Reading Each Lever or Reading the Play

After a lever lands, the actor has to say what the target made of it. With one lever that is a single question. With several, another question comes first: whether to read each lever as it lands, or to wait and read the whole play once every lever has been played. It is tempting to treat this as temperament, with the eager actor reading every flicker in the room and the patient one waiting for the full picture.

In The Lam System for Political Interaction the choice is made earlier, and for a reason that has nothing to do with patience. Which way a cycle reads shows in how its levers were framed when they were declared. A lever aimed at one particular option has a question of its own to answer and can be read the moment it lands. Levers that each move one weight in the same comparison have no separate questions; none of them says anything until the others are in place, so they are read together, once. By the time the reading comes, the framing has settled which kind it will be, and with it what the actor can learn from the cycle afterward.

What a reading is

Perception is the target's reading of the comparison after a lever has landed. Each lever carries a projection of how that comparison will look once it has been played, and the reading is set beside the projection: either it validates what the lever projected, or it fails. The perception is the target's act. The record holds the actor's judgment of it, written where the target's perception belongs, since nobody else was placed to see it, and The Boundary of Computation explains why that judgment stays with the actor.

Projections take different shapes. A lever can project that the preferred position will cost the target less, or that an alternative will cost more, or simply that the preferred position will come to rank higher. Whatever the shape, the reading arrives at one kind of claim: the target now values the preferred position above the alternative in question. A reading is always about the comparison the target decides on, whichever corner of it the lever was pushing.

Reading each lever as it lands

Lena Ortiz wants the night dispatch desks brought under her own budget. The decision is Daniel Okafor's as chief operating officer, and her detection named three options for him: approve the move, leave dispatch with the depot managers, or hand it to the automation program. Each of her two levers is aimed at one of those alternatives. The overtime case, which shows a single desk trimming the overtime Daniel has taken criticism over, is aimed at the depot managers, who run the overtime. The savings figure that Priya Natarajan, the controller, has signed is aimed at the automation program, which can promise lower overtime too but has no figure finance has tested.

So each lever has its own question. After the overtime case lands, Lena can ask whether Daniel now ranks the desks above the depots, and answer before the second lever has reached him. She reads that he does. Later, with Priya's sign-off fetched through a sub-cycle and the signed figure played, she asks whether he now ranks the desks above automation, and reads that he does.

Reading lever by lever gives the actor attribution. The record holds two projections and two readings, each at its lever's address, so Lena can see afterward which lever moved Daniel against which option. Had one reading failed, the failure would point at one lever and leave the other's reading standing. It also gives her time. A failed reading of the overtime case would arrive while the second lever was still to play, with a new lever, mooting and abandoning all open before Daniel decides; the essay Perception Failure follows those exits.

What it risks is a lever misread on its own. A lever that does its work only once another is in place will look like a failure when read alone, and the actor may answer the false failure with a new lever, or give up a lever that was about to work.

Reading the play

Suppose Lena had framed the same two levers the other way. She treats Daniel's choice as a single comparison, the move against the alternative in whatever form he might take it, and gives each lever one weight in it. The overtime case adds to what approval offers Daniel. Priya's signature takes away what approval risks for him, since a savings claim with finance's name on it is one he can defend if it is challenged. Neither works alone: the overtime saving is a claim he cannot stand behind without the signature, and a signature on a figure he does not care about changes nothing.

Her detection is the same in both framings. It still names the depot managers and the automation program apart, because detection lists every option the target has. What changes is what the levers aim at. In the first framing each lever answers for one named alternative; in the second, both work on the preferred position against the alternatives taken together. The reading follows the levers, so a cycle with a long list of options can still be read once, and a cycle with two options can still be read lever by lever.

Framed this way, the levers have nothing to answer separately, and the cycle reads once. The overtime case is played and left unread. The signed figure is fetched and played, and only then does Lena ask what Daniel makes of the whole, whether he now ranks the move above the alternative, with one reading written once every lever is in.

Reading the play gives an honest reading of levers that work only together, since nothing is written down as failing halfway because its partner had not yet landed. What it costs is attribution. If the play's reading fails, the record shows that the whole play missed and cannot say which half fell short, so the next lever is chosen with less to go on. Across many cycles, the actor learns less about which kinds of lever move which people.

The gap has a cost of its own. Between the first lever's execution and the one reading, the record holds nothing about what the target made of anything. Lena will have seen Daniel react to the overtime case, but in this framing her impression has no place to go, and if the play's reading later fails, there is no entry to go back to.

The system ranks neither way of reading. Each fits a different kind of argument, and the system receives whichever the actor brings. The levers in a cycle are framed alike, each against its own option or all within the one comparison, and the reading follows from that. An actor who wants one lever read alone and two others read together has levers that do not yet agree on what the comparison is.

The six things in the figure split evenly, three to each way of reading.

The selection waits for the reading

Whichever way a cycle reads, nothing Daniel selects goes on the record while a live lever still waits for its reading, the wait Selection describes from his side of the table. Read lever by lever, a lever that has landed and not been read holds the selection back. Read as a play, the selection waits for the single reading after the last lever.

The reason is the unit. Daniel decides once, on the comparison as every lever has left it, and a lever still in flight can change his answer. A selection written before the reading would leave the record with a decision and no account of what the levers did to it, and no lever's projection could ever be checked.

In practice the actor often learns the decision before writing the reading. Daniel approves in the meeting where the signed figure lands, and the temptation is to write that he approved, so it worked. The record still puts the reading first, because the reading is what the lever did and the selection is what Daniel did. What the order of entries cannot do is tell a reading made when the lever landed from one made after the answer was known, and readings made late tend to agree with the selections that followed them. An actor whose readings never disagree with what the target chose is either an unusually good reader of people or writing the readings afterward, and only the actor knows which.

What the framing commits

The framing is the earliest choice in the cycle that limits what the cycle can teach. Lena, framing each lever against its own alternative, gets a record that says lever by lever what worked, and accepts that a lever needing a partner would have been misread. Framing them as two weights in one comparison would have given her a reading that matches how Daniel actually decides, in a record that could never say which weight did more. She chooses when she declares the first lever, long before anything is read, and nothing in the meeting room will prompt her to notice that she has chosen.