This post is half-baked, meaning semi-published.
Think of it like a draft that for some reason has been made available anyway.
It might disappear or change dramatically. But likely the url will continue to point at something relevant.
When I had my Non-Naive Trust Insight in mid-2020, I initially conceived of it as a patch on what we were doing at the cultural incubator I’d been living in for years, and I drafted this intro in Roam intended to convey it to the people I was living with. Things got pretty weird and I didn’t quite get it to the point of finishing it to share it with them at the time (although it wasn’t private—technically they could have looked, since it was in our shared Roam). So I don’t know how it would have landed. Some of the terminology or assumptions referenced below may be opaque. Feel free to comment asking for clarity.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolm’s initial introduction to the Non-Naive Trust Dance, mostly written early October 2020
The [[[[non-naive trust]] dance]] is a framework created by [[Malcolm]] for modeling how [[non-naive trust]] is developed within and between people, which of course includes the nurturing of self-trust within each individual.
So far, in this document, I at various points refer to “distrust” or “doesn’t trust”, which is a somewhat incoherent concept in the context of [[non-naive trust]] based on [[self-trust]], where all trust is “positive”; there’s no such thing as distrust.
This applies to all scales:
A guide to being as trustable as you are.
This means that if someone is not choosing the collaborative mindset, there must be something they don’t understand about it, or some part of them that has a different understanding that they haven’t yet integrated. Whatever their concept of “collaborative mindset” is, is in some way confused or incomplete.
This also means that if someone experiences “choosing the collaborative mindset”, there is still some unintegrated part, because if they had a fully-integrated understanding of H3, it wouldn’t feel like a choice, it would just be the obvious way to operate.
To be clear: incomplete versions of the collaborative mindset are not a problem to be avoided—by contrast, they are a necessary element within the bootstrapping process, both internally and interpersonally.
One thing I mean by this is that it cannot start from the assumption that any particular person (or group, or part) is trustable.
Historically, the LRC/Upstart/LSA ecosystem has functionally operated with Jean in the role of trustably-operating-from-postjudgment. This has been vital as part of being able to learn the new mindset to have someone who is consistently not judging and able to say that they’re not judging, because:
However, this approach is fundamentally limited.
One limit it encounters is that, in the learning process, people may not be able to distinguish between “the role model is not judging me” and “the role model won’t enact patterns of behavior that result in pain/suffering for me” (including but not limited to the pain/suffering of feeling judged)
As a result, they will tend to not know what to expect, nor how to clearly articulate their expectations in order to get shared reality on them.
So they may—appropriately—feel betrayed, and this creates a big experience distrust that ultimately needs to be digested.
Even if the role model is operating from a consistent stance of postjudgment, that doesn’t mean the role model can be relied upon in various other ways, and this needs to be talkaboutable without it calling the role model’s postjudgmental stance into question.
Some of the limits are related to us not having been able to adequately point at what “judgment” means in such a way that people could recognize when they or others are doing it, independent of someone else pointing at it.
But the bigger element is simply that in order to truly develop [[self-trust]] and [[non-naive trust]], one needs to start on a foundation of not assuming that someone else is trustable.
(EDIT 2025: H2/H3 is short for “Humanity 2/3” and is similar to “Game A/B”. We’re referring to the cultural platform based on judgment and coercion that has broadly underpinned most of human culture for the past 10,000 years or so. I don’t use these concepts as often any more.)
…in the same sense that there is no such thing as an “H2 person”.
One can talk about “a person who was socialized in H2 and doesn’t know how to do H3” or “a part that is operating with H2 assumptions”.
In much the same way that Game B isn’t about having a tiny minority who understand it rule over everyone else, Getting to a place where a whole person is operating consistently from H3 doesn’t involve anything resembling “handing control over to H3 parts instead of H2 parts”, but “all parts learning what H3 means for them.”
All of these parts are caring for things, and they all need to learn to work with those cares in collaborative ways.
This is related to the above principle, The collaborative mindset is always preferable to the coercive mindset, which is true on all scales. If a given part of someone’s experience is not collaborating, there’s something it needs to understand better.
Nor does it remotely contradict person C trusting B, or B trusting their own relevant capacity.
Different people have both:
(this applies to A & B being people, or parts/perspectives of a person, or could even apply to whole groups)
Often, A has a different perspective, internally, that does trust B.
In this case, one way the scene might go could involve A flipping that part into consciousness/control, which would result in leaning in but would still in some fundamental sense be naive.
Another way the scene could go would be to get those parts in dialogue, so they could come to some sort of larger shared understanding, that would potentially allow leaning in, though might also set a kind of boundary, or whatever.
Sometimes, for A, speaking to the sense of distrust etc and having that be received, is enough to disconfirm at least the surface level of what is happening, and create space to lean in. We’ve experienced this a lot over the years. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it’s not.
There’s a kind of stance that someone in B’s position can access, that says something like “Of course you can’t trust me. That makes sense.”
It’s great when B is able to understand deeply the historical context for the distrust, whether specific to the A-B or related to A’s childhood or [[School-Prison culture]] trauma.
However, being able to understand the specifics is entirely unnecessary to be able to respond from this 100% validation place.
The stance requires only these two things:
From that perspective, one can say “of course you’re having the experience you’re having and interpreting it the way you are! how could it possibly be otherwise?”
We’ve done a lot of this validation here in a kind of implicit way, and my model and experience is that it actually can be remarkably powerful to do it explicitly, repeatedly. There’s a lot of unlearning to do of the H2 culture within which we constantly had our experiences & perceptions invalidated.
This is core to all 3 of the elements-to-be-nurtured in the center of the [[Collaborative Circle]]:
H2, [[School-Prison culture]]., is constantly saying “you should trust”. (EDIT 2025: see Oppressive cultures: you don’t get to know what you know)
As far as I can tell, nurturing H3 requires not just not making that demand but actively subverting the implicit presence of that demand whereever it could arise. This is something that everyone has 100% co-responsibility for.
I think to some extent we’ve avoided doing this explicit validation from a fear that it would set up an external source of validation which would reinforce H2 in some way.
From my experience, that doesn’t appear to be what happens!
I think part of what makes the difference is the unconditionality of the stance described above:
it’s clearly not validating some specific response, with an implication that other responses would be invalid
it’s instead inviting the person into a paradigm where all experiences are valid
Another part of what makes the difference is that everyone is being validated simultaneously.
Even if A says to B “I think you’re judging me” and B is really clear internally that B is not judging A, then B can still say “it makes sense that you can’t trust that I’m not judging me” while also clearly holding “it makes sense that I can trust that I’m not judging you” (although in practice this often does not need to be stated; it’s simply embodied by an utter lack of apology, submission., on B’s part)
People are multifaceted. A may feel safe leaning in in some situations and not in others. Neither A nor B nor anyone else may fully understand why, although with adequate time, space, and technique, it can basically always be untangled and figured out.
It’s common for people to respond to someone feeling less trust than they did some other time by trying to get the person back in touch with the trust they had before.
It’s my current model that this is almost entirely counterproductive.
Here’s how I relate to this now (when I’m on my game)
When I take this perspective, it’s obvious to me that trying to get the person back in touch with the trust they had before ends up pushing away the part that is actually present, which does not build trust with that part. This means that even if I succeed at getting the person to flip into some other perspective, that distrustful part that was there before still distrusts me just as much, if not even more.
I think that in practice part of why people find doing the move above hard is that they become internally disturbed by experiencing an apparent loss of the former connection, and are unable to hold that disturbance.
This could be articulated as an internal trust gap:
and what’s needed here is for both parts to recognize that they’re holding part of the truth:
these don’t contradict
People in B’s position also often seem to think that what’s necessary is for A to internally-dialogue and sort out A’s parts that disagree on how trustworthy B is. This is sometimes possible but even when it is it requires substantial skill and emotional capacity that A may not have (and that B can’t assume A has).
But often the kind of evidence that A1 has used to know B is trustworthy is not valid evidence to A2, and so it’s actually approximately not possible for A to get in sync with B while A2 is active (as opposed to suppressed or compartmentalized or inactive because it isn’t relevant to the situation as construed by A). This is fractally equivalent to how just because Person X trusts both Y and Z in some ways, doesn’t mean Y and Z trust each other. Trust is not transitive like that when it comes to anything complex or interpersonal. (It somewhat is when it comes to deferring to experts on external matters.)
^^< TODO: summary of this model – needs to define what “intrinsic error” is so that the below paragraphs scan; TL;DR = PCT is a cybernetic model of action and perception. some control systems are created by other control systems, but others (such as hungry, thirst, temperature-regulation, sleep, as well as probably more subtle things like belonging or orientedness) are “intrinsic” >^^
First we might ask: what is punishment and why doesn’t it work?
Perceptual Control Theory can articulate this beautifully in a few paragraphs:
Before going on to consider possible complications of this simple picture of learning, we must consider aversive reinforcement, which I have left out of the discussion to prevent confusion. Aversive reinforcement, or punishment, is anything that causes or increases intrinsic error. If a behavior pattern regularly causes intrinsic error, the reorganizing system will be driven into activity by that behavior, and that behavior will be reorganized out of existence. (I trust that the reader can supply his own reminders that avoidance behavior can be a learned control phenomenon, too: reference level of zero.)
As B. F. Skinner (1968) has proven beyond doubt, punishment is a poor way to teach anything. All that punishment can do is cause behavior to reorganize; it cannot produce any specific behavior, because reorganization can be terminated by any change that destroys the feature of behavioral organization causing the intrinsic error. Using aversive reinforcement, one can be sure of eliminating some aspect of behavior, but can have no way of predicting what the resulting new organization will do. Behavior is capable of change in too many dimensions to permit a person to think of controlling it by hemming it in with punishing consequences that leave only the desired behavior unpunished. It would seem that neither punishment nor reward is a good way to change behavior.
In spring of 2018, I had a conversation with H
in which we had an exchange something like this:
H: “I just feel so uncomfortable here! And I know it’s not supposed to be comfortable.”
Malcolm: “Well, it’s one of the most comfortable places in the world to be operating from H3. And one of the most uncomfortable places to be operating from H2.”
I now understand my comment there as having been accurate to how we were holding things at the time, and no longer in line with my understanding of how to make learning work effectively.
Making things maximally uncomfortable for H2 patterns causes rapid reorganization, including:
Similar to the section on validation, I think there has been a model, sometimes implicit, sometimes more explicit of not wanting to “reinforce” the H2 patterns.
The concept of “reinforcing” comes from a conditioning-based model of learning (Skinner etc), which is not compatible with the cybernetic systems model of change that
^^< pull in stuff from the 5k deal doc >^^
Me doing internal NNTD that day in August:
(A & B are both parts in me)
A: I’m afraid I’m not doing a good job
B: No! I know I’m doing a good job.
B: Wait… A, I hear that you can’t trust that we’re doing a good job. That makes sense. I know you’re scared.
A: *feeling seen, cared for*
EDIT 2025: There are now more case-studies of internal trust-dancing. I’d like to publish some of interpersonal trust-dancing as well but they, oddly, tend to feel a bit more personal and/or more of my experiences of them were not in contexts where I was recording. Maybe they’re also just more complicated.
There are now also many other introductions to NNTD!
Explicitly “NNTD”:
Subtly/implicitly “NNTD”:
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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