Epistemic vs Attunement

This single tweet explained to me why I’ve suffered at the Chairs’ and Directors’ Council for 5 years:

I thought these meetings were epistemic. I thought we were there to get things done and debate issues.

But everybody else was there for attunement. They didn’t want to establish what’s right. They wanted to feel a warm and fuzzy togetherness.

I can do warm and fuzzy togetherness like it’s no one’s business. Really, I can. It’s completely fake but people love fake. But nobody warned me that was the purpose of the meetings. They kept giving me agendas and spreadsheets.

I’ve been completely misled.

2 thoughts on “Epistemic vs Attunement

  1. “They wanted to feel a warm and fuzzy togetherness”

    This is also why Franco is treated as being worse and more inhumane than Castro by academics even though Castro was objectively worse by almost any possible measure. It’s not about politics or the real world at all. It’s about feeling warm and fuzzy inside because they’re on the side of the people!

    I had a professor once who said that almost everybody reacts to almost everything new by ‘slot filling’ (slipping it into a pre-formed filter for navigating reality).

    Franco is slotted as ‘mean guy’ and Castro gets slotted as ‘people’s hero’ and reality has little to do that.

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  2. This is why I stay away from women’s groups, even at church. Because if you say “we’re having a meeting to plan the upcoming XYZ, I take that very literally and seriously, and try to think about the actual logistical problems. So if I arrive at the meeting and find that it has been planned already, and we are just there to check the checkbox and approve the plan, this is confusing, frustrating, and I feel like I’ve been misled, which breaks trust with other members of the group, and now I have a hard time trusting them in other contexts as well. Disaster.

    If I could join the men’s group, would probably get by OK there. They never act like who’s in charge and what’s actually going on are classified intel I don’t have the clearance for :/

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