Understanding Each Other: Shared Concepts and Values
It’s 2 am, and I am writing a blog post in a dark room. Tomorrow I have a trip to Italy, yay.
You know the feeling when you meet a person and the things he talks about just *click*? Like he is talking your language…
And, when you share a song, the person genuinely enjoys it, because he has very similar taste in music.
Well-aligned valuation of concepts is a beautiful thing.
I used to make music with a computer and a guitar. For the first years, every song I shared with my friends did not really get too good of a reception. Not the kind I was hoping for at least. I thought they were killers when I made them. What happened?
Turns out they were not very prototypical to the genres. Or if they were, there was always something off like drums or melody. The result was, the song was always kind of a fit to their mental category, but not quite.
…
I’ve discovered that when you share something, whether it is creative work, a topic of discussion, an idea… You are dipping the concept into one’s vast system of mental categories, and hoping it catches. Like those fishing toys, you used to play with as a kid. You just dip your conceptual rod into their brain and hope it catches a category they value.
That being said, I found that the concepts and values in my brain have always been quite far away from the average. It has pros & cons.
It is much harder to find someone interested in the things you are interested in. Of course. If you think “Why people are not interested in my stuff”, why would they? It’s far from the categories they’d like to stimulate. Take a look.
Tip (loosely derived from the book “Surfaces & Essences”):
If you suspect the listener does not have a solid or valued mental category for the thing you’ll share, come up with an analogy to a distant domain they might value, to get them to see the original situation through “one’s own eyes” —
If you happen to be like me with a greater gap to the average person’s interests and concepts (hence atypical concept network), it’s either: Finding like-minded people (always good), or/and getting to know more regular interests better.
At some point, I started digital marketing, and I just knew I had to get out of my goblin mind for once. So I downloaded TikTok about a year ago. It’s been great. I loathed it at first, but I can see the fun and there’s even educational stuff.
Later on, I downloaded a local community app, joined Facebook, Linkedin… And incrementally getting to know more of “regular” interests and topics of discussion. I know it’s needed. If I ever want to help many people, I need to be able to understand them better, instead of just being tied to my isolated goblin trajectory.
Categorization is a paramount process spreading throughout our cognition because permits us to gain in cognitive economy, i.e., make a more efficient way of our cognitive resources.
When we classify an artefact as belonging to a certain category we can understand quickly and effortless what the object is and to predict which type of characteristics it possesses (Medin and Aguilar, 2001)
In simpler words, if people hate you, it’s because things you say are atypical and you are stealing their brain energy.
Bye.
Niko