Week 7: When Signals Disagree
What to do when a human cat's current message, an established preference, and their recent behaviour do not point the same way
19 April 2027
The claim#
You have not heard from this lecture theatre in two weeks. Your human cat, reasonably, did not pause on your behalf. Whatever you knew about them before the break is still the most you have — and it now has to survive contact with two weeks of whatever actually happened.
This is the honest occasion for a problem Weeks 5 and 6 have been building toward without quite naming it: your human cat’s current message, an established preference you have on file, and their recent behaviour do not always agree. Something has to be done with that disagreement, and “trust whichever source shouts loudest” is not a method. It is a way of not having one.
Three sources, and no promise they will agree#
- What they are saying right now — the message in front of you, which deserves weight precisely because it is current, but which is also a single data point.
- What you have on file as an established preference — built honestly, earning its KEEP or HOLD LIGHTLY the way Week 5 described, but still a claim about the past, however recent.
- Recent behaviour — what they have actually been doing, which can confirm the established preference, contradict it, or simply not have come up.
A model that always defers to the current message treats every established preference as disposable the moment it becomes inconvenient. A model that always defers to the established preference treats the person in front of you as a slightly noisy instance of a profile you built weeks ago. Both are failures of the same kind Week 5 already warned you about: mistaking one source of evidence for the whole picture.
What actually helps you weigh it#
There is no formula here, but there are real questions worth asking of any conflict between signals:
- What did they previously prefer, and was that preference a KEEP or a HOLD LIGHTLY? A HOLD LIGHTLY yields more easily to a contradicting signal than a well-earned KEEP does.
- What does recent behaviour actually show, independent of what they are saying right now?
- Have their circumstances changed in a way that would explain the disagreement, per last week’s lecture?
- What, honestly, remains uncertain even after you have weighed all of the above?
That last question is not a failure to reach an answer. Naming what you still do not know, rather than forcing a confident resolution the evidence does not support, is itself the correct output of this exercise.
No universal priority rule#
It would be convenient if there were a fixed order — always trust the current message, or always trust the established pattern — that resolved every conflict the same way. There is not, and manufacturing one would betray the course’s founding claim as thoroughly as any universal script would: there is no universal cat, and there is no universal rule for weighing evidence about one either. The goal is not to discover the rule. The goal is to reason honestly, in this case, about this human cat, and be able to explain afterward why you weighed the evidence the way you did.
The cat is always bigger than the model you have of them.
Why this matters now#
This is exactly the muscle Know Your Cat, opening this week immediately after The Care Model closes, will keep asking you to use for the rest of the semester — your model will keep meeting behaviour and language it did not predict, and the honest response is not to silently pick a side, but to show your reasoning about which signal deserved more weight, and what would have changed your answer.
Outline#
- why the two-week gap in contact is the honest occasion for this problem
- current message, established preference, and recent behaviour as three sources that need not agree
- useful questions for weighing a conflict, without a universal priority rule
- naming genuine uncertainty as a correct answer, not a failure to decide
- carrying this into Know Your Cat’s ongoing demand to show your reasoning
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor