"What does the market think of me?"

An essay on the poverty of language for mental events.

"What does the market think of me?", is a basic question facing every business developer, at the onset of every meeting, with any individual prospect.

Recently I have been working on my friendships with various individuals - friendships are, in business terms, both opex with shorter-term returns, and capex with longer-term returns. Returns may be positive or negative in any case, being simultaneously threats and opportunities vis-a-vis the SWOT model. In summary : all capital ventured, on any timeframe, is a gamble of opportunity costs. Such is every relationship.

When I contemplate what my friends think of me, I review both their positive and negative feedback to my actions.

Broadly, I guess I don't think of my friends, in the same way that my friends think of me, because we prefer different paradigms, or lenses upon the world. Many people think of the world concretely, having indexed in their heads a great many specific experiences. Others think of the world more abstractly, remembering only symbols and summaries representing groups of past experiences, but not remembering the specifics of past experiences as concretely as the aforementioned group of people.

I, myself, have thought of my experience of the world as if it were a box of legos, for the past twenty years. When I think of emotions, I have a view of what they are made from, how to disassemble them, and how to reassemble them. I have a similarly molecular appreciation of concepts such as selfhood, the concept of concepts in general, and probably every other aspect of my conscious existence. So if someone says to me, "I need respect", I can produce a tree of possible interpretations, and explain the concrete semantics of each leaf ... if given enough time and space to perform the analysis of "what my intuition believes ( what my sub-conscious mind computes ) about what someone has said to me".

However, lacking sufficient time and space to communicate my understanding of what a friend says when they express needs, of course I must then fall back to the common practice of speaking coarsely, in short spurts, with low accuracy - aha, just as normal people do!

And it is the nature of brevity to invite errors into the communication of complexity.

To many people, "they themselves" are simply "they themselves" , and that's it - the details of which are retained subconsciously, or consciously but embargoed from external communications. Furthermore if one finds "themselves to be offended" , often the detailed structure of the belief is not forthcoming.

To cut this short, I suppose it is accurate enough to say that we live at a point in history where the standardisation of language for mental events is poor, where our collective abilities to speak are rough and unrefined, and where the consequences of using such primitive tools are brutal. ( Just look at all the butthurt the world evolves on an hourly basis. ) Therefore it behooves us to appreciate our luck when our dumb tools produce happiness in the commons - when we are at peace.

Moreover we should work consistently towards an eventual disposal of dumb tools for methods of greater precision.