that is relevant to you that does involve commitment?
No, love and commitment are separate things.
Okay.
So this actually does start to be pretty illegible to me. Yes, I understand the feeeeeelings involved. Yes I understand what the person is saying. But there is something about it that makes it kind of tricky to coordinate on.
Legibility is about if both parties can see what is happening, and have agreements that what they think they see is happening is what is happening.
Somebody can be legible to themselves and internally consistent in a way that still forms a circle between themselves and their own brain and has minimal contact with something another partner is doing. They can define words in such a way that it makes perfect sense to them, but then for another person to coordinate with you, they have to know the entire system and how each part of the system interacts with every other part.
Think about the Enneagram. If I tell you “Enneagram 7” that would not mean anything to you unless you know what the Enneagram system is. To understand Enneagram 7 you probably should understand Enneagram 1,2,3,4,5,6,8, and 9. Otherwise if I say “Enneagram 7” to you it would not mean anything to you.
This is one example of illegibility. It is from knowing your mind very well, and knowing your own beliefs very well, such that coordinating with others becomes tricky.
There are others.
Another kind of illegibility comes from habits of deep submission. “Let’s do what you want to be doing.” “You will teach me everything I need to know, right?”
A person who is very submissive can go along for a long time, doing something, without making clear what they actually want to be doing. They can be reactive in conversations, asking questions, but then not actually guiding the conversations to what they care about most.
In the example above, there was an overabundance of very bespoke definitions, which led to illegibility.
There can also be an underspecification of definitions. If a person does not have any definitions of “love” for themselves that they feel good about, or hasn’t grappled with how it’s hard to use words to describe it, they may have a hard time coordinating something with somebody. They may ask “Do you still love her” or “Do you love me most” without knowing what they want from these answers, because they do not know how they conceptualize the concept in themselves. They are using the words to check threat models, or check for safety, or be able to predict the future. But actually they may be wanting something else entirely, but do not have the vocabulary for it.
There is a style of fight, in which people “set boundaries” and “say when their boundaries are being violated” while still remaining completely illegible to each other because how they defined the concepts of boundaries and violation was pretty incoherent to begin with.
I will have to give more examples here because there is probably a very simple topology for this.