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Communicating with humans is dangerous.
I don’t just mean that you could say something ground-breaking that challenges the dominant paradigm and breaks the old models, necessitating a restructuring of modern thought. (Though you could, and if you can, go for it.) No, I mean that when you say something to another person and they say something back, you get involved, engaged, entangled. You care.
And once you care what the other guy is going to say, you start getting ready for it, thinking how it might go. Being annoyed when it goes some other way.
Those darned people. They say things they shouldn’t, they don’t say things they should. You go out of your way for them and they don’t notice. You get them to say yes one day and the next they don’t remember. Unbelievable.
Naturally, we do a lot of speculating about the other guy. When we talk, we guess at how he hears us. When he talks, we guess at what he means. And you know, allowing for culture, gender, and distractions like screaming children and trucks thundering by, we’re actually pretty good at the whole guessing thing.
That’s what we do, as humans, with other humans. We guess. And we’re very good at it.
That’s not the dangerous part. … [Continue reading...]
