First, let me say that I learned this the hard way. I am an excellent decoupler. I like thinking abstractly. I can easily imagine a different context or no context for whatever focal topic. And I decoupled too close to the sun by actually missing huge parts of what I was talking about (namely, context) because I had determined ahead of time they didnât count.
Decoupling is the ability to mentally disentangle the parts in a situation from each other and from the particular context theyâre in right now. Like being able to answer a hypothetical question with an answer you would never give in real life, such as âIf you had to have sex with a cow, would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?â
This is actually a real question from an application to a hype house from creators who famously prize âhigh decouplingâ.
A high decoupler, according to those who value this trait, should be able to engage the hypothetical on its own terms without saying something like âI would never, ever, ever do that, so Iâd find a way out.â Because it says in the hypothetical that you HAVE to, a high decoupler would move past taking issue with the premise and consider which would actually be worse and why. Decouplers bite bullets. Some people value decoupling extremely highly, and they enjoy testing their ability to isolate taboo topics from the context that would âtechnicallyâ make them bad. Generally they say they value open-mindedness and critical thinking. âEdgelordsâ is often a fair description.
It is an act of interpretation to determine what can be decoupled from what, what is essential and what isnât. It has to be done to have any kind of gears-level understanding and prediction in your head. But a goal of âhigh decouplingâ is wrong because it fetishizes the stripping away of parts and allows them to be stripped selectively. And, by making it your goal to think in a high decoupling way, you can easily be taken advantage of by people who just want to put you in simulated situations of debasement or suffering and make you take part. The cow question has an info button beneath it, which explains âwe need to make sure that youâre ready for anythingâ, which might as well be a DANGER siren saying âwe will violate your boundariesâ.
Taking pride in an identity as a âhigh decouplerâ is lowkey a way to assert that context isnât real, that everyone should be concerned only with getting at the platonic ideal. And so it can become a license to dismiss inconvenient components of a real world system as contingent context and strip them away. Iâve heard things like âItâs only because of cultural conditioning that women donât like catcalling. If you decouple the compliment from our cultureâs negative ideas about men, then itâs actually nice.â Cultural context can just be stripped away, while the essential (and, therefore, true) nature of the interaction is asserted to have an intrinsic positive quality. In fact, one issue with catcalling is it is sometimes intended in an inherently, genuinely threatening way, where the woman is demeaned or rationally fears for her physical safety. That possibility is being sneakily dismissed by simply being labeled as expendable context, but itâs being presented as if the counterintuitive true nature of the interaction has been revealed by the decoupling analysis.
Saying that youâre decoupling can be a smokescreen for smuggling in your preferred context or asserting that your contingent preference is objectively right. Or it can be a reason to express socially unacceptable or aggressive views, like which humans are worth more (âSay you HAD to choose between two people to kill and all you know is one is white and one is AsianâŚâ) or making it known what you think with plausible deniability (âIf I HAD to cheat on my wife, it would be with Sonia. But thatâs only if I had to!â). In these examples, the person is clearly yearning for an acceptable way to express an unacceptable view, and they choose the pretense of intellectual fearlessness, even suggesting that if others wouldnât be willing to go there themselves, itâs because they canât face the truth.
Things are correlated and connected. They are, in fact, coupled. If you allow yourself to think in a decoupled way without eventually recoupling before taking your insight to the real, contextualized world, you will be missing real information that is in fact part of the whole. If you allow un-recoupled high decoupling from others, you may be missing why people really want a reason to give âdecoupledâ answers.
The ultimate manifestation of this is the pro-AI cliche that âAI is just a tool.â As if recognizing that something is a tool strips it of any ethical dimensions. It is a way to trick people into thinking that being upset about AI is as silly as being angry at a screwdriver.