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This is: Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough, published by Academian on the LessWrong.
Disclaimer: This post was written time-boxed to 2 hours because I think LessWrong can still understand and improve upon it; please don't judge me harshly for it.
Summary: I am generally dismayed that many people seem to think or assume that only three levels of social metacognition matter ("Alex knows that Bailey knows that Charlie knows X"), or otherwise seem generally averse to unrolling those levels. This post is intended to point out (1) how the higher levels systematically get distilled and chunked into smaller working memory elements through social learning, which leads to emotional tracking of phenomena at 6 levels of meta and higher, and (2) what I think this means about how to approach conflict resolution.
Epistemic status: don't take my word for it; conceptual points intended to be fairly self evident upon reflection; actual techniques not backed up by systematic empirical research and might not generalize to other humans; all content very much validated by my personal experiences with talking to people about feelings in real life.
Related Reading: Duncan Sabien on Common knowledge & Miasma; Ben Pace on The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge
I. Conceptual introduction, by example
Here's how higher levels of social metacognition get distilled down and represented in emotions that end up tracking them (if poorly). Each feeling in the example below will be followed by an unrolling of the actual event or events it is implicitly tracking or referring to.
Warning: reading this first section (I) will require a fair bit of symbolic reasoning/thinking, so you might find it tiring and prefer to skip to later sections. A better writing of this section would do more work in between these symbolic reasoning bits to distill things out and make them easier to digest.
Scale 1: One event, four levels of meta (yes, we're starting with four)
1.1) Alex leaves out the milk for 5 minutes
1.2) Bailey observes (1.1), and feels it was bad.
Unrolling of referents: Bailey felt that Alex leaving out the milk was bad.
1.3) Alex observes (1.2), and feels judged.
Unrolling of referents: Alex felt that Bailey felt that Alex leaving out the milk was bad.
1.4) Alex reflects on feeling judged, doesn't like it, and concludes that Bailey is "a downer".
Unrolling of referents: Alex felt it was bad that Alex felt that Bailey felt that Alex leaving out the milk was bad.
Notice that the unrollings look and sound very different from the distillations. That's in large part because the unrolling is not our native format for storing social metacognition; it's stored via concepts like "feeling judged" or "being a downer". However, to the extent that the feeling "Bailey is a downer" is tracking something in reality, it's tracking things that track things that track things that track reality: in this case, milk spoilage.
(An aside: notice also that 1.4 involves Alex's feelings about Alex's feelings. Some people wouldn't call that an extra level of social metacognition, and would just combine it all together into "Alex's feelings". However, I'm separating those layers for two reasons: (1) the separation in counting won't affect my conclusion that the total number of levels being implicitly tracked greatly exceeds three, and (2) I think it's especially important to note when people have feelings about their own feelings, as that can lead to circular definitions in what their feelings are tracking; but that's a topic for another day.)
Scale 2: multiple events, six levels of meta
I'll start the numbering at 4 here:
2.4) Multiple similar Scale 1 events happen where Alex does something X, and ends up feeling that Bailey was "a downer" about it.
Partial unrolling of referents: Alex feels ...
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