On the Etiquette of Being Polite

We postpone taking actions that facilitate our comfort in cases where immediately obliging the desire would result in others' discomfort. This is polite behavior. For example, you won't see a sober passenger take a piss on the subway.

What's happening implicitly in many of these cases, including the example above, is the establishment of a currency exchange, where the currencies being exchanged are different types of dis/comfort. This is easiest to describe with the help of an example, so I'll just keep using the one I started. But first, a brief clarification: I'm defining comfort and discomfort as inverses of each other; it depends on one's point of view, two sides of the same coin, etc.

The reason an exchange is implicitly created is because, if the passenger took a piss, the resulting discomfort of the other passengers would not be a consequence of their own bladders becoming more filled with urine. Their discomfort would, instead, be caused by the breach of social norms that the pissing passenger selfishly accomplished. In another scenario, a passenger who opted to postpone pissing until they reached a restroom, while six other passengers rode along obliviously, would essentially be saying "one bank note of my urinary tract discomfort equals six bank notes of an average person's comfort associated with things progressing in a socially acceptable manner."

We've dissected this a bit so far, but there's more to uncover. Let's look even closer...

Viewing the dis/comfort exchange in terms of an actual currency exchange becomes problematic once your observations of detail require that you peer through a microscope. One of the first discrepancies you may encounter is that the deterrent to piss when three other passengers are present equals more than half the deterrent when there are six other passengers. In fact, there's hardly a deterrent reduction at all. This is very different from the bank, where the former of two pieces of paper worth three and six bank notes, respectively, is valued at exactly half the latter. The sleigh of hand in the preceding is inconsequential; you'll obtain similar results if the bank notes retain their original metaphorical attribute...the number of other passengers has no bearing on the discomfort resulting from being polite.

As humans, we have the wondrous ability to regard ourselves from the point of view of another. This is especially easy when the other person is within our line of sight, a circumstance that encourages the notion of seeing ourselves from another's point of view to be taken quite literally. Such occasions are worth mentioning here because they introduce a relevant quirk. Though I somewhat trivialized the endeavor by describing it as 'especially easy', an aspect of it that's more involved is to ensure that when one is viewing oneself from the other's visual perspective, insider knowledge doesn't infiltrate the perception.

By this I mean, for example, if two people, Ashley and Philip, are separated by 20 meters and approaching each other on the sidewalk, and Philip is imagining how he looks through Ashley's eyes, he should take care not to allow his knowledge of what he's spitting onto the sidewalk influence his out-of-body perception of himself, since Ashley is still too far away to determine whether he's spitting phlegm, which is possibly offensive, or watermelon seeds, which could only offend someone who is sour to begin with. This demonstrates how people are liable to erroneously incriminate themselves for being impolite when viewing themselves through another's eyes.

Driveling Drippy Drinks

I recently overheard an exchange that drew my attention to a previously unexplored aspect of verbal communication, which I will refer to as Exchange Structure. Though such structures can be graphically represented numerous ways, I didn't spend time evaluating the options, and simply chose the first that came to mind. It's all very straightforward, with each column corresponding to an Exchange Participant, and the circled numbers representing the chronological order of things. Here's what I overheard, shown in its ES form, which led to the construct of an ES in the first place:

So we have a person who had made the innocent mistake of swapping the relationship between proof and % alcohol. They happened to have been reading from the bottle's label, on which was printed the % alcohol, and from which they had incorrectly inferred the beverage's proof. What interested me about all this was that, despite the other Exchange Participant accurately pointing their inquiry to the piece of information they had assumed was given (% alcohol), they could just as well have asked about the inferred information, the proof, thinking that it was this information from which the % alcohol was inferred. And what in god's name would the Exchange Structure look like then, I wonder? Would not the EP being asked to confirm the proof similarly reply 'yes', albeit perhaps less confidently, owing to the fact that in this case the information whose accuracy they were being asked to confirm was based on their own inference rather than on an official-looking label?

Well, of course, I had to draw it out. As you would expect, this ES is rather longer than that from the first case, since the EPs have to hash out a seeming contradiction: whereas before, the Exchange Participant who was corrected by the other is led to concede that their inference was in error, now they're staring directly at the bottle's own label, which claims that the beverage therein contained boasts a fourfold increase in % alcohol compared to the % alcohol purported by the correcting Exchange Participant.

I was initially quite taken by this idea of an Exchange Structure, romanticizing that it could be used to quickly discern whether a misunderstanding had taken place. I had imagined that variables like the intonation associated with questions, and the number of arrow "branches" between EPs, could be used to uniquely render a conversation graphically in a way that would catalyze the deduction of information about it. I've since concluded that conversations are too unpredictable to ever dependably fit into anticipated, pre-fabricated forms. For example, questions are sometimes asked with the intonation of a statement.

Yes, I had already given up on the idea of an Exchange Structure by the time I started writing this post, yet I nonetheless propagated the fallacy of its merit, at least for a time. After all, who wants to read about something that is total bunk? I included this last paragraph in an attempt to illustrate that authors who are unwilling to let go of ideas that once held promise might be knowingly deceiving their readers. It is easier to believe your own lie after you've convinced others to believe it with you.