They don’t know that we know they know we know

1. A few weeks ago, I read an interesting New York Times article by Patricia Cohen about a new area of literature research:
Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know. Some scholars are turning to M.R.I.’s and evolutionary theory to explore how and why people read fiction.

But what really got me to keep reading was that one of the scholars quoted uses a well-known episode of the sitcom Friends to introduce the research:

To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.”
(Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them.


As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”


This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

Since reading that, I keep seeing that pop up all over the place.

2. Consider a recent Twitter post from Triple Olympic and World Champion, Triple world record holder Usain Bolt.

u a say a that me say u must know something me dont know talking the thing them my friend \

3. And then today, ran across an article in the New Yorker from best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell (of the Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) reviewing the book "Operation Mincemeat"  by Ben Macintyre, which details an pretty amazing World War II British intelligence plot to deceive German that the Allies were planning to invade German-occupied Greece.

Or maybe they would have found the flaws in Mincemeat a little too obvious, and concluded that the British were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that they were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets—in order to mask the fact that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets.

This is the second, and more serious, of the problems that surround the products of espionage. It is not just that secrets themselves are hard to fact-check; it’s that their interpretation is inherently ambiguous. Any party to an intelligence transaction is trapped in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called an “expression game.” I’m trying to fool you. You realize that I’m trying to fool you, and I—realizing that—try to fool you into thinking that I don’t realize that you have realized that I am trying to fool you.

Wow. My brain hurts.