What Is a Dare

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. What a dare names
6. What it states
7. A dare that misreports
8. What an answer is
9. “I only did it because he dared me”
10. What it costs
11. An ordinary Tuesday

On the last warm Saturday of the summer, Sam stood on the lip of a flooded quarry with four friends on the ledge behind him. Dev, who had jumped twice already, said, “Bet you won’t.” Sam had been looking at the water for ten minutes and had said nothing about it. He jumped. In the car afterwards he told them all, and meant it, that he would not have done it without the bet.

Nobody in the car questioned the sentence. People say a dare moves them, and the word is used of schoolyards and boardrooms alike: bet you can’t ship it by Friday, I dare you to say it to her face. It is a test of nerve given by other people, and it works, the usual account runs, by making the cost of refusing larger than the cost of the act.

Underneath that account is a picture, and it has been good enough to run on for a long time. A dare is a force. The giver applies it from outside, the dared person feels it as pressure, and the act is then done under it or declined against it. The picture commits to three things. The pressure is in the dare, so the same words push whoever hears them. The size of the act is its difficulty, so a higher ledge is a braver jump. And declining is the absence of an answer, something done by not doing.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The seam is in where the picture puts the push. In the first case it is not in the mark. In the second it is still there after the act has stopped being pending. In the third it has shrunk with the act held fixed. A force from outside does none of these. A reading does all three: it is in someone, it stays until something else is read, and it changes when what the reader holds changes.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one.

What Is a Bluff, from yesterday, takes a mark that reads differently from the holding behind it, and the reader who is not shown the holding. A dare has no hand behind it that a showing would settle, so I do not go there, though I come to a dare that misreports and say how it resembles a bluff and where it differs. What Is a Reputation owns the point that a mark takes its value from the reader’s prior and not from the act, so that a strong name makes conforming acts nearly free of information. I lean on that for one sentence and add only what a dare does to a prior that is ordinarily silent. What Is Temptation is the nearest. It takes the pull of a condition that has become readable, and notes that a demonstration or a prohibition can produce a pull where there was none. I carry its readability step in words and take the sentence that makes a condition readable, with the person who says it.

What Is Managing Expectations owns the point that a stated expectation is a mark and not the carried denominator. I rely on it and apply it to someone else’s expectation of you. What Is Willpower owns the strain felt in resisting as a reading of how the pull arrived against what the host’s expectation held, and I take the felt push of a dare only that far. What Is Blame owns the point that each mark is answered for in full by its maker and that another person’s mark does not reduce it; I use that in words for “he made me do it.” What Is Revenge owns the author reading an act smaller than the person who receives it, which I use for the second jump. What Is a First Time takes the first reading of a kind, and I do not extend its claims.

What the foundation holds

Ten numbered things and three parts of the section on acts and artifacts carry this piece. A condition is a prerequisite in order for something to happen or exist, and does not cause it (P6). An idea is a named condition, where naming does not create the condition and makes the relationship readable (P7). Ideas have people and people do not have ideas, so a condition is prior to the person who names it (P8). The expectation a host carries is made of subconscious prediction and ideas (P4), the host experiences only the quotient (R8), and the denominator is not ours to command (R10). Records update expectation forward and are never reopened (R2). What is revisable is the host’s response to a readable condition (P5), the host is the site of conscious responsibility (R13), and ownership is a category error while the manifestation is accountable (R12).

From the section on acts and artifacts: an act is a process and an artifact is a mark, and an act that leaves no mark is not in the record. The magnitude of an artifact is surprisal, how far the actual departed from the prediction, and its phase is which condition it serves, fixed by which idea has the actualizer and not by the mark and not by the maker. And the author of an act reads it against a denominator trained on the author’s own making of such acts, so that the reading of one’s own act is the smaller.

The foundation has no row for the word. Its nearest rows are the ones for reputation, temptation and managing expectations, and the rest of this piece is built from the elements above.

What a dare names

Take Sam on the ledge before Dev speaks. The jump has conditions: a ledge, a depth, a body that can make the fall. And because four people are standing there, it has one more, of a different kind. If the jump is made it will be read. Nobody had named that. It stood there as a prerequisite of the jump being read as anything at all, prior to whoever would come to name it, and for Sam it was a condition and not yet an idea.

P7 is exact about what naming does. It does not create the condition, and it makes the relationship readable. So Dev’s sentence did not add a prerequisite to the jump. The ledge was watched before a word was said. What the sentence did was make a relationship readable to Sam that he had not been reading, and P4 puts a thing that is named into E on the side of ideas. The denominator Sam stood in changed by one term. R8 then says what that is like. He does not feel a term added; he feels the quotient, and a denominator that changes while the numerator stays is indistinguishable from the world having changed. The same ledge looks higher, the water colder, the four faces closer. That is the push.

What it states

Dev did more than name a condition. He said what he expects: you won’t. The managing-expectations piece owns the point that a stated expectation is a mark and not the carried denominator, so I do not say that Dev’s sentence is Dev’s expectation. It may report it. It may also misreport it, as a later case shows. What it is, without any doubt, is a present mark made by Dev whose content is a prediction about Sam’s next mark. I have not found a common sentence with that content in that form. A compliment, a warning or a favour says something about the person or the situation. A dare is a prediction about what the hearer will do, handed to the hearer.

R2 gives the rest. The mark is in the record from the moment it is made. Dev can say forget it, I was kidding, and that is one more mark beside the first. This is why Lena’s case holds. The sentence was said, it is in the record, and Lena read it; what a host reads updates expectation forward. I do not say by how much. The foundation has no expression for it, and I do not say it is the only thing that moves an expectation. Her brother’s forgetting is not in her denominator.

Now the size. What does the jump read at? The magnitude of a mark is surprisal against the prediction, and the prediction belongs to the reader. There are several readers. The four on the ledge, Dev among them, hold a prediction about Sam’s jumps, and Dev has just said his out loud. Sam holds his own. The reputation piece owns the point that a mark’s value is set by the reader’s prior and not by the act. Carry it here in words and the difficulty of the jump drops out of the account. A five-metre ledge that all four expected Sam to take reads small to them. A step off a kerb that all four expected him to refuse reads large.

Sam’s own reading is different again. The author of an act reads it against a denominator trained on his own making of such acts, and the section is exact that it is making and not foreseeing that counts. Before the first jump Sam has no record of making one, so for him the jump is not yet attenuated and reads as it would to a person watching. After it his denominator holds a jump, and the next one reads smaller, with the ledge unmoved. That is the third case, and no one’s prediction about the water needed to change.

A dare that misreports

Suppose a manager says to a team that has shipped on Friday in each month of the year, “Bet you can’t do it by Friday.” The mark says won’t. Suppose the manager’s own term, shaped by the same record, says will. The team reads the mark. That is the shape of the bluff, a mark read against a term the reader cannot see, and the resemblance is close. The difference is in what the reader is trying to close. In a bluff the question is the hand, and only a record of the hand settles it. Here the team can read the manager’s earlier sentences of this kind, and what it reads next is the manager’s next mark.

The gap sits where the other pieces found it. The foundation has no expression for how far two hosts’ expectations differ or overlap, and so none for how far the manager’s term and the team’s differ. I name the gap and give no figure.

What an answer is

Some of what Sam might do next leaves a mark and some does not. Jumping leaves one. Saying no leaves one too, a short sentence on a ledge. Standing there with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing, leaves none of his own. Not jumping is a process without a mark, and an act that leaves no mark is not in the record. Before Dev speaks, that is simply so, and there is nothing yet for the four to read. After Dev speaks the silence is still without a mark of Sam’s, but it is no longer unread. The four now hold a named condition and a stated prediction, and whatever they say and do next is a mark of theirs: a laugh, told you, a shrug. Each of those has a phase set by the idea that has the one who makes it.

So the person dared who does not answer is answered for. The person who says, “No, it’s shallow on the left,” has made a mark of their own, a named condition set beside Dev’s, which the others can read the silence against. The foundation does not say the stated reason fixes the phase. Phase is fixed by which idea has the actualizer, and a reason can be false, or sincere and mistaken, since the host reads only the quotient. What the sentence gives is a second record, and it is theirs.

“I only did it because he dared me”

This is the sentence the word is most often used to carry. It is true as a report and false as a transfer. As a report: the sentence named a condition and stated a prediction, Sam’s denominator changed, and he met the change as the ledge being different. “The dare made it different” is an accurate account of how it read. As a transfer, it hands the response to the dare, and the foundation does not allow that.

The condition is prior to Sam and to Dev (P8) and owned by neither (R12). Dev answers for the sentence he made, and Sam for the jump he made, and the blame piece’s point that another person’s mark does not reduce the maker’s answerability carries over in words. P5 puts what is revisable at the response to a readable condition, and R13 makes the host the site of responsibility. The foundation does not say that position was out of Sam’s reach. It says the felt push is a reading of a denominator. A reading has no means of taking a position from anyone.

Dev’s side is the same. His sentence is in the record, he cannot reopen it (R2), and he answers for it in full (R12). He did not own the condition he named, and he cannot command what it lands as in Sam (R10), so he cannot count on what it will do. The same words to a friend whose record says he jumps are a small mark. To a friend with no record of such acts they are not.

What it costs

It takes away two things. The first is the excuse that is also a comfort, that you were pushed. What is left is that you read a sentence at a size and answered it. The second is the pride on the other side, that you proved something to them by doing it. A mark read at a size set by the readers’ predictions proves what the readers’ predictions were. Sam’s jump is large to Dev because Dev predicted against it. It tells Sam less about Sam than the car ride suggested, because its size was set in other people.

There is a harder cost. The foundation gives no way to tell, from the mark or from the inside, whether the jump served the condition the ledge stood on or the one the sentence named. Phase is relational and the host reads only the quotient. Sam cannot know which, and neither can Dev. I have not found a way to soften that, and I do not try.

An ordinary Tuesday

1. Read the sentence for what it is. A stated prediction about your next mark, from one person. Ask what it tells you about their term, not about yours.
2. Name the condition the act stands on without the audience. If it is a task at a desk, what does the work need? That condition was there before anyone named the other one.
3. If you decline, say a reason about the act when it is true. Silence will be read by the others, and the reading will be theirs.
4. If you accept, do not take the felt push as a measure of your nerve. It is a quotient. Its size was set by their prediction and your record, and not by how hard the act is.
5. If you give one, you are making a record you cannot withdraw and you answer for it in full. Say the prediction as yours, and know which hearers have a record that makes it small.
6. At work, “bet you can’t” is the same sentence. A deadline put that way carries a prediction. The team reads it as one.