GHDR Report 0606: Learning to Talk like a Human

⊕captionAn unexpected joy was meeting a family member's coffee group at Peet's in California. This gave me an example of how a social group operates organically.

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The new car is so cute! Like a stretching cat ready to pounce on adventure! I'm thinking of calling her 'Nellie' because the Golf is quite docile on the road much like a friendly horse, but I also have just been calling her 'Bloo-car' until the paperwork is finalized and new license plates are mounted.

Happy Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDR) Report Day! It's been a month and a day since my last report while in Taiwan. I'm back home now, and have nearly resolved a huge source of anxiety: acquiring a replacement car after my 25-year old GTI succumbed to salt rot from many New England winters. I've just finished evaluating the replacement---a used 2017 Golf Mk7 shipped from Georgia---and have decided to keep her!

With this decision made, two months of car-related anxiety have come to an end, and I'm ready to move on to whatever the heck I was doing with my GHDR Resolutions.

Picking Up from Last Month

Last month, my big insight was reframing my mission to a questionNod to director Steven Chow, who is alleged to have said, "A film must answer a question. The answer can be complicated but the question must be simple." that values-alignedSee Sri Public Notes for a description of my core values folks might find more approachable:

I think at the time, this captured my mood at the time. I was dealing with being in Taiwan again which triggers quite a number of anxious childhood memories, not speaking the language and feeling misunderstood for years. Happily, I seem to have finally moved past that through my positive experiences being present with the people around me while projecting that I was pleased to interact with them. This included not only family, but random people I met driving Ubers or manning the counter at 7-11. From this, I learned that projecting positive sentiment as part of my conversation helped carry me past embarassment for my poor Mandarin Chinese. The same experience repeated when I returned to the US, spending a week in Northern California. Of particular note was meeting my cousin's father-in-law's morning coffee group at a Peet's Coffee, where I experienced the same positive interactions.

From this experience, I've proposed a new guideline for myself:

This might seem obvious to most people, but it isn't to me. I'm a weird cross-domain human-centered synthesizer with high systemizing cognition in both emotional and analytical realms. In other words, I make little sense to people because I often try to communicate in terms of models and datapoints to express the complex histories behind my lived experience. And you know what? There's NO WAY that this works in polite informal conversation. I believe this has been my primary oversight. While all that system stuff is great when someone needs me to solve a problem, it is not a good way to communicate.

What works instead? Being present. Conveying positive sentiment. This works across all cognitive styles, I think. It's the fundamental unit of human connection, from which opportunities to collaborate arise and friendships form organically. And isn't that exactly what my Groundhog Day Resolutions are trying to accomplish this year with my systems framing of The Meadow and The Colony?

Duh!

Ramifications of Sentiment-based Communication

One of the first applications of this new insight is this very GHDR Report. If I am writing to 90% Sentiment---let me call this 90S for short---then I have to restructure the way I write for the public. The goal is the same: create a collaborative community that motivates not just be, but also others who feel invisible and unseen so we can do cool things together. For that we need friendship and that is based on the 90S trust experience.

There's a second insight related to how my "cognitive architecture" as a Systemizing Conceptual Thinker is quite different from the general population. The majority of people, I believe, look for recognizable context and patterns for which they seek tested solutions in the form of a recipe or process. They don't need the entire conceptual model; they can figure it out by following the steps and drawing their own conclusions. Again, an enormous mismatch between how I think in an adaptive/synthesis mode versus how others build understanding. Neither is better than the other, but they are highly situational and require different approaches.

From this, I can infer that my approach to writing and packing products could become more approachable if I simply adhere to the context-pattern-recipe format. It's perfectly fine, even though I don't think that way. What's more important again is sentiment that is apparent from observable care and interest in what I approach, demonstrated over time. With luck, these interaction lead to meeting people and collaborating.

I'm pretty excited about this change in my framing. I can still bust out the cross-domain systems thinking but it doesn't need to be the primary way I communicate. I can switch to 90S communication. I did it in Taiwan and I did it in California. My deeply-held values don't change, and are in fact reinforced by the pursuit of projecting positive sentiment. I can use words that are authentic, transparent, and imbued with truthfulnessThis reminds me of The Four Agreements principle "Be meticulous with your word" . What's new is the 90% emphasis on sentiment as the primal foundation of informal human conversation.

The Month Forward

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Goals Summary

This diagram (high-res source here) is still relevant. It lists all the things that I thought were important for 2025 as a systematic inquiry.

From the February 2nd Kickoff I also listed these tangible artifacts:

• documentation written and published
• social media posts
• software delivered
• new forms designed, old forms refreshed
• new business contracted
• entries added to digital garden
• new people met
• checks cashed from creative works

My tangible goals continue to be:

• Create code libraries to demonstrate capabilities
• Reboot my productivity tools
• Develop prosocial architectural governance docs
• Engage in collaborative projects for the sake of working with people, not specific outcomes
• Put more stuff on the Internet for people to find and share

I could describe my overarching professional interest as:

This resonates with me well and with others system thinkers, but my community goals are broader. What's good for Sri-kin like myself is, I hope, good for everyoneMuch in the same way that what's good for feminists and neurodivergent people is good for everyone.

Instead, I think my strategy will be to write using compatible 90S patterns based on the aforementioned style of identifying contexts and then proposing recipes (this being the 90%) while also hinting at conceptual modeling (the remaining 10%). It may seem obvious to most people, but it wasn't to me because I previously had the strong need to share cross-domain conceptual models and supporting data so people could draw their own conclusions and decide whether it fit their situation. No longer. This new-to-me framing is finally in a form that I can adapt to my thinking, recognizing that even other systemizing cross-domain people would be hard-pressed to absorb decades of systems thinking in a casual piece of media.

Expressed as a a guideline:

I'll be focusing on getting used to writing and conversing this way, and see how it goes.

Thanks for sticking with this blog post! We'll see how things go!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS