I’m amazed at how inexplicable even simple misunderstandings in social situations can be. You know the kind: tiny emotional explosions occur on someone’s countenance in response to an ambiguous utterance. It seems easy enough to explain: person A interpreted a sentence structure to mean something that person B did not intend to convey, and person B feels as misunderstood as person A feels wounded. But it’s always more than that, and it always will be. James C Scott famously writes that large scale social events will always exceed in complexity any schema we devise to explain them. But it’s even the case for small social events. We are small things on the surface of the earth.

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