yetineti

@Natasha Tori Maru @Joseph Maynor That maybe why the three of us communicate so well. There is also the whole ‘compatibility’ chart thing and I remember my own: ENFP does best with INFJ or INTJ—ironically. So maybe I just love you guys! I think it’s a better gauge of communication compatibility than romantic usually, though lol.

I think this was a good lesson for everyone, including myself: provocation is not profundity.

@LordFall Thanks for opening up.

Maybe it is because of the nonlinear relationship between intelligence, social consensus and value.

AI will not become AGI until the training data becomes the training supply.

Yes, but I will also concede to his point that it very much appears insecure from me not to receive valid points—for any reason. But it should also be recognized that people’s attention is earned and if a point is trying to be made, you must know who it is being made to. Points don’t make themselves to people or exist independently from people. A point to no one is a point to nowhere. Generalizations or assumptions can be a huge turnoff. I used to do sales. Identify plot. Relate to resolution. Suggest, never assert. I hated sales, though.

Yes. I prefer more relational questions in the future. I could have probably short circuited this earlier, however. Never attack an ENFPs character or an INTPs framework! Relate, discuss—never assume. 😁

So busy trying to disarm each other, neither of us noticed we’d already exchanged weapons.

TLDR: Kyle and I basically agree on value. I somehow turned a misunderstanding into a month-long epistemology project. Anyway, I can fix your dryer now.

@LordFall This was never really a conversation about value. However, revealing my values may explain the gap. The big reveal: we pretty much agree. I don’t think people have to provide value to have value. However, everyone should probably be trying to provide more value than baseline. The implication someone can sit around is ridiculous. Stage Green bypassing is ridiculous. Maintaining baseline forever is ridiculous. I also don’t think I ever really disagreed with your values framework. I’ve spent about a month asking questions about it because I was curious how you were getting from a framework that increasingly sounded pretty reasonable to me—competence, contribution, responsibility, solving problems, creating abundance—to fairly confident assumptions about me from very limited information. The more I understood your actual framework, the less I disagreed with it. You don’t even seem to hold yourself to some magical higher standard. You seem to apply basically the same expectations to yourself. So my question was never really, “How do I defeat this value system?” It was: How did this value system produce those assumptions about me? That has been my loop in this whole thing. — Where I probably differ is that I rarely use value as a comparative human scoreboard. I have goals and standards. Obviously I compare sometimes. But I mostly ask whether I am becoming more capable, useful, independent, responsible, skilled, helpful, etc. relative to my own circumstances and potential. I use comparison sparingly because it gets dangerous extremely fast when the frame is wrong. You are taking a snapshot of somebody without knowing everything that produced the snapshot. That doesn’t mean edge cases destroy the paradigm. I almost think the opposite: the better a paradigm becomes, the more selectively I think it should be applied. A bad framework fails obviously. A sophisticated framework can explain a LOT. Precisely because it can explain a lot, it can start absorbing contradictory information and producing plausible explanations for almost anything. That’s where I get cautious: use the paradigm to generate questions, use reality to determine whether the paradigm applies, and don’t use the paradigm to determine what reality must have been. — And this is where the ENFP thing is actually relevant to me. “Campaigner.” “Champion.” Whatever haha. Obviously I’m not claiming four letters scientifically prove my motives or personality, but the shorthand fits me pretty damn well: people, possibilities, connections, meaning, constantly asking “what about this angle?” And yeah, I can overthink the shit out of something when I’m fascinated by it. So me spending a month asking you questions about value wasn’t necessarily me evading a values conversation. From my perspective it was almost the opposite: I was interested enough in your framework to keep turning it around trying to figure out exactly how it worked. I’m fascinated by this whole thing. I don’t think you’re a bad person at all. I actually admire quite a bit of what you’re trying to do around competence, responsibility, contribution and results. These particular traps just caught my attention because I had never really come across them this cleanly before. I’ve argued plenty in my life lol, especially with family, but this felt unusually strong while somehow remaining disconnected from the thing I thought I was asking. And obviously I got caught in it too. Early on I started defending myself instead of just figuring out what the hell was happening. I was trying to explain myself, understand where you were coming from and defend against the assumptions at the same time. That made everything messier. These traps can happen to anyone. That’s part of why I find them interesting. — There’s also a funny personal connection with the INTP thing, but I don’t want to compare you and my dad too much. My dad is an INTP and a master welder. Extremely mechanical. I was hilariously not mechanical AT ALL. He constantly tried to teach me that stuff and I avoided it. The useful contrast isn’t really “you and my dad.” It’s inside my own life. I found other ways to provide value long before I became mechanically useful, then gradually developed the exact side of myself I had avoided. So there is something funny to me about now having this giant conversation about competence, systems and value with another person identifying as an INTP while I’m finally becoming mechanically competent myself. That’s about as far as I’d take the comparison haha. — In high school, my parents divorced. Dad and my much older sister moved out. My mom babysat kids in the house. I felt like I was in an intellectual bubble between the age gaps and family situation, and I had a lot to figure out. I could ace tests, but decided: fuck college. I skipped plenty of homework to work more shifts, help my mom around the house, or frankly prioritize my own mental health at the time. From some external snapshots, you could probably call parts of that a “low-value” trajectory. But it was extremely valuable. I helped people through really hard periods, kept things functioning, and learned an absurd amount about people, relationships, responsibility and myself. I wasn’t just going to sit around and watch people I loved remain helpless in their own victim mindsets either. I wanted them okay. Eventually I realized: I need to help myself too. — Leo had already helped me a lot here, but I needed a harder test. I moved out and have lived alone for years. I delivered for a store as their only driver and, shit, made around $4k/month for a while. But my car was expensive to maintain and I didn’t really feel like I brought much unique value personally. Anyone could basically do it. Living alone also makes responsibility impossible to abstract away: dishes dirty? Mine. Laundry? Mine. Bills? Mine. Car broken? Mine. People around me also started stabilizing and didn’t need me as much. So eventually I made myself start working on my own car. Turns out mechanics is basically high-stakes Legos. I still didn’t feel useful enough, so I picked up warehouse work: 140°F trailers, hundreds of packages an hour, 1 lb to 200 lbs. Somebody had to do it. Eventually I still felt like I was underselling myself, so I quit delivery and literally let AI interrogate me about what I was good at and where I could provide more value. It found a maintenance application nearby. I drove there without really looking into it further and knocked on the door. — For roughly the last year I’ve been maintaining several multi-million-dollar facilities. I’ve taught myself plumbing, electrical, fire systems, compliance, appliances, mechanical troubleshooting, vendor coordination and a pile of other shit I absolutely did not know five years ago. AND I get to apply the communication and people skills I already had. They joke about shutting down if I leave. It’s a dying trade. Reliable people willing to learn are hard to find. I still help my family and deliberately maintain jobs with flexible schedules. I already have offers for around 33% more income, and I’m working on arrangements where certain jobs could pay close to double my regular rate. I’ve also been thinking about getting back into music or eventually running my own maintenance company. My dad, naturally, finds all of this hilarious because I barely knew a flathead from a Phillips a few years ago. — So yeah: I care A LOT about providing value. Probably too much sometimes. I’m constantly asking whether I’m more capable than I was, whether I’m solving harder problems, whether I’m making things easier for people around me, whether I’m actually using what I have, where I’m avoiding growth, and where I could contribute more. That is much closer to my framework than asking, “Am I higher value than this other guy?” And that is precisely why I consciously decided not to devalue myself by spending this entire dispute explaining my value to you. Not because I couldn’t. Because that was never the question I was trying to answer. I wanted you to explain the assumptions you had already made. You kept coming back to some version of “tell me your value so I can determine whether my judgment was wrong,” while I kept asking: What justified the judgment before you knew the answer? Those are different questions. — And this is what I meant by my immature “You are trapped” comment. I already suspected we valued things similarly. The longer this went on, the more obvious that became. You’ve been trying to clarify the value framework because you thought I was challenging it. But I wasn’t challenging your values framework. I was challenging your assumptions. That distinction is basically the entire disagreement. And now I’ve finally done the thing I intentionally refused to do during the argument. I told you my values framework. I told you how I think about contribution. I told you how I actually live it. And it’s basically your framework. I think people should become capable. I think people should solve problems. I think people should contribute. I think victim mindsets can destroy people. I think bypassing responsibility is destructive. I’m actively trying to provide more value, and I think I already provide quite a lot. I just don’t generally use that framework to take snapshots of other people and rank them. — And again, this isn’t an indictment of you. I don’t think you’re a bad person. I actually admire a lot of this stuff. I also don’t think these traps mean anything uniquely terrible about you. I got caught in them too by defending myself instead of recognizing what was happening. That’s why I’m fascinated. The framework itself is pretty reasonable. The interesting question is how a reasonable framework produced the assumptions in the first place, and what happens to those assumptions now that you actually have the information. That’s really all I’ve been trying to understand. And the funniest part is still: we basically agree on value.

@Joshe This really doesn’t have much to do with Kyle personally. Kyle just happens to be providing an unusually clear case study in kafkatraps, double binds, and self-sealing arguments. It started when he made judgments about my own life. When I questioned those judgments, the response eventually became to disengage and suggest that other users disengage from me as well. That fascinated me. Whenever I end up in situations like this, my instinct is to understand what is actually happening. I’ve been through plenty of interpersonal conflicts, but I had never encountered an argument that felt so rhetorically strong while also feeling so disconnected from anything I could actually clarify, falsify, or resolve. At this point, if Kyle continues reframing what happened, I’ve documented enough of the exchange to keep the record clear. I’m not interested in attacking him personally. I also acknowledge that earlier in the conflict I said some unnecessary things, and I apologize to the community for that and have already been deliberately avoiding rhetoric like that. When the onus was placed on me, however, I am not sure. What interests me now is the structure of the arguments themselves. I have roughly a month’s worth of examples, and I’m considering making a separate thread dedicated specifically to these kinds of mental traps. That would not be an indictment of Kyle as a person. I’m not trying to establish that he is “good” or “bad.” The point is that these argumentative structures are apparent far beyond this one interaction and, in my view, fairly common in this community. A live example simply makes them easier to examine. The especially interesting part is how the structure can become self-sealing. If he keeps responding, the dispute continues and can be reframed again. If he stops responding, that can potentially be interpreted as him avoiding the issue or conceding it—which has been one of his accusations towards me, actually. Likewise, my own attempts to clarify can be reframed as further evidence that I am evading something. That is the phenomenon I’m interested in documenting: not Kyle himself, but the kind of argumentative loop in which nearly every possible response can be absorbed back into the original interpretation. It is fascinating.

This response adds a third demonstration of the same loop. I first laid out the structure: “YetiNeti tries to clarify > reframe as evasion. ‘Evasive’ conversation > devalue the conversation. Leaving > relabel as ‘using my time better,’ not evasion. Accused of evading > reverse the accusation: proof they were evading first. So the seal is: clarification = evidence, disengagement = justified, counteraccusation = more evidence. Nothing is allowed to count against the original ‘evasion’ claim.” I then explained how the two loops connect: “Judgment about my value > I ask what justified it > I’m asked to demonstrate my value instead > I question why the burden shifted to me > that questioning gets treated as evasion > I try to clarify what we actually agreed to discuss > clarification gets framed as an ‘exit ramp’ > the disputed framing gets treated as the settled agreement > not following that framing becomes proof that I evaded > that ‘evasion’ reinforces the original negative judgment > I ask how that proves the original judgment > I’m handed the same test again > repeat.” Your response was: “Let’s be real about what happened.” You then restate the disputed account as settled reality: “It was clearly defined,” I “avoided defining what think value is,” “refused to share how provide it,” came in with “an agenda to cross-examine the host,” and engaged in “deflection and evasion.” But this is the third pass through the same structure. I identify the loop > my identification is reframed as denial, manipulation, or refusal to face reality > your reframed account is presented as “what really happened” > I question that account > my questioning becomes further evidence of evasion. So the act of pointing out the self-sealing structure is itself absorbed into the structure. The disputed premise is repeatedly restated as fact, and my refusal to accept it is then treated as proof of the original accusation. That is why the question remains: what evidence originally justified the judgment, and what evidence would count against it? That is what I wanted to talk about.

I think part of why this has been so confusing is that the two loops are really one larger loop: Judgment about my value > I ask what justified it > I’m asked to demonstrate my value instead > I question why the burden shifted to me > that questioning gets treated as evasion > I try to clarify what we actually agreed to discuss > clarification gets framed as an “exit ramp” > the disputed framing gets treated as the settled agreement > not following that framing becomes proof that I evaded > that “evasion” reinforces the original negative judgment > I ask how that proves the original judgment > I’m handed the same test again > repeat. That’s the combined structure I’ve been trying to isolate. Basically, the frame starts equating: questioning the burden = evasion clarifying the topic = evasion not accepting the disputed frame = evasion evasion = evidence supporting the original judgment

@Joshe I’m open to a ‘round 2,’ perhaps with a mod and definitely with proper clarification. I have previous examples as well, unfortunately some of the threads have been deleted. They’re reconstructible through the forum index, though. I plan on sharing some of that in the future. Here’s the concrete example I’m looking at from this exchange: I tried to clarify the topic before the stream > that was framed as me creating “exit ramps.” Disputed framing > I question/clarify it > clarification gets treated as evasion > the disputed framing is later assumed as established > my failure to follow it becomes proof that I evaded. Afterward Kyle says the agreed topic was specifically for me to define and demonstrate my value in my own life > but that definition of the agreement is itself what I had been trying to clarify beforehand. Disputed framing > I question/clarify it > clarification gets treated as evasion > the disputed framing is later assumed as established > my failure to follow it becomes proof that I evaded. And even in this exchange: Kyle says the next debate should have a clearly defined thesis > I ask whether that means ours wasn’t clearly defined > he says it was clearly defined > then defines it in the exact way I had been disputing and trying to clarify beforehand > my refusal to follow that framing becomes proof that I evaded it. Disputed framing > I question/clarify it > clarification gets treated as evasion > the disputed framing is later assumed as established > my failure to follow it becomes proof that I evaded. That’s the kind of loop I mean. The conclusion depends on accepting the very premise I was disputing, while disputing the premise becomes evidence for the conclusion. I’ve been going back through the interactions pretty carefully to make sure I’m not forcing that pattern onto them. If you think there’s still a step missing there, what would you want to see demonstrated more concretely?

@Joshe I’m working on that.

@Joshe I haven’t asked for anything other than what I’ve asked for. The main point is about self-sealing reasoning: what evidence originally justifies a judgment, what would count against it, and whether disagreement, clarification, or refusal can all be reinterpreted as further evidence for the same conclusion. My situation with LordFall is just the example I’m using to test that structure, because I think that’s what has been happening here.

@LordFall Who is evading?

So did I evade the topic or was it not clearly defined? You evaded clarification. I tried to clarify it, for the exact reason that you wouldn’t be able to use it as an excuse like you are now. Let this conversation and my previous response to you be the track record for that and another example of you reframe-evading.

@Joseph Maynor I think we could figure something out. You seem like you’d be great to talk to. Doesn’t have to be video either. I just used an old iPhone selfie camera and older AirPods (which is admittedly higher end than standard, but not too fancy. I was going to set up some fancy stuff and got lazy haha). +discord was limiting at 720p anyways

@LordFall I didn’t want an open-ended debate. That was a suggestion that Joseph made that you acknowledged. See above. You allowed me to pick the topic. When I was not concise enough with my wording, and tried to clarify the topic beforehand, ‘what is your thesis, no more no less,’ you used it against me. The above post was your response, accusing me of off ramps and posturing about me being overwhelmed or not showing up—I showed up. Seems like once you figured out what I actually wanted to talk about, you figured it’d be easier not to. But you were already committed. You held out as long as you could but after an hour and a half, you fell back to the only trick you know: accuse and evade: Create a self-sealing reason why what you’re doing is not what you’re accusing the other of. Sign off and hope nobody accuses the actual evasion. YetiNeti tries to clarify > reframe as evasion. “Evasive” conversation > devalue the conversation. Leaving > relabel as “using my time better,” not evasion. Accused of evading > reverse the accusation: proof they were evading first. So the seal is: clarification = evidence, disengagement = justified, counteraccusation = more evidence. Nothing is allowed to count against the original “evasion” claim.

I thought about a mod. I’m open to that. I think we each had our own concrete topics, in the discussion haha.

@Ulax Let’s do our own live stream and like every working relationship—I give you something, you give me something. You want me to disclose my private life and convince you I’m valuable? Convince me that the time it takes me to do that is valuable. For us, it may be. For LordFall and I, it became too apparent he has his assumptions. If someone says ‘If you don’t tell me how you're valuable, I’ll assume you’re not’—that’s bad faith, and frankly a tactic used frequently in abusive relationships or, to be fair, business. So, if that makes me evasive—yeah I wasn’t going to qualify myself to someone. I live my life in a way where I don’t have to. If you guys don’t want to, you don’t have to either. I’d just call that fair. I don’t engage in bad faith beyond reason. I gave LordFall endless chances. He’s slippery. You might be different. Want to talk? I’m more than open to having discussions and even disclosing aspects of my life to people that are supportive and helpful.

@Yimpa @Natasha Tori Maru Thank you, ladies.

@LordFall That is why you rage quit? I was just about to tell you what it is about me that makes me valuable! But I don’t owe you any qualifications and I apologize for my lack of clarity and your misunderstanding of the topic. I tried to clarify your and my own thesis before hand and make this a proper debate. I offered to tell you about myself. I just wanted to make sure, if I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t make any assumptions. More than fair for me to ensure good faith. But it is public for everyone to see now. Don’t even try to delete it! I have my own copy.